News

We're announcing HackQuest ZeroNights winners!

HackQuest which is traditionally held before the start of ZERONIGHTS is now over. Various tasks were offered for the participants: find vulnerabilities in web-applications, make reverse engineering, analyze traffic, write binary exploit and many others. Let us remind you that the contest took part in the period from 9th to 16th of November and one task was offered for the whole day.

During the quest 5153 unique IP-addresses visited http://hackquest.zeronights.org/ website (that is one and a half more than it was previous year). In total there were 380323 attempts to find solutions for the tasks, and only some of them were correct. During the contest multiple attempts to bruteforce answers were detected, all of them failed.

So now we’re announcing the winners:

Day 1, “Chocolate Factory” task (web) - cdump and BlackFan

Day 2, “HSM V1.0” task (web, crypto, hash cracking) - Abr1k0s

Day 3, “BAZAAR NG” task (web) - AV1ct0r

Day 4, “ILLOGICAL PHOTOGALLERY” task (web, oauth) - Beched

Day 5, “CRACKME” task (reverse) - sysenter

Day 6, “BANK ROBBERY” task (phreaking, web) - dr.glukyne

Day 6, “BLINK2PWN” task (reverse, binary pwn) - mr_dawerty

All of them are awarded with a personal invitation to the conference. We'll see them at ZERONIGHTS!

P.S. a nice bonus: solutions for the tasks will soon be available at habrahabr.ru

Keep track of our news updates ;)

Few days left till the end of registration to ZERONIGHTS

Friends, associates, colleagues! Please note that registration to ZERONIGHTS 2015 conference will be over at 21.00 on November 23. After that tickets will be unavailable for purchase. This year we decided to keep only online registration, thus, unfortunately, it’ll be impossible to pay for participation on-the-spot. We kindly ask that you do not postpone your visit to the following page till the last day as there are, as always, many of those who’d like to participate.

School CTF winners were invited to ZERONIGHTS!

Friends, we're happy to announce that Capture the flag (CTF) information security team competition organized 8th of November 2015 for Moscow and Moscow Region school students by Moscow State University department of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics ( http://ctf.cs.msu.ru/ ) is now finished.

Winners, who took top places, Shadow Servants Jr (1), Ceasar salad (2), %teamname% (3) and Pairwise Nonisomorphic Caterpillars are invited to participate as special guests at ZERONIGHTS 2015 conference that will take part 25-26 November in Moscow.

Last year 60 teams participated in the competition, this time there were 80. Winners list is available here: http://ctf.cs.msu.ru:2015/results/2.

Organizers point our that this year tasks were much more complicated, many of them can be compared to the ones offered at DEFCON CTF. Denis Gamayunov, organising committee chairman mentioned “Even though it influenced general statistics of the competition, students surprised us, as even the most difficult tasks were not beyond their powers”.

Also Gamayunov noted Mytishchi Programmers Schools success, they win for the second year in a row. “We’re pleased that schools are already accepting CTF movement as a wonderful form of educating not just information security but IT in general”.

Attention - a contest by Qiwi at ZERONIGHTS

Participants of ZERONIGHTS will have an opportunity to participate in the search for vulnerabilities in QIWI payment terminal. Three fully functional terminals (including users’ favorite ‘transparent’ model) will be available during the conference.

It’s prohibited to:

take destructive actions against the terminal that can lead to its physical destruction

carry out attacks against the cash acceptor (counterfeit bills, ‘fishing’, attacks against COM-port)

You’re allowed to:

use picklocks to gain physical access to the terminal’s hardware

connect additional equipment to the terminal

Of interest are the vulnerabilities the allow accessing Windows shell and carrying out payments by means of the data received from the terminal. Depending on the criticality of discovered security issues, the award may amount to 200 000 rubles and will be paid as part of the Qiwi bug bounty project.

Do you want to hear exactly what hackers talking about?

ZERONIGHTS. Welcome.





HackQuest ZERONIGHTS 2015

Traditionally, before the start of ZERONIGHTS we held HackQuest, where participants are offered to solve various tasks (find web-application vulnerabilities, do reverse engineering, analyze traffic, make binary exploit etc.). This time it will be from 9th to 16th of November 2015 and we’ll be providing one task for one day. Winners will be awarded with invitations to the conference and will become part of our ‘hall-of-fame’.

Rules are as follows:

Quest’s duration is 7 days, starting from 20.00 on 9th of November and ending at 20.00 on 16th of November.

One task for a day. You’ve got 24 hours to solve it

First one to solve the task gets conference invitation

This year’s update: if you’re second or third you get points. Second place winner gets 0.5 points and the fird one gets 0.25. If you have earned one point you will get an invitation (however, that doesn't mean that if you have two points you can get more than one invitation)

Upon enquiry, organizers can request complete task solution (we’re in favor of honesty)

It’s prohibited to help others and give ready-made solutions

It’s prohibited to hand over your answers for more than one time (under other account)

Details, registration and participation at http://hackquest.zeronights.org/. Winners will be announced separately.

ZeroNightsWorld photo contest results will be announced at ZN 2015

We'd like remind you that at ZN 2015 anniversary conference results of ZeroNightsWorld contest will be revealed. We will determine authors of the coolest photos devoted to matreshka’s travels, winners will be awarded with the special prizes. Now that you have official conference shop in disposal (http://shop.vertcomm.ru/), it’s much easier to become a participant!

Your task is to make photos of people wearing clothes with our emblems or of flags or any other items (even handmade) with ZeroNights emblem from most remote parts of the world. There are about 20 countries currently, but our effort is to have the whole world. You can trace ZeroNights migrations by the #zeronightsworld hashtag. Join us! Rules are simple: make photos of locals so that it would be easy to guess they are really locals (for example, Bangkok taxi-driver or Turkish kebab salesman), or of yourself with ZeroNights attributes, then post in Twitter, Instagram, Facebook with #zeronightsworld hashtag, specify a country and a city and leave some comments.

RuCTFE 2015 at ZERONIGHTS

At ZERONIGHTS conference Hackerdrom team representatives Irina Budrova, Alexander Bersenev and Michail Vyatskov will talk about how RuCTFE works, those are international online contests in the ‘attack and defence' form. Also, experts will look into the process of RuCTFE 2015 game and reveal service vulnerabilities. ZN guests will get to know what are the technologies that lie in the basis of this game’s infrastructure, how validation system works. During the conference anybody can take participants position, try to hack offered services. RuCTFE talks will take part in the first (main program) and second day (FastTrack) of the conference.

This year is the 7th time when RuCTFE helds a competition, which will be on 21st of November. Participants registration is now open via this link: https://ructf.org/e/2015/registration. Worth being mentioned is the fact that RuCTFE is the qualifying stage of annual inter-usiversity competitions RuCTF 2016. Organizers are welcoming student teams to participate.

One month to find vulnerabilities in Yandex Browser

Yandex, a company partnering ZeroNights announces its month of searching vulnerabilities in Yandex Browser. The core initiative is to find out whether there are weak links in the new security system unknown to Yandex’es specialists.

Terms of the contest are simple: anyone can try to hack the browser and report revealed vulnerability to the company. Participants who will reveal most dangerous issues will be awarded with cash. First place prize is 500 thousand rubles, second and third – 300 and 150 thousand correspondently. Yandex is particularly interested in the vulnerabilities that allow compromising or impairing integrity of user data. Relevant error types are listed in the contest rules.

The deadline is 20th of November, messages are to be sent via the feedback form. Results will be published on November 26th at the ZeroNights-2015 conference. If you can't be there its nothing to worry about: names of the winners will also be published in Yandex Browser club.

Analyze it: 2 talks, workshop, FastTrack and Defensive Track

We are living up to our promise not to keep you waiting for agenda news. And we have prepared something special for you today.

For starters, here are two new main program talks:

Daniel (Jin Long), Azure (Yang Jietao) of Keen Team (China) will deliver a talk Did you get your token? This presentation focuses on the basics and principles of Windows privilege separation, describes the internal structure of token, how it supports DACL, privilege and mandatory level check, and how sandboxes mechanisms are built upon it. Anton Kochkov (Russia) will talk about ESIL, which is used to describe semantics of any instruction for any processor (from VLIW DSP to 4-bit Intel 4004). This talk, called ESIL – universal IL (Intermediate Language) for Radare2, will present the audience with practical cases of ESIL implementation, its conversion into other similar languages (OpenREIL) and possibilities of the further development.

Then we have a powerful workshop by Alexander Matrosov, Eugene Rodionov (USA / Russia):

Practical object-oriented code reverse engineering. The authors will address the problem of reverse engineering complex threats developed using object-oriented programming.

An excellent FastTrack:

Distributing the reconstruction of high-level intermediate representation for large scale malware analysis. In this work, the authors discuss distributed reverse engineering techniques, using intermediate representation in a clustered environment. The extracted characteristics of 2 million malware samples are analyzed.

And a fancy Defensive Track talk:

Daniil Svetlov (Russia) will present a talk called Analyze it – assembling modern SIEM based on Open Source components for large-scale logs analysis. In this presentation, the author will demonstrate how to assemble OSSEC, Snort, Suricata and Cisco ASA log analysis system out of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana. The system will have an SQL-like search feature, flexible mail notification management, large-scale multi-tier architecture out of the box.

Less than a month until we meet! Don’t forget to secure your ticket at registration!

Four agenda bombs

Friends, it’s time to deliver some ZeroNights news so that you can plan November 25 and 26 comfortably :) Today, we announce four truly mind-blowing talks – just look at them!

Main program:

Stay tuned and expect more news soon! We promise several more pleasant surprises ;)

HPC Village at ZeroNights

Friends, we have an announcement from our friend and last year's keynote, Alexander 'SolarDesigner' Peslyak. In 2013, OpenWall set up HPC Village, a hobbyist heterogeneous (hybrid) High Performance Computing (HPC) platform:



HPC Village has been available to Open Source software developers (and to some others) during those 2 years. Participants are provided with remote access (via the SSH protocol) to a server with multi-core CPUs (16 cores, 32 logical CPUs, 128 GB RAM) and HPC accelerator cards of different kinds - Intel MIC (Xeon Phi), AMD GPU, NVIDIA GPU - as well as with pre-installed and configured drivers and development tools (SDKs): http://openwall.info/wiki/HPC/Village

We have good news: Openwall've recently added to the mix an NVIDIA GTX Titan X, the largest GPU card based on NVIDIA's latest Maxwell architecture. This purchase was fully sponsored by Sagitta HPC, a subsidiary of Stricture Group LLC. Sagitta HPC specializes on delivery of hardware and software "solutions that are designed by world-renowned password cracking experts and are tailored for information security, forensics, law enforcement, and litigation support professionals". If you need a GPU rig for password cracking, please consider purchasing from them: https://sagitta.pw

More good news: besides the main HPC Village machine described above, access is also available to non-HPC development boxes, such as with Intel AVX2, Intel HD Graphics 4600 (with a configured and working OpenCL "driver"), AMD XOP, AMD GCN 1.1, NVIDIA Fermi, some non-x86 architectures (ARM, MIPS64, Epiphany), some FPGAs (ZedBoard with Xilinx Zynq 7020, ZTEX 1.15y with quad Xilinx Spartan-6 LX150). The exact set of these keeps changing. Please feel free to inquire about availability of these or/and other resources if relevant to your project. See the wiki page for exact eligibility requirements and for how to apply.

Even more good news: just like in 2013, Openwall is once again providing access not only to Open Source developers, but also to any interested attendees to ZeroNights 2015. Looking forward to meeting fellow HPC hobbyists and code optimization geeks in November!