Black Hat/DefCon: Welcome to the funhouse

The Black Hat conference and its post-event, DefCon, promise to be a security funhouse in the coming week, as experts in Las Vegas seek to shock and amaze by poking holes in today's network technologies. The Web, wireless LANs, routers, and desktop software may all look different reflected in the Black Hat/DefCon hall of mirrors, where security vendors will be revealing their hacker sides.

"We're showing malware we created called Jinx," says Itzik Kotler, manager of the security operations center at Radware and a presenter at Black Hat, which runs through Aug. 7. Kotler describes Jinx as attack code that can be used to take over the machines of victims using versions of Mozilla's Firefox browser that pre-date Firefox 3, Mozilla's latest release. (You might want to upgrade now if you haven't already.)

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JavaScript-based Jinx can index a victim's hard drive and send back files from Macintosh, Windows, or Linux-based machines to the attacker, or turn the computer into a spam machine, he says.

"It's the first proof-of-concept of such malware, with no code injection, no interfering with the kernel," says Kotler, adding the Jinx exploit code will be published for all to see. He hinted Radware is working on similar Jinx-like malware aimed at Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Why all the effort? "We believe people need to be prepared for this. There's a popular demand for Web 2.0, but it's a bad situation in that we've given huge power to browsers, but these browsers often have logic flaws that allow these attacks," Kotler says.

For vendor AirTight Networks, which makes WLAN intrusion-prevention systems, its focus is how some wireless LAN vendors may not be implementing the IEEE's new 802.11w security standard correctly.

The 802.11w standard (Cisco calls it "management frame protection") is supposed to make WLANs resistant to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. But AirTight will show how it's possible with some implementations of 802.11w in vendor equipment to conjure up an attack that hits WLAN access points with malformed packets, not bringing them down but triggering a disconnection response in their WLAN clients.

"This attack involves a special packet which has the effect of disconnecting the endpoint," says Pravin Bhagwat, chief technology officer at AirTight, which dubs this the "autoimmunity disorder in WLANs."

The WLAN DoS attack, which involves tampering with the MAC address at Layer 7 by sending a continuous stream of injected packets at intervals of about 30 seconds, basically results in the WLAN access point being exploited as the vector for disabling WLAN end points.