Hack the hackers: Leaking data over SSL/TLS

Presented at DEF CON 29 (2021), Aug. 7, 2021, 12:30 p.m. (20 minutes)

Have you considered that in certain situations the way hackers exploit vulnerabilities over the network can be predictable? Anyone with access to encrypted traffic can reverse the logic behind the exploit and thus obtain the same data as the exploit. Various automated tools have been analyzed and it has been found that these tools operate in an unsafe way. Various exploit databases were analyzed and we learned that some of these are written in an insecure (predictable) way. This presentation will showcase the results of the research, including examples of exploits that once executed can be harmful. The data we obtain after exploitation can be accessible to other entities without the need of decrypting the traffic. The SSL/TLS specs will not change. There is a clear reason for that and in this presentation I will argue this, but what will change for sure is the way hackers will write some of the exploits.

Presenters:

  • Ionut Cernica - PHD Student @Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science, University Politehnica of Bucharest
    Ionut Cernica started his security career with the bug bounty program from Facebook. His passion for security led him to get involved in dozens of such programs and he found problems in very large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AT&T, eBay, VMware. He has also been testing web application security for 9 years and has had a large number of projects on the penetration testing side. Another stage of his career was to get involved in security contests and participated in more than 100 such contests. He also reached important finals such as Codegate, Trend Micro and Defcon with the PwnThyBytes team. He also won several individual competitions, including the mini CTF from the first edition of Appsec village - Defcon village. Now he is doing research in the field of web application security, being also a PhD student at University Polytechnic of Bucharest. Through his research he wants to innovate in the field and to bring a new layer of security to web applications. He has also been working as a Security Researcher @Future Networks 5G Lab for a few months now and hopes to make an important contribution to the 5G security area through research. @CernicaIonut

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