It's exactly one month until Black Hat Europe 2013 kicks off -- we hope your travel plans are set. (See the bottom of this post for important info about the imminent hotel discount booking deadline!) In an ongoing move to highlight key sessions we'd like to start with a batch of Black Hat Briefings that are all about thinking big... about small devices.
First up is Don A. Bailey's The M2M Risk Assessment Guide, which will take place on Thursday, March 14th at 10:45. Bailey's team at Capitol Hill Consultants surveyed the current state of the M2M (Machine to Machine) landscape, zeroed in on approximately 80 key companies and vendors, and conducted an exhaustive examination of the tools and technologies each org used in their M2M offerings. The result is the M2M Risk Assessment Guide, which debuts at Black Hat and will offer high-level insight into the six primary M2M industries while delving deep into the low-level components used in real-world M2M devices. Engineers and analysts alike will benefit from the Guide's expertise.
Day two at 11:30 will be Next-Generation Mobile Rootkits, with Thomas Roth. Roth, an expert on exploitation techniques and low-level and embedded reverse engineering, will give you a tour of the bleeding edge of mobile rootkit insertion via ARM exploitation. He'll show you how to use a security feature of recent-model ARM processors to hide rootkits in a way that's practically invisible to the operating system. Beyond examining the theoretical attack vector, Roth will also recount the lessons learned writing and hiding a rootkit using these methods.
Finally, at the very end of the conference , Phil Polstra will present Mesh Stalkings: Penetration Testing with Small Networked Devices, which will show attendees how to perform penetration testing with a network of small, battery-powered penetration testing systems. The small ARM devices Polstra running The Deck, a full-featured pentest and forensics Linux distro. They can easily run days or weeks on battery power, and while each is full-featured in itself, networking them together can offer even greater power and flexibility. All told, Polstra's complete kit, which includes a touch-controlled 7-inch command station, can fit inside two lunch boxes.
Black Hat Europe 2013 will take place March 12-15 at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam. If you haven't booked your hotel yet, be sure to take care of that soon -- the discount rate ends on February 16th. And as ever, check us out on Twitter and be our friend on Facebook.