One week from today I’ll be presenting a talk at Black Hat. Black Hat! Wow. I’m still a little amazed at this turn of events, but am trying not to dwell on it for fear of slipping into a blind panic. :)

But I think I’m ready. I submitted a nice long white paper a couple of weeks ago, and sent in my presentation yesterday. I’m comfortable with the material. I (think) I’ll be able to intelligently field questions. I’m pretty sure I won’t be a complete, blithering idiot on stage. And to settle my nerves, I’ve put in an early order for a bottle of Drambuie. Though I think I’ll save that for the obligatory post-talk celebration.

Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve spoken at a conference – I was lucky enough to get a spot on the closing panel at ShmooCon this past January. There were four of us on the panel, so I didn’t get to speak long (only about 10 minutes). But being the closing session, most of the con was there – perhaps as many as 1000 people. I haven’t seen the video, but people tell me that I did well, so I guess there’s really no reason to be nervous here.

I still have yet to write up anything about that ShmooCon appearance, and hopefully I’ll finally do something soon. There’s been quite a bit happening in the password cracking / authentication business in the past six months, and I have a lot of interesting ideas swirling around that I really need to put down for others to comment on. Maybe I’ll write some on the flight to Vegas. You know, to keep my mind off of my talk.

It’s actually my talk that I’m writing now, to, er, talk about. Since joining Intrepidus Group, I’ve spent a good deal of time helping to assess risk and craft security guidelines for iOS devices in large enterprises. A large part of securing iStuff in the enterprise relies upon the use of Mobile Device Management technology (MDM). MDM has been around for a while, especially for some of the older, more corporately-established mobile devices (like BlackBerry or Windows Mobile). Last summer, though, Apple jumped into the arena, adding support for their devices as part of iOS 4.0.

Unfortunately, the way that MDM works for iOS hasn’t been very well described, publicly. Which makes it difficult when you’re trying to demonstrate to a customer that it will make their enviroment more secure.

So I set about doing everything I could to understand, at a deep, technical level, exactly how the technology worked. We were already pretty satisifed, abstractly, with the features and capabilities of Apple’s MDM, but we felt it necessary to go that extra step to truly know what it’s doing. The end result of this is that we now have a mostly-complete understanding of how the protocol works.

Which is what I’ll be talking about next week. I start with how iOS settings work, move into additional features available through the iPhone Configuration Utility, and then start talking about MDM. The talk shows in detail how MDM uses the Apple Push Notification Service, and describes the message format used to make that notification. It’ll also document the interaction between device and server, from authentication and enrollment to receiving commands and providing responses. Enough detail is provided to enable you to write your own experimental MDM server (or, you could simply use the one I’ll be releasing at the talk).

Finally, I’ll talk about some limitations and weaknesses I’ve uncovered, and their potential security ramifications. There might even be a surprise for those hardy enough to sit through the whole talk.

This is going to be quite the experience for me. If your work involves securing iOS devices, especially at the enterprise level, please drop by and give a listen. If you can’t make it, check out the Intrepidus Group website after the conference – I hope to write up some of the more interesting bits of the talk for a standalone post, and we should also have the slides, white paper, and source code available for download at some point.

See you in Vegas!

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