Presented at
DEF CON 30 (2022),
Aug. 12, 2022, 2 p.m.
(240 minutes).
For decades mainframes have been thought to be unhackable. One of the core tenants of this myth was that buffer overflows were not possible on MVS. In 2020 a mainframe hacker figured out how to find and exploit z/OS binaries using very simple buffer overflow techniques. This workshop aims to teach you those techniques. Attendees will learn how C programs are used on mainframes, understand how to use JCL for buffer overflows, how save areas are used, common registries used for pointers, ASCII to EBCDIC machine code, and how they can hunt vulnerable binaries in their environment. Multiple hands-on labs will be instructor lead with a real mainframe provided both during and after class.
Materials:
A laptop capable of running a modern browser
Prereq:
None
Presenters:
-
Jake Labelle
- Security Consultant
Jake, a security consultant from Basingstoke, UK, got his hands on a licensed emulator for z/OS over the pandemic , and considering that we have been in and out of lockdown for the past two years, started playing around with it for a fairly good portion of time. As someone who adores the 80s cyber aesthetic, he loves mucking around with it, but also there is nothing legacy about mainframes, docker, node js, python all your modern applications/programs are on there. Over the past year, he has found and reported a number of z/OS LPEs and RCEs vulns to IBM.
-
Phil Young
- Mainframe Security Expert
Philip Young, aka Soldier of FORTRAN, is a leading expert in all things mainframe hacking. Having spoken and taught at conferences around the world, including DEFCON, RSA, BlackHat and keynoting at both SHARE and GSE Europe, he has established himself as the thought leader in mainframe penetration testing. Since 2013 Philip has released tools to aid in the testing of mainframe security and contributed to multiple open source projects including Nmap, allowing those with little mainframe capabilities the chance to test their mainframes. His hope is that through raising awareness about mainframe security more organizations will take their risk profile seriously.
Similar Presentations: