BlackHat Without The Drama

Well another BlackHat is in the books and another round of vulnerabilities have been disclosed and bantered about. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year as a panelist on the Laws of Vulnerabilities 2.0 discussion. While I was happy and honored to be invited, I wanted to draw some attention to another talk.

No, I’m not talking about the SSL issues presented by Dan Kaminsky or Moxie Marlinspike. Nor am I referring to the mobile SMS exploits. Each year you can count on BlackHat and Defcon for presentations and displays in lots of interesting security research and incredibly sexy vulnerabilities and exploits. Every year attendees walk away with that sinking feeling that the end of the internet is nigh and we have little hope of diverting it’s destruction. But, despite this, we have not shut down the internet and we manage to continue to chug along and develop new applications and infrastructure on top of it.

I was able to attend a session on Thursday that explained and theorized about why this all works out the way it does. It was the final session of the conference and unfortunately was opposite Bruce Schneier, which meant a lot of people that should have seen this, didn’t. Of course, Bruce is a great speaker and I’m sure I missed out as well, but hey that’s what the video is for.

David Mortman and Alex Hutton presented a risk management session on BlackHat vulnerabilities and ran them through the “Mortman/Hutton” risk model – clever name indeed. They included a couple of real-world practitioners and ran through how these newly disclosed vulnerabilities may or may not affect us over the coming weeks and months. They were able to quantify why some vulnerabilities have a greater affect and at what point in time they reach a tipping point where a majority of users of a given technology should address. David and Alex are regular writers on the New School of Information Security blog and will be posting their model in full with hopes of continuing to debate, evolve and improve it. Any of these new security vulnerabilities concern you? Go check out the model and see where they stand.