It's that time again! Black Hat Europe is right around the corner, so we're gearing up to return to the historic city of Amsterdam. We hope you'll join us October 14-17 and help make this another Black Hat to remember. As ever, you can expect a full gamut of topical, provocative programming, starting with today's slate of mobile-related highlights. You know where registration is, so let's dig in.
Smartphones took the concept of carrier control to a whole new level, but service providers' influence over these devices goes even deeper than most would imagine. In Cellular Exploitation on a Global Scale: The Rise and Fall of the Control Protocol Mathew Solnik and Marc Blanchou walk you through their extensive reverse engineering of baseband- and application-space code and over-the-air protocols. Their proof-of-concept shows how the flaws they've uncovered can pose real threats to end users, not the least of which is OTA code execution over all major cellular networks and operating systems.
Speaking of mobile hacks, software barriers typically prevent unauthorized apps from accessing a phone's microphone and similiar components. But neither iOS nor Android require any special permissions to access the gyroscope, which opens the door to a surprising exploit. Gyrophone: Eavesdropping Using a Gyroscope will demonstrate how apps and even active websites that lack microphone permissions can nevertheless harness the gury to eavesdrop on conversations in the vicinity of the phone. Kinda gives a whole new meaning to "the latest rumblings."
Amid the growing BYOD hype, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) products claim to offer secure containers. VDI solutions provide a remote workstation offering so that no data is stored locally, supposedly providing security. Dan Koretsky, however, will reveal a chink in that armor in A Practical Attack Against VDI Solutions. His proof-of-concept attack has a malicious app utilize screen scraping to exfiltrate data from common VDI platforms. Simulating user interaction and employing automation make such an attack not only feasible, but efficient and indetectable.
Finally, various OEMs bend Android into different shapes, and while the OS offers several security mechanisms at the framework and application levels, there's little to protect on the OEM customization level. For example, previous such vulnerabilities have stemmed from excess file permissions, or processes left running as root. Android Kernel and OS Security Assessment with Iron Crow will introduce a solution called Iron Crow, which will help OEM developers catch vulnerabilities of this nature. OEM bugs, be gone.
Early registration ends this Friday, August 29th, so go sign up to enjoy the best possible rates. Head on over to Black Hat Europe 2014's registration page to get started and be sure to visit our travel page for discounts on hotel and travel to Amsterdam!