How to rate the security of closed source software

March 11, 2010 (at 1:30 p.m.) in Defense & Management

Security evaluation of software is getting more and more common in large enterprises to ensure that they can trust the software and secure the processed data. But beneath the common source code reviews, pentests and fuzzing tests, it’s still hard to rate the security of closed source software without reverse engineering it. This talk will introduce some ideas how to rate this software in an almost automated way using the right tools and based on some quality metrics and other facts of the binary. It will give some advises how to implement the concept in the enterprise.

Michael Thumann

Michael Thumann is Chief Security Officer and head of the ERNW application security team. He has published security advisories regarding topics like ‘Cracking IKE Preshared Keys’ and Buffer Overflows in Web Servers/VPN Software/VoIP Software. Michael enjoys sharing his self-written security tools (e.g. ‘tomas – a Cisco Password Cracker’, ‘ikeprobe – IKE PSK Vulnerability Scanner’ or ‘dnsdigger – a dns information gathering tool’) and his experience with the community. Besides numerous articles and papers he wrote the first (and only) German Pen-Test Book that has become a recommended reading at german universities.

In addition to his daily pentesting tasks he is a regular conference-speaker (e.g. Blackhat, HITB and RSA Conference) and has also contributed exploit code to the Metasploit Framework. With more than 10 years of experience in computer security Michaels’ main interest is to uncover vulnerabilities and security design flaws from the network to the application level and reverse almost everything to understand the inner working.