You can't spell "exploit" without "Black Hat." Wait, that didn't come out right... how embarrassing. While our word engineers troubleshoot the aphorism we just fried, you might enjoy this latest round-up of Black Hat Asia 2015 Briefings. You'll note they focus on security exploits, not wordplay. Probably for the best.
RC4 is the most popular stream cipher in the world, and in particular is used to protect a significant portion of SSL/TLS sessions. In Bar-Mitzva Attack: Breaking SSL with 13-Year Old RC4 Weakness Itsik Mantin will show how an old vulnerability of RC4 can be used to mount a partial plaintext recovery attack on SSL-protected data. This new attack is not limited to recovery of temporal session tokens, being capable of stealing parts of permanent secret data when delivers as POST parameters. What's more, it's the first practical SSL attack that doesn't require man-in-the-middle. Pique your interest yet?
If you're looking for a more general overview of current exploits, Browsers Gone Wild will fit the bill. Angelo Prado and Xiaoran Wang will (deep breath) unveil and demo the latest developments in browser-specific weaknesses, including creative new mechanisms to compromise confidentiality, successfully perform login and history detection, serve mixed content, deliver malicious ghost binaries without a C&C server, exploit cache/timing side channels to extract secrets from third-party domains, and leverage new HTML5 features to carry out stealthier attacks.
Or let's talk cross-site scripting (XSS), one of the web's most severe security vulnerabilties. Browser vendors responded by creating client-side XSS filters, but their hasty protections are inadequate. In fact, Client-Side Protection Against DOM-Based XSS Done Right (TM) will begin with a dizzying 17 newfound flaws in Chrome's XSS Auditor, and that's just the start of the carnage. Luckily, the presenters will wrap with a new, superior approach to client-side XSS protection, which can potentially stop these attacks for good.
Lastly, Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) and its successor MLDv2 are protocols in the IPv6 suite, and widely used in routers and operating systems like Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD. But have the security implications of MLD been studied enough? No, say Joel St. John and Nicolas Guigo, and in MLD Considered Harmful - Breaking Another IPv6 Subprotocol they'll hold forth on both existing and potential attacks, ending with recommendations on how to secure IPv6 networks to the current best possible extent.
Black Hat Asia 2015 takes place March 24 to 27 at the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. There are only a few weeks left to register, so why wait?