Re: informIT: Building versus Breaking

["Sergio 'shadown' Alvarez" <shadown () gmail com>]

Hi gem,

I've read your article to see what direction you were willing to take, before jumping into the conversation. Your post 
was exactly what I thought you were heading to.

I disagree with your thought for many reasons.

But first I would like to use proper terms so that we don't misuse some vocabulary:

You said: """Software security should be a balanced approach of offense and defense (white hat and black hat, if you 
will)"""

Whitehat: reports what he/she has found. Network vulenerabilities, software security flaws, flawed crypto, design 
flaws, or whatever it is that the individual found it was broken or wrong.

Blackhat: doesn't report what he/she found, because she/he want to keep it that way.

Of course there are a lot of grays out there too.

Defense is…well... defense.

To design and build proper software and hardware there are a lot of conferences out there, as well as trainings and a 
huge amount of literature. There are very good books when it comes to secure software development.

Every year what is presented, in the best security conferences, are new techniques that developers need to be aware of 
in order to build secure products. Most of the presentations talk about things that were wrongly designed and/or 
corner-cases which were not considered.

There are also a lot of tools and libraries which help development teams to do things right, specially libraries and 
templates like Microsoft Safeint as well as the safe APIs, which prevent developers from shooting themselves.
They just need to use them. There are also managed languages, APIs to handle SQL securely, etc. It is just that a lot 
of developers don't use what is available to them.

Blackhat is great as it is now, there are talks about new defense technologies from time to time too. Having more talks 
about defense would be use, in my opinion, to sale products than anything else. I don't believe it would do any good to 
Blackhat.

"""I am not opposed to breaking stuff (see "Exploiting Software" from 2004), but I am worried about an overemphasis on 
breaking stuff."""

Blackhat IS about breaking stuff, the vendors area offers defense products and services to improve your security. For 
building stuff (as in development) there are other conferences out there. People go to Blackhat to be aware of what 
things might go wrong in order to protect better themselves. And even then many good talks overlap unfortunately.

Regards,
  Sergio

On Aug 31, 2011, at 4:16 PM, Gary McGraw wrote:

> hi sc-l,
>
> I went to Blackhat for the first time ever this year (even though I am basically allergic to Las Vegas), and it got 
> me started thinking about building things properly versus breaking things in our field.  Blackhat was mostly about 
> breaking stuff of course.  I am not opposed to breaking stuff (see "Exploiting Software" from 2004), but I am worried 
> about an overemphasis on breaking stuff.
>
> After a quick and dirty blog entry on the subject 
> <http://www.cigital.com/justiceleague/2011/08/09/building-versus-breaking-a-white-hat-goes-to-blackhat/>, I sat down 
> and wrote a better article about it:
>
> Software [In]security: Balancing All the Breaking with some Building
> http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1750195
>
> I've also had a chat with Adam Shostack (a member of the newly formed Blackhat Advisors) about the possibility of 
> adding some building content to Blackhat.  Go Adam!
>
> Do you agree that Blackhat could do with some building content??
>
> gem
>
> company www.cigital.com
> podcast www.cigital.com/silverbullet
> blog www.cigital.com/justoceleague
> book www.swsec.com
>
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Follow KRvW Associates on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/KRvW_Associates
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