ShmooCon 2006 Wrap Up

Having recently returned from ShmooCon 2006 (and having further spent most of yesterday resting and recovering), here's my brief writeup: "Go next year."

Ok, here's my slightly less brief writeup. I arrived around 1:00PM Friday. Giant kudos to the registration team, who checked me in without delay. In fact, they checked in nearly everyone without delay, thanks to the nifty bar codes they emailed to the registered attendees. Print it out, scan it and get a conference bag. It was great. What was even better about it was that the badges had no name tag. They were just (sharp) metal access tokens, and if you had on around your neck, you were in. Good for anonymity, though a little annoying at times when I think I should know someone's name, but don't.

I don't want to give a blow-by-blow account, because

1. that's boring
2. others have done it better
3. it's still boring

I would like to mention several of my favorite presentations, though, in roughly chronological order.

First, Dan Moniz and Patrick Stach presented their work on creating an exhaustive rainbow table for LANMAN ("Breaking LanMan Forever"), which was a little math-y but in the end they've made the results available. The good thing about this is that by going for a guaranteed complete coverage instead of a statistical coverage, they reduced the number of tables you have to search through to find password hashes, and avoiding the overlap speeds things up a lot. Good job guys.

Second, Acidus' talk on "Covert Crawling" (a spider that is indistinguishable from a set of human visitors) was pretty fun. Nothing terribly high-tech, but he's thought through a lot of the problems and solved most of them. Should be good code when it's released.

Dan Kaminsky's talk on "Black Ops of TCP/IP 2005.5" was, of course, stellar. IP fragmentation timing attacks. Genius.

I also enjoyed Lasse Overlier and Paul Syverson's talk on detecting hidden services in Tor, and the upcoming countermeasures to these attacks. Makes me want to go right out and hide something!

Deviant Ollam's lockpicking talk scared the hell out of me, and I've pretty much sworn off all locks by now. Only trained attack dogs for me from now on.

And of course, the highlight of the con was Johnny Long's "Hacking Hollywood" presentation. The image of hackers and hacking in the movies has always fascinated me, and it was nice to see such an informed send-up. Hillarious and timely. I can't wait for the video to be released!

So, this was my first ShmooCon, but it won't be my last!

PS. Richard Bejtlich and I did a talk on sguil. It went well, I thought. In case you were wondering.