Black Hat Track Chairs

Black Hat USA 2012 is just around the corner, and here at Black Hat HQ there is a palpable excitement in the air. And no, it's not just from the latest RDP vuln or Flame analysis.

We had an amazing Call for Papers process with over 500 submissions, and Black Hat thanks the Review Board for all of its work. The USA 2012 event will boast 14 Briefings tracks and four Workshop tracks over two days. We're anticipating a lot of great new stuff that will likely make this year's event the best Black Hat yet.

One of the many new changes: Black Hat Track Chairs. Five of our Review Board members have graciously agreed to choose a particular subject matter and shepherd content submitted by the infosec community into five distinct tracks. Read on for the downlow.

Track I: Mobile with Vincenzo Iozzo

Advanced ARM Exploitation by Stephen Ridley & Stephen Lawler
Scaling Up Baseband Attacks: More (Unexpected) Attack Surface by Ralf-Philipp Weinmann
Don't Stand So Close to Me: An Analysis of the NFC Attack Surface by Charlie Miller
Probing Mobile Operator Networks by Collin Mulliner
Adventures in Bouncer Land by Nicholas Percoco & Sean Schulte

Track II: Defense with Shawn Moyer

SexyDefense: Maximizing the Home-field Advantage by Iftach Ian Amit
The Defense RESTs: Automation and APIs for Improving Security by David Mortman
Contrl-Alt-Hack(TM): White Hat Hacking for Fun and Profit (A Computer Security Card Game) by Tadayoshi Kohno, Tamara Denning & Adam Shostack
Intrusion Detection Along the Kill Chain: Why your Detection System Sucks and What to Do About It by John Flynn
Exploit Mitigation Improvements in Windows 8 by Matt Miller

Track III: AppSec with Nathan Hamiel

HTML5 Top 10 Threats: Stealth Attacks and Silent Exploits by Shreeraj Shah
AMF Testing Made Easy! by Luca Carettoni
Hacking with WebSockets by Sergey Shekyan & Vaagn Toukharian
Blended Threats and JavaScript: A Plan for Permanent Network Compromise by Phil Purviance & Joshua Brashars
State of Web Exploit Toolkits by Jason Jones

Track IV: Breaking Things with Chris Rohlf

A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: A Case of Multiple Operating System Vulnerability by Rafal Wojtczuk
Expoiting the Jemalloc Memory Allocator: Owning Firefox's Heap by Patroklos Argyroudis & Chariton Karamitas
The Info Leak Era on Software Exploitation by Fermin J. Serna
Are You My Type? - Breaking .NET Sandboxes Through Serialization by James Forshaw
PinPadPwn by Nils & Rafael Dominguez Vega

Track V: Malware with Stefano Zanero

A Scientific (But Not Academic) Study of Malware Employs Anti-debugging, Anti-disassembly, and Anti-virtualization Technologies by Rodrigo Branco
De Mysteriis Dom Jobsivs: Mac EFI Rootkits by Loukas K
Dex Education: Practicing Safe Dex by Timothy Strazzere
Hardware Backdooring is Practical by Jonathan Brossard
Flowers for Automated Malware Analysis by Chengyu Song & Paul Royal

Also, be sure to check out our July 14 webcast as we join the Black Hat Track Chairs to discuss their selections. Learn the whys, hows and sometimes whats of this yearís presentations. Even if you are not planning on attending the USA event, this will be a fun and informative webcast with an eye on the trends and patterns developing in infosec.

Finally, we raise a tankard to our USA keynote Neal Stephenson, who's running a Kickstarter for CLANG!, his typically ambitious take on a detailed, Medieval Armed Combat simulation. They are over halfway to their goal with only 17 days left. Check out the highly amusing videos. And if you thirst for battle….why not help out?