Cyber Security in the Age of Large-Scale Adversaries

Postponed due to COVID-19: CASA Summer School on Backdoors and Trojans and the Women in IT Security Workshop

Due to COVID-19 the CASA Summer School on Backdoors on Trojans will not be held from 22-26 June 2020. An alternative date cannot be offered yet, however, we aim to arrange the Summer School at a later date.

We have made a conscious decision not to offer the Summer School as an online event. Besides the excellent lectures, the event is intended in particular to enable personal exchange, which could not be adequately realized online.

Speakers CASA Summer School

Daniel J. Bernstein & Tanja Lange

Daniel J. Bernstein is the designer of the "tinydns" software used by Facebook to publish server addresses, the "ChaCha20" cipher used in the Wireguard VPN, the "dnscache" software used by Cisco's OpenDNS to handle 175 billion address requests per day from 90 million Internet users, the "SipHash" hash function (co-designed with Jean-Philippe Aumasson) used by Python to protect against hash-flooding attacks, and the "Curve25519" public-key system used by WhatsApp for end-to-end encryption. Cryptographic algorithms designed by Bernstein are used by default in Apple's iOS, Google's Chrome browser, Android, etc., encrypting data for billions of users.

Tanja Lange holds the chair for Cryptography at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, the Netherlands. She is an expert on curve-based crypto and post-quantum crypto. Her work brings together mathematics and cryptology to create more secure cryptographic implementations and protocols.

The Snowden revelations in 2013 shook up the cryptographic community when documents showed evidence of actions to subvert standards and restrict "indigenous cryptography". This day will shine a light on the history of the most famous standardized back door, the Dual-EC pseudo-random number generator, and how it came into being a standard. The day will also cover some lesser-known back doors and the terminology of kleptography.

Christof Paar & Research Group

Christof Paar is director at the Max Planck Institute for Cybersecurity and Privacy in Bochum and research professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has been working in Embedded Security since 1995. In 1999, he co-founded CHES, the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems. His research interests include hardware security, low-level Trojans, physical layer security and application security in embedded systems.

Christof and his group will first highlight the threat posed by extremely low-level hardware Trojans for ASICs and FPGAs. We will then give an introduction to hardware reverse engineering (HRE). In the hands-on session, participants will be able to work on reversing hardware circuit using the powerful open-source HRE tool “HAL”.

Angela Sasse & Research Group

M. Angela Sasse is the Professor of Human-Centred Security at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. She read psychology in Germany before she obtained an MSc in Occupational Psychology from Sheffield University and an PhD in Computer Science from the University of Birmingham. She started investigating the causes and effects of usability issues with security mechanisms in 1996. Her 1999 seminal paper with Anne Adams, Users are Not the Enemy, is one of two papers that founded the research area of usable security. She was the founding Director of the UK Research Institute for Science of Cyber Security (RISCS) which promotes multidisciplinary evidence-based research into the effectiveness of cyber security policies and measures. Since 2018, she is the Professor of Human-Centred Security at RUB and leads Hub D (Usability) of the Cluster of Excellence CASA.

Within CASA, we are researching what experts and non-experts know about security threats and the role of encryption in defending against them, and how that knowledge fosters adoption and use. Currently our research focuses on 'general' and 'technical' users - such as developers and systems administrators.

In the first half of Hub D day of the summer school, we will present an overview of the research on this topic to date, starting with Whitten & Tygar's seminal 1999 USENIX paper 'Why Johnny can't encrypt'. We will critically review how researchers have tried to improve the usability of tools, and whether this has increased usage and decreased mistakes. We will then present what we know about the mental models of different user groups, and how these influence adoption and usage. One of the conclusions is that the current terminology and communications around encryption are confusing and off-putting. In the second half of the day, we will conduct some hands-on user research and design exercises in small groups - how we can find out what protection users want? how should we represent those security properties in user interfaces of tools, and the communication that accompanies them? Expect lego, plasticine, coloured pens and post-its.

Lucas Davi & Research Group

Lucas Davi is an assistant professor for Secure Software Systems at University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He received his PhD from TU Darmstadt in computer science. His research focus includes aspects of system security, software security, and trusted computing, especially software exploitation techniques and defenses. He received best paper awards at DAC, ACM ASIACCS, and IEEE Security and Privacy. His PhD thesis on code-reuse attacks and defenses has been awarded the ACM SIGSAC Dissertation Award 2016.

Memory corruption attacks exploit software errors to hijack applications by performing arbitrary reads and writes to main memory. While traditional attacks required the attacker to directly inject malicious code into the memory space of an application, modern attacks either only induce malicious execution by means of a combination of existing code (return-oriented programming) or only manipulate variables without violating the program’s control flow (data-oriented exploits). For the case of real-world crypto schemes, these attacks are capable of stealing and altering cryptographic material. In this tutorial, we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art memory exploitation techniques and defenses. We start with the main principles of memory exploitation covering stack smashing, return-oriented programming, and data-oriented programming. Next, we present modern defense techniques such as control-flow integrity and memory randomization. In the second part of this tutorial, we continue with a hands-on lab where attendees will have the opportunity to construct proof-of-concept memory exploits that undermine cryptographic schemes deployed by the target application.

Women in IT Security Workshop

Also postponed.

Melanie Rieback

Dr. Melanie Rieback is the CEO/Co-founder of Radically Open Security, the world’s first non-profit computer security consultancy company. She is also a former Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) who performed RFID security research (RFID Virus and RFID Guardian), that attracted worldwide press coverage, and won several awards (Mediakomeet, ISOC Award, NWO I/O award, IEEE Percom Best Paper, USENIX Lisa Best Paper). Melanie worked as a Senior Engineering Manager on XenClient at Citrix, where she led their Vancouver office. She was also the head researcher in the CSIRT at ING Bank, where she spearheaded their Analysis Lab and the ING Core Threat Intelligence Project. For fun, she co-founded the Dutch Girl Geek Dinner in 2008. Melanie was named 2010 ICT Professional of the Year (Finalist) by WomeninIT, one of the 400 most successful women in the Netherlands by Viva Magazine (Viva400) in 2010 and 2017, one of the fifty most inspiring women in tech (Inspiring Fifty Netherlands) in 2016, 2017, and 2019. She was also called the Most Innovative IT Leader by CIO Magazine NL (TIM Award) in 2017, and one of the 9 Most Innovative Women in the European Union (EU Women Innovators Prize) in 2019. Her company, Radically Open Security was named the 50th Most Innovative SME by the Dutch Chamber of Commerce (MKB Innovatie Top 100) in 2016.

Computer Science can be radical, political, expressive, and artistic. This presentation will share my own experiences with hacking and Radically Open Security, critically reflect on Computer Science education, and suggest ways to leverage our "craft" for positive disruptive change.

Jiska Classen

Jiska Classen is a postdoc researcher at Secure Mobile Networking Lab, TU Darmstadt. Her research focus is wireless and mobile security, such as Bluetooth chips in recent mobile devices.

In this workshop, you can play a capture the flag game within various signals. You will learn how to demodulate and decode wireless signals. The challenges address all skill levels, so you will still have fun if you are completely new to signal processing. The skills acquired in this workshop will help you in analysing real-world wireless systems. Practical wireless security is often underestimated and considered complex, while opening garage doors or switching traffic lights can be surprisingly easy.

Requirements: Please bring a laptop, ideally with Gqrx SDR (Linux) oder SDRSharp (Windows) pre-installed.