Jose Selvi - Breaking SSL Using Time Synchronisation Attacks

Materials Available here:https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2023/DEF%20CON%2023%20presentations/DEFCON-23-Jose-Selvi-Breaking-SSL-Using-Time-Synchronisation-Attacks.pdf

Breaking SSL Using Time Synchronisation Attacks

Jose Selvi Senior Security Consultant, NCC Group

What time? When? Who is first? Obviously, Time is strongly present in our daily life. We use time in almost everything we do, and computers are not an exception to this rule. Our computers and devices use time in a wide variety of ways such as cache expiration, scheduling tasks or even security technologies. Some of those technologies completely relies on the local clock, and they can be affected by a clock misconfiguration.

However, since most operating system providers do not offer secure time synchronisation protocols by default, an attacker could manipulate those protocols and control the local clock. In this presentation, we review how different operating systems synchronise their local clocks and how an attacker could exploit some of them in order to bypass different well-known security protections.

Jose Selvi is a Senior Penetration Tester at NCC Group. His 11 years of expertise performing advanced security services and solutions in various industries (government, telecom, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, financial, technology...) include mainly penetration tests and information security research in new technologies. He is also a SANS Institute community instructor for penetration testing courses and a regular speaker at security conferences (mostly in Spain)