Speaking at Shmoo

I’m really excited to be speaking at Shmoocon again and especially excited about my presentation this Saturday at 1pm. Javascript Malware for a Gray Goo Tomorrow focuses on the increased scope of damage caused by Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the last year. The Web 2.0 revolution has been built on the back of standards compliant browsers and enhancements to the JavaScript language. This homogenous platform, coupled with JavaScript’s new features has enabled attackers to perform advanced attacks using XSS that were thought to be impossible even 2 years ago. Self-propagating XSS+Ajax worms, advanced keystroke and mouse loggers, port scanning, fingerprinting, and assaulting intranet applications, as well as stealing search engine queries or browser histories are now all components in an attackers toolbox.

The first part of my presentation will provide an overview of all these new advanced threats. Specifically, how this attacks work and how they can be prevented. In the second half I’ll discuss how JavaScript is capable of crawling and auditing 3rd party websites just like a traditional web scanner. As a proof of concept, I created Jikto, a web scanner written in JavaScript. Although I will not be releasing the source code of Jikto, I will be giving a full live demo and provide a detailed discussion about its methodology and architecture. The purpose of this public discussion and demonstration is to raise awareness of the danger of a XSS vulnerability and educate web developers and administrators on how to create websites securely. The biggest tragedy of all would be if a developer decides to put off fixing a XSS vulnerability because they weren’t aware of all the damage that could be done.

I really believe people are going to see some cool tricks, learn more about how attackers are using the often misunderstood JavaScript to perform sophisticated attacks, and leave with the knowledge to design, code and deploy secure websites. Hope to see you all there!