Talk:San Jose

Previous Meetings:
August 10, 2006 - The Next Generation of Vulnerable Applications

Presented by: Alex Stamos, Founding Partner, iSEC Partners

Abstract: Web Services represent a new and unexplored set of security-sensitive technologies that have been widely deployed by large companies, governments, financial institutions, and in consumer applications. Unfortunately, the attributes that make web services attractive, such as their ease of use, platform independence, use of HTTP and powerful functionality, also make them a great target for attack. In this talk, we will explain the basic technologies (such as XML, SOAP, and UDDI) upon which web services are built, and explore the innate security weaknesses in each. We will then demonstrate new attacks that exist in web service infrastructures, and show how classic web application attacks (SQL Injection, XSS, etc…) can be retooled to work with the next-generation of enterprise applications.

Bio: Alex Stamos is a founding partner of iSEC Partners - a strategic digital security organization. Alex is an experienced security engineer and consultant specializing in application security and securing large infrastructures, and has taught multiple classes in network and application security. He is a leading researcher in the field of web application and web services security and has been a featured speaker at top industry conferences such as BlackHat, DefCon, SyScan, Microsoft BlueHat and OWASP App Sec.

Before he helped form iSEC Partners, Alex spent two years as a Managing Security Architect with @stake. Alex performed as a technical leader on many complex and difficult assignments, including a thorough penetration test and architectural review of a 6 million line enterprise management system, a secure re-design of a multi-thousand host ASP network, and a thorough analysis and code review of a major commercial web server. He was also one of @stake’s West Coast trainers, educating select technical audiences in advanced network and application attacks.

Alex has also worked in at a DoE National Laboratory. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where he participated in research projects related to distributed secure storage and automatic C code auditing.