Preparations are underway for Black Hat Europe’s return to London later this year, and there’s already a bumper crop of content laid in for the December event. Today we showcase briefings with a special focus on hidden vulnerabilities in hardware and software you use every day.

For example, in his session on Attacking Hardware Systems Using Resonance and the Laws of Physics, IBM X-Force Red’s Ivan Reedman will make the case that by finding the resonant frequency of certain electronic sensors and other devices, it is possible to subvert systems that are supposedly secured by electronic components.

These resonance attacks are all about leveraging physical properties of the target device from ultrasonic attacks on MEMS (microelectro-mechanical systems) microphones in most voice-enabled IoT and mobile equipment to high-frequency electrical resonance inside certain programmable logic. By chaining these attacks together with other hardware attacks, Reedman will show you how to use software to bypass quite complex hardware security sub-systems.

And if you care at all about sharpening your threat detection skills, don’t skip over Deep Impact: Recognizing Unknown Malicious Activities from Zero Knowledge. Presented by Internet Initiative Japan threat/malware analysts Hiroshi Suzuki and Hisao Nashiwa, the analysts will showcase how the pair overcame common threat detection hurdles and detected unknown malicious activities from typical logs of devices not dedicated to attack detection. (Think: proxies, firewalls, etc.) Specifically, the pair plan to focus on effective C2 server detection and exploit kit detection. They say their model can detect 14 kinds of EKs, like Rig, Nebula, Terror, Sundown, and KaiXinwith) with zero knowledge.

In Search of CurveSwap: Measuring Elliptic Curve Implementations in the Wild will be presented by Luke Valenta (PhD student, University of Pennsylvania) and Cloudflare head of cryptography Nick Sullivan.

Sullivan previously outlined a theoretical parameter downgrade attack against specific TLS versions which he named CurveSwap, and in this talk the pair plan to show you how to safeguard against such attacks. They’ll survey elliptic curve implementations from several vantage points, and perform active measurements to estimate server vulnerability to known attacks against elliptic curve implementations, including support for weak curves, invalid curve attacks, and curve twist attacks. They’ll also show you how vulnerabilities could be used to construct an elliptic curve parameter downgrade attack (CurveSwap for TLS), analyze source code for elliptic curve implementations, and showcase potential failure points in JSON Web Encryption, as well as Java and NSS multiplication algorithms.

With more and more devices integrating into IoT networks, now is the right time for a talk like When Machines Can’t Talk: Security and Privacy Issues of Machine-to-Machine Data Protocols. Presented by EURECOM post-doctoral researcher Davide Quarta and Trend Micro senior threat researcher Federico Maggi, this talk promises to lay bare the security issues at play in two popular machine-to-machine (M2M) protocols: MQTT CoAP.

Together they’re slowly forming the backbone of many IoT infrastructures, including critical industry environments. With that in mind, Quarta and Maggi will show you how vulnerable these protocols can be to attack, and, using MQTT CoAP as a concrete example of modern M2M technology) will offer recommendations at various levels (standardization bodies, vendors, developers, and users) that could set a more responsible tone and significantly reduce the number of insecure deployments in the future.

Black Hat Europe returns to The Excel in London December 3-6, 2018. For more information on how to register, check out the Black Hat website.