Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2005 [audio] Presentations From The Security Conference

The computer and network security fields have made little progress in the past decade. The rhetoric that the field is in an arms race; attacks are becoming more complicated and thus defenses are always in a keep-up situation makes little sense when 10 year old root kits, BGP and DNS attacks that have been widely publicized for years, and plain-text communications streams are still being taken advantage of. This talk looks at the environment without being skewed by currently marketed solutions. It then presents corollaries for environments in different disciplines, such as economics and physics, talks to certain psychological situations that prohibit researchers and organizations from being able to correctly address the problems, maps these solutions into Counter Intelligence and Counter Espionage models and finally applies them to low level network and systems communications. This presentation involves audience participation to point out ways of breaking the helplessness cycle (for the defensive side) or to b