NoVA Sec Meeting 1930 Thu 31 Jan 08

I was determined to start 2008 right by having a NoVA Sec meeting in January. Thursday night is our last chance, but thanks to last-minute coordination with Dowless and Associates we have a meeting location.

The next NoVA Sec meeting will take place 1930 Thursday 31 January 2008 at Dowless and Associates:

13873 Park Center Rd.
Suite 450
Herndon, VA 20171

Devin will speak and demo his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) box.

Our host is requesting a list of names of attendees, so please RSVP via email (taosecurity at gmail dot com) by end of day Wednesday 30 January 2008. Thank you.

Remember, there are no dues and no requirements for membership. We do leave certifications, FISMA, the certification and accreditation (C&A) process, and related items in the parking lot.

2008 Meeting Schedule

I'd like to regularly schedule NoVA Sec meetings in 2008 as the fourth Thursday of every month. That puts the meetings after the OWASP Washington VA meetings on the second Thursday and the ISSA-NoVA meetings on the third Thursday.

With that in mind, here is the proposed schedule for 2008.

• 24 Jan


• 28 Feb


• 27 Mar


• 24 Apr


• 22 May


• No Jun meeting: FIRST conference


• 24 Jul


• 28 Aug


• 25 Sep


• 23 Oct


• No Nov meeting: Thanksgiving


• No Dec meeting: Christmas

I am working on securing speakers for the other meetings now. If you have a speaker in mind (including yourself) please let me know via email to taosecurity at gmail dot com. I am also looking for generous corporate souls to host the meetings. Thank you.

Update: There are monthly Thursday conflicts with CapSec. Please see our mailing list for ongoing discussion.

NoVA Sec XSS Slides Posted

Thanks again to Andre Ludwig for his XSS Gone Wilde (.pdf) presentation.

Happy Birthday NoVA Sec

We're one year old today, because I created NoVA Sec on 21 July 2006. Our speaker for the 26 July meeting will be Andre Ludwig on "XSS Gone Wild." Next month Michael Smith will discuss life as a NOC ant at his MSSP. No date or location for that meeting has been set yet.

NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Thursday 26 July 07

The next NoVA Sec meeting will take place 1900 (7 pm) Thursday 26 July 2007 at Fishnet Security:

13454 Sunrise Valley Dr. Suite 230
Herndon, VA 20171
703.793.1440



If we don't get a volunteer speaker before then I will present either Open Source Network Forensics or Traditional IDS Should Be Dead. I really just want to get us meeting again so NoVA Sec can rise from our summer slumber. Thanks to Fishnet for hosting!

April Meeting Doubtful

I don't think we will have an April meeting. I am not available Thursday 26 April (or anytime that week). The previous Thursday is ISSA NoVA night. This Thursday is short notice and I'm busy too.

If someone would like to organize a meeting and find a date, speaker and location, please do. Otherwise we can try again in May

NoVA Sec Meeting Friday 1230 23 March 2007

The next NoVA Sec meeting will take place 1230 Friday 23 March 2007 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC, the site for ShmooCon 2007. Registration opens at 1300 Friday, with the conference starting at 1530. Our guest speaker will be Chris Lee, who has numerous cool projects and is a key member of the Honeynet Project.

We will probably not be meeting in a specific room and we very probably will not have a projector. I'd like this to be a meet-for-lunch meeting, possibly using the tables next to the deli for our meeting location. I suggest bringing a laptop in the event Chris has any slides he wants us to ponder on our laptops. Thank you to Chris for driving up from Georgia for ShmooCon and speaking to us.

Honeynet Alliance Membership

At our last meeting I raised the possibility of NoVA Sec operating a honeynet using the Getronics Red Siren IP and hardware range. After speaking with members of the Honeynet Project, they suggested we volunteer NoVA Sec as a member of the Honeynet Research Alliance. Please read the Honeynet Research Alliance Charter for information on the requirements. I'd like to put this to a vote at our next meeting, or at least solicit your inputs here and on our mailing list. Please let me know if you'd like NoVA Sec to become a Honeynet Research Alliance member. Basically, they trade trust and support in exchange for our help. I think it's a good idea. Thank you.

NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Thursday 22 Feb 07

The next NoVA Sec meeting will take place 1900 (7 pm) Thursday 22 February 2007 at Fishnet Security:

13454 Sunrise Valley Dr. Suite 230
Herndon, VA 20171
703.793.1440



Scott Musman from Augmented Systems will be our guest speaker. He will discuss using autonomic systems for improved intrusion detection.

In the event that I (Richard) cannot make the meeting due to consulting out of town, Keith McCammon has agreed to be Scott's host Thursday evening. Thanks Keith!

Thoughts on March Meeting at ShmooCon

ShmooCon starts Friday 23 March at 3 pm at the Wardman Park Marriott Hotel near the Woodley Park/Zoo Metro stop. That first day of talks ends at 7 pm. I have recruited a special guest speaker, Chris Lee, from the Honeynet Project, as a guest speaker "near" ShmooCon.

I suggest we hold our March NoVA Sec meeting at ShmooCon at 1:30 pm Friday 23 March. We can find a suitable open space, grab it, and chat. Chris can chat without slides.

What do you think?

NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Mon 29 Jan 07 at Getronics

The next NoVA Sec meeting will take place 1900 (7 pm) Monday 29 January 2007 at Getronics Red Siren. Wesley Shields will discuss FreeBSD jails.

NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Wed 13 Dec 06 at Cisco

The Wednesday NoVA Sec meeting will be held at Cisco in Herndon, VA:

13600 Dulles Technology Drive
Herndon, VA



Yahoo Map

The meeting will be in the Sapporo 1972 room. You will have to sign in. No RSVP is needed. Thank you.

Next NoVA Sec Meeting In Jeopardy

Nigel Houghton will no longer be able to speak at our next meeting, due to the "quiet period" caused by Sourcefire's IPO. Is anyone available to speak that night? If not, I can brief a section of my TCP/IP Weapons School class. That should motivate someone to volunteer to speak!

Next NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Wed 13 Dec 06

Our next meeting is 1900 Wednesday 13 December 2006. Our guest speaker will be Nigel Houghton from Sourcefire VRT. I expect he will say something cool about Snort.

I am working on securing a location now. When I have one arranged I will post it here. This will be our last meeting for 2006. I'd like to schedule some guest speakers for 2007. If you have any suggestions, please post them here or to our mailing list. Thank you.

NoVA Sec Mailing List Created

Thanks to Wesley Shields for establishing the NoVA Sec Mailing List. This will help us have extended discussions that can't be handled well by NoVA Sec blog comments. Only registered mailing list members can post (to frustrate spammers), so sign up today.

NoVA Sec Meeting Follow-up

We had a great meeting last night. Thanks especially to Steven Murdoch for a creative and highly technical briefing. The slides we saw are online (.pdf), and the paper is here (.pdf).

Steven mentioned the Sybil attack, and I found the original paper here. Wikipedia's entry on information theory might be useful, assuming some joker hasn't corrupted it. Low-bandwidth covert channels are great ways to transmit AES keys. Steven's talk reminded me that calculus-like or -based methods, or basically thinking about measuring changes over time, is a powerful analytical method. Finally, Steven mentioned he wrote some of his tests in Lua, which has a FreeBSD port and a new Wrox book arriving next spring.

We've got several initiatives in mind. I'm going to need some help with these if we want them to go anywhere. If no one cares, that's cool too.

1. Can anyone recommend future speakers? If you have an idea, please email me: taosecurity [at] gmail [dot] com. We're looking for anyone who would like to speak on a technical topic.


2. Paul mentioned interest in setting up a distributed attack-and-defend network (AADN). You would provide one or more systems from which you would attack other people on this network, and which could be attacked by others. I believe establishing some sort of VPN among all participating nodes would be the best way to hide this activity from ISPs, and also guarantee that whomever is part of the VPN has really agreed to participate in this activity. If anyone is interested in this idea, please post a comment.


3. Beyond an individually owned-and-operated AADN, there is some interest in collecting old gear for NoVA Sec learning and experimentation. For example, it would be nice to assemble a collection of Cisco equipment for those who want to gain some hands-on experience without potentially corrupting their production gear at work. I have a friend at Cisco who might be able to contribute old gear. We would also need a central location to house it and an equipment custodian.

On the communications side, our ability to communicate effectively is going to outgrow blog comments. A few ideas follow:

1. Would anyone want to set up and maintain an IRC channel?


2. Would anyone want to set up and maintain a mailing list?


3. Is there a need for a Web site other than this blog?

Thank you.

Reminder: Next NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Thu 2 Nov 06

As a reminder, our next meeting is 1900 Thu 2 Nov 06 at Getronics Red Siren. I will be driving guest speaker Steven J. Murdoch from Alexandria to Reston during rush hour, so please don't worry if I'm not there by 1900. I plan to ask Steven to start his talk at 1930.

Next NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Thu 2 Nov 06

Thanks to everyone who attended the second NoVA Sec meeting. I talked about FreeBSD, then we discussed ZERT, bump keys, and other security issues from the last month. We had about 15 attendees. Thanks to Getronics for hosting!

We will hold our next meeting at the same location as the second meeting, at 1900 Thu 2 Nov 06. We will have our first guest speaker -- Steven J. Murdoch. Steven will present his paper Hot or Not: Revealing Hidden Services by their Clock Skew. He's flying all the way from Cambridge University just to be with us. Ok, not really -- he's presenting that paper at the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society the same week.

I should note that the speaking portion of the meeting will start around 1930, as was the case this week. I have to drive Steven from Alexandria to Reston after Steven's conference day ends. That might delay arriving at Getronics by 1900.

At the end of the last meeting I also spoke with Aaron, who volunteered to be our first local guest speaker. He will discuss virtual machine forensics at our fourth meeting. I haven't proposed a date for that yet.

Confirmed: Next NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Thu 28 Sep 06

As posted here, the second NoVA Sec meeting will be held at 1900 on Thursday 28 September 2006, at Getronics Red Siren.

If you'd like to try FreeBSD on your hardware, bring the appropriate CD installation media (disc 1 is usually sufficient) to make our lives easier. I'll have i386 media with me.

Next NoVA Sec Meeting 1900 Thu 28 Sep 06

The second NoVA Sec meeting will be held at 1900 on Thursday 28 September 2006, tentatively at Getronics Red Siren:

10790 Parkridge Boulevard
Suite 300
Reston, VA 20191
Phone: 703.788.9800



Richard Bejtlich will speak for about 45 minutes on FreeBSD. Following the talk we can help people install FreeBSD on systems they bring to the meeting, if they like.