Track: Trust, Safety & Security

10:35am - 11:25am

Exploiting Common iOS Apps’ Vulnerabilities

Many mobile developers still believe that it’s not possible to extract information embedded inside the application bundle. However, it's not true.  

My area of interest is the reverse engineering of mobile apps. In this talk, I'll walk through some of the most common vulnerabilities on iOS apps and show how to exploit them. All these vulnerabilities have been found on real production apps of companies that have (or don't have) bug bounty program. This talk is useful for those connected with mobile app development or those who do use mobile apps to work with sensitive data.

11:50am - 12:40pm

How to Use Encryption for Defense in Depth in Native and Browser Apps

Encryption is one of the most effective technical security measures. It massively reduces the impact and cost of a data breach. But encryption is typically focused on “infrastructure-level” elements like TLS and full-disk encryption. These are important tools, but they rely on assumptions about the infrastructure instead of the application code.    

As developers, infrastructure isn’t our strength, and sometimes it’s not even our job, so encryption takes a back seat to application-level features. But adding encryption to the application itself can insulate our systems from infrastructure-level failures, adding an important element of defense in depth.  

In this talk, we will discuss the pros and cons of application-level and end-to-end encryption. Since browsers are a nearly unavoidable element of modern application development, we will also cover the attack surface of application-level encryption in the browser, how it is very different from native clients, and how WebAssembly and WebCrypto help.

1:40pm - 2:30pm

Security Culture: Why You Need One and How to Create It

Strong cultures permeate people’s mentality and the way that they behave, their receptiveness to new ideas and thoughts, and their motivation to do security tasks.  Organizations with a positive security culture have immense capability to build resilient products and reduce security debt.    

Every organization has a security culture, either good or bad, even if a security team or company has never invested in it. It is the underlying driver of why people choose to do what they do around security. This is exactly why security teams and their organizations need to take ownership and proactively shape the culture into a direction that supports the security well-being of the organization.    

This talk will go into understanding how to measure your organization's current security culture and how to define where you want to go. From there we will look into techniques and cases studies of how to begin to shape your organization’s security culture to become more resilient and enable people-powered security.

2:55pm - 3:45pm

Small Is Beautiful: How to Improve Security by Maintaining Less Code

Project Zero has reported over 1500 vulnerabilities in commonly used software, including Windows, Android, iOS, browsers and may others. A common factor in many of these vulnerabilities is unnecessary attack surface. This presentation explains several causes of unnecessary attack surface and how to avoid them. It includes examples of vulnerabilities reported by Project Zero and explains how developers can prevent similar bugs.

4:10pm - 5:00pm

Reflecting on a Life Watching Movies and a Career in Security

Things change, and people and industries adapt. Individuals and businesses that can spot the trends and adjust quickly are likely to be more successful. With this as an underlying thesis, we'll talk about some trends in the movie industry that relate well to similar changes in technology and security. We'll also run through some tips and lessons learned to help security teams stay ahead as they navigate technical and operational changes.