I always enjoy the Black Hat sessions. The conference leans much more on the technical side of things, more so than the humungous brochure-fest known as RSA. Black Hat Europe is next week April 14th through 17th. And while I won't be able to (unfortunately) attend, there's a number of sessions I wouldn't miss if I was able to hope a flight to Amsterdam.Taming the Beast : Assess Kerberos-Protected Networks In this presentation, Emmanuel Bouillon, will take a look at vulnerabilities in Kerberos in both Unix and Windows environments, and review both known and new attacks at Kerberos protected systems. Considering how many businesses rely on the Kerberos protocol, this is an important topic -- to say the least.

Advanced SQL Injection Exploitation to Operating System Full Control Like buffer overflows, SQL injection attacks won't be a problem solved any time soon. This session will look at new ways SQL injection vulnerabilities can be used to highjack databases throughout the Net.

Stack Smashing as of Today: A State-of-the-Art Overview on Buffer Overflow Protections on linux_x86_64 Speaking of buffer-overflows, Hagen Fritsch, will look at how some of the attempts to mitigate these vulnerabilities work, as well as how they -- NX, ASLR or stack-cookies -- can be bypassed.

Stripping SSL To Defeat HTTPS In Practice As if comprised Kerberos authentications, exploiting software through what seems to be an unlimited number of buffer overflows, and ditto for databases vulnerable to SQL injection attacks -- why not toss SSL into the mix. This session will detail research that shows how to side-step SSL as it's often used for secure Web site logons as well as for online banking applications.

All Your Packets Are Belong to Us - Attacking Backbone Technologies Saved one of the most interesting, and potentially most important (they're all important topics, really). This talk will examine existing and theoretical vulnerabilities in network backbone (carrier) technologies such as MPLS and QinQ.

More info on the briefings are available here.

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