Yesterday I passed my Certified Ethical Hacker test making me a CEH. I really don't put much personal information in this blog but since I wish I'd found more information about the possibility of self studying for the CEH before I took the exam, I'm going to write this entry in the hopes that someone else will find it before they take their's.

CEH's Perception

The Certified Ethical Hacker certification came around years ago but I first heard about it at Defcon 15. You can go look at what the CEH is and read why you need to get it but I'm more interested in writing about how I personally have seen it perceived.

One of the Goons at Defcon was making fun of the certification saying that he was going to start his own test to be a CEH - Certified Ethical Harpoonist and that the CEH cert was less than desirable. He used more colorful adjectives. Goons are at least two steps up from the "Humans" at Defcon so their opinion has some sway (especially among n3wbs and scene whores) no matter how beer fueled it is.

None of the people that I know or are friends with have the CEH cert and I've never really had a conversation with anyone saying how they're going to work towards it. Most look at the CISSP to be a manager or some of the SANS certs if you want to actually know how to hack. The best example of how CEH is not widely known or desired was I told a techie friend that I'd passed my CEH exam and his response was, "Congratulations. What's that?"

Why get the CEH?

So if it's been planted in my mind that the CEH is really not that big of deal and most people don't even know what the CEH is, why even go for it right? More than anything else it added a structure to the security projects I had been working on. Up til now, I was working on 15 different projects using all kinds of different technology from encryption games and anonymity utilities to programming projects and improving my soldering skills. I found the CEH study guide and looking through the table of contents, it seemed like something that could teach me new skills to wrap into my projects. So it just really put everything I had been studying into a specific achievable goal.

I would say to anyone expecting the CEH cert to open doors or make it easier for you to get a job, don't waste your time. In my opinion, CEH is the A+ of security.

Is Self Study an Option?

The short answer is a big maybe.

I'm lucky enough to work for a company that pays for my training. That being said, I really didn't want to take a week of to do the CEH training course knowing that the CEH really wouldn't do much for anyone. Since I'm on sabbatical for a few months, what better time to study towards something like this.

I bought the CEH review guide which in one of the first paragraphs of the books states something to the affect of

"This book does not contain all the information you need to pass the test."

Ok, I understand. I'll look at the information it's talking about and apply some real world examples. The review guide was missing a LOT of information. In fact, if I had no previous experience in security and was starting from scratch, the review guide wouldn't have even touched upon half of the subjects in the test.

I know what you're going to say, it's called a _REVIEW_ guide but in fact, there is no official book of information for the CEH which means that the only book to study from is this review guide. Maybe this is normal but for all the other certifications I have, there's always been a gigantic book that you studied from. So it was like having the cliff notes instead of the original novel and then trying to pass a 150 question exam. It wasn't like that, it WAS that.

The alternative to the review guide is that you hook up with the EC Council training and they tell you the secret subjects that you should study for in one of their week long training classes. Lets just say that thanks to the openness of the Internet, I was able to track down some more information to study.

Subjects not covered

I looked up as much information as I could and I talked to people in some forums and IRC channels that I frequent and they all basically said the same thing. "Nothing really surprising. Few gotcha questions. Pretty straight forward." And in response to did you self-study - "No." In fact out of the 5 or 6 people I directly talked to that had passed the CEH, they all shelled out the more than $1000 for the week training and then took the test.

The biggest item that I didn't study for was programming. They don't expect you to write any exploits or anything like that but you need to be able to debug C to point out locations for buffer overflows. I don't know C or C++ but can hack my way through so it was a stretch and not in any thing that I was studying. Luckily there were only two of these questions.

Conclusion

My major conclusion is the test material is really good for security professionals but if you're going to be able to pass the exam with the review guide, you are probably already in the security industry and this test will do nothing for you. If not, you'll end up spending the same amount of money re-taking the test that you would have if you did the week long training. The reason that I was successful was because of all the extra study materials I found and generally because I am a geek.

Last year was my first year at Defcon so I was sucking up as much information as possible but generally I just went to the talks and then back to the room to play with the things that I had learned.  I didn't get into the social scene very much.

This year I still attended a ton of the talks but instead of taking time to go back to the room and play, my friends and I made more of an effort to get into the Defcon social scene.

Overall Experience

Just like last year I had a blast but I think even more this year because of some of the people we met. I've seen some posts complaining about the situation at Defcon about how it was too crowded and they missed some talks because of this. It sounds to me like a lot of people have gone to things like Microsoft Events where you stand around some muffins and coffee and then sit through 2 hours of talks.Defcon hacks the conservative convention idea and takes into account the amount of hackers that have ADD.They offer 5 tracks of talks at the same time, lock picking training, wireless village, general hang outs, and more. Then when the talks are all done, there are parties all over the city. It's not cup of coffee, stand in line, polite conversation kind of gathering but rather a red bull and vodka, bum rush, punch in the face cluster of people from all over world meeting to show solidarity in the hacker community. At least that's the my ideal perspective of what Defcon should be, it may be growing in a different direction.

List of talks I attended:

• Welcome by DT & Making the DEFCON 16 Badge with Joe "Kingpin" Grand
• Clinton Wong - Web Privacy & Flash Local Shared Objects.
• Roger Dingledine -Security and anonymity vulnerabilities in Tor: past, present, and future
• Robert Ricks -New Tool for SQL Injection with DNS Exfiltration.
• Magnus Bråding -Generic, Decentralized, Unstoppable Anonymity: The Phantom Protocol.
• Eric Schmiedl -Advanced Physical Attacks: Going Beyond Social Engineering and Dumpster Diving Or, Techniques of Industrial Espionage
• Fyodor -NMAP-Scanning the Internet.
• Matt Yoder-Death Envelope: Medieval Solution to a 21st Century Problem.
• John Fitzpatrick -Virtually Hacking.
• Nathan Evans -De-TOR-iorate Anonymity
• Movie Night With DT: Premiere of "Hackers Are People Too
• Cameron Hotchkies-Under the iHood.
• Jay Beale-Owning the Users with Agent in the Middle.
• Luciano Bello & Maximiliano Bertacchini-Predictable RNG in the Vulnerable Debian OpenSSL Package, the What and the How.
• Panel: All your Sploits (and Servers) are belong to us.
• Mike Perry-365-Day:Active https cookie hijacking.
• Tony Howlett-The death of Cash: The Loss of anonymity & other danger of the cash free society.
• Ryan Trost-Evade IDS/IPS Systems using Geospatial Threat Detection.
• Rick Hill-War Ballooning-Kismet Wireless "Eye in the Sky"
• Jay Beale-They're Hacking Our Clients! Introducing Free Client-side Intrustion Prevention.
• DAVIX Visualization Workshop
• Stealing the Internet

Tor

I've been following Tor for a while now so it was interesting to go to the two Tor specific talks – both about vulnerabilities in Tor. Roger Dingledine presented a general overview of past, present, and future vulnerabilities in the Tor network and Nathan Evans went over a specific vulnerability which allowed an attacker to find out all nodes in a circuit. Both talks were interesting and I'm going to go into much more detail in future blog entries.

Sidejacking Redux

Last year, the concept of sidejacking was in its infancy. Sidejacking or session hijacking is when an attacker uses a man in the middle to steal the current session of something a user is accessing. For instance, with this attack, an attacker could steal the cookies used to authenticate a person's gmail account which would grant the attacker access to Gmail and all other Google services for the amount of time that session was valid. This year Jay Beale of the company Intel Guardians released a tool called “The Middler” which automates this process and Mike Perry of Riverbed and the Tor Project pointed out a flaw in the way that some companies have tried to protect users from this exploit.

Since last year, services like Gmail have offered SSL encryption to protect from this attack but they didn't force users to use SSL which lead to Mike Perry's talk. He pointed out an attack on a Gmail  where even though the user was using an SSL connection, the cookie could be transmitted in clear text allowing a session hijack. This was done by doing a MITM attack, using a tool to check which online service the user was using, inject a piece of html that pointed to the non-SSL encrypted version of that online service and then perform a session hijack after reading in the credentials. He even pointed out a simple fix that he has told Gmail and Yahoo about where you can set a bit in the cookie to only transmit in SSL.

War-Ballooning

One of the most fun talks that I attended was Rick Hill's War-Ballooning demonstration. They were planning on doing a live demo from the roof of the Riveria but at the last minute, some authorities decided to stop them. War-Ballooning was a development of last years idea of War-Rocketing which shot a rocket in the air and then searched for wireless signals while it parachuted to the ground. This year they took a professional balloon that was used by photographers for shooting aerial shots, attached a cooler filled with various wireless gear, and configured a orbital webcam that controlled which direction the yagi antenna was pointing. So they gave a video of the demonstration which was recorded the day before in a park five miles out of town. For added drama, they used Kismet's feature to read wireless networks out loud as it found them. They had the balloon up for ten minutes and found over 300 wireless signals as it broadcast a 7 mile radius. 30% of those were unsecured.

Hackers Are People Too - Ashley Schwartau

And how could I forget to add something about my acting debut in the documentary Hackers Are People Too which was premiered at Defcon XVI. Well ok, maybe I was on the screen for less than 2 seconds and I wasn't quoted as saying anything but hey, to be in a hacker documentary was really cool. Ashley even recognized me when I came up to her vendor booth. But enough of my vanity, the documentary was so cool and people really should pick it up to show to their friends and family and get the scarey idea of what hackers are out of their heads.

External Links

http://www.hackersarepeopletoo.com - link to the Hackers Are People Too official website (BUY BUY BUY!!!)
http://fscked.org/ - Mike Perry's website
http://www.defcon.org-Defcon
http://www.intelguardians.com/ - Intel Guardians will soon be releasing "The Middler"
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I arrived Thursday morning to Las Vegas in an attempt to do some of the pre-Defcon social events this year. We posted our room availability on the Defcon forums and picked up two roomates to help with the costs; Riot and Matt.

I reserved the "deluxe" room at the Riveria which although being nicer, doesn't have any more space than the non-deluxe. It does look much more romantic but filling it with 4 guys takes care of that feeling pretty quickly.

Badges this year include an IR port, an SD slot, and supposedly a way to shut off all TV's in a certain radius, and a transmit mode that may allow you to talk to other badges as you walk around the floor.

Ethical Hackers

Ethical Hackers was doing a get together at Hofbrauhaus, a German brew house at 8:00pm. Dan who runs the site was putting it all together and had a $500 tab for us to use. The whole event was a lot of fun and had a lot of interesting people. Timmy of Red Rock Security, Brian of Cisco, Ed of Intel Guardians, David an extreme baby sitter, Collin of Training Camp, Mike the Military Vet, Naps, and a bunch of others of whom I may have forgotten their names. Check out ChicagoCon for anyone that will be in the area. Sounds like a very worthwhile event. I think the whole get together was a success.

EFF Summit

We also grabbed a few of the guys to make it back to the EFF Summit at the top of the Monaco tower back at the Riveria. Donations were $40 to get in and included a one year membership. Once the sound system was working at around 10:30 or 11:00, some of the EFF guys went up to talk about some of the cases that were won and some of good things that the EFF does. I think it was kind of preaching to the choir but the event went pretty well.

External Links

http://www.ethicalhackers.net
Red Rock Security
ChicagoCon
Intel Guardians