hack0r.net

This weekend the Informatiktage 2007 took place. It was pretty cool and interesting. As I wrote before i attended to the workshop “Security in online banking” which was held by Hans-Peter Dünnwald, Matthias Stoffel and Eberhard Stickel. They were from the “Sparkasseninformatikzentrum” and “Hochschule der Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe”. We were only 5 attendees, so it was a rather relaxed. The workshop was divided into three parts. One on the first day and two on the second.

The first one started a little boring and confused, because only one of three people who should present this workshop were there first and the one who was present was pretty ill. The two other arrived short before the end, they had some meetings. He began the workshop with the basics of cryptography, like what is symmetric and asymmetric encryption and stuff. Most of us already heard and/or read almost everything we were told.

The evening program was called networking. But no we didn’t play computer games. It was more to get in contact with other students and the representatives of the companies that were presenting the workshops or sponsoring the whole congress. And there was free beer, which almost got fatal for me.

On the second day three of us, including me, were able to give a short lecture about our submissions. Too bad Georg and I were a little late, because I had to find a copyshop, which was able to print a black and white poster for under 20 Euro, so we didn’t see the first half of “Rainbow table Cracking”. My lecture was about XSS and Session Riding. I did mostly a live presentation of how it works and then enumerating known countermeasures. Unluckily I seem to have liked talking about XSS too much, so there were only 5 minutes left to talk about Session Riding and so this part got a little chaotic.

The part of the Sparkasse was much more interesting than the day before. They told us about their experiences and way of handling with security and it’s breaches. I was just a little disappointed about their comment on requiring javascript to be able to reach the Haspa onlinebanking section. They only said “Yes I do agree with you. But you always have to choose between security and functionality/design”. Yes i do agree with them, but please choose security if it comes to my money. Well, they told me the new Haspa website is already launched and I just had a look at it and yeah they fortunately did change it. The workshop topic of this second part was basically about the ways the guys with the dark hats do their stuff. It was primarily about phishing techniques, since this is the way the most damage is done.

Between the second and third part of the workshop the poster session took place. I had the feeling, that it got some more attention on the first day and so in the main we did talk to the owners of our neighbouring posters. But maybe it was just because my poster was that ugly and/or uninteresting. I wouldn’t wonder about that too much. I created it in the middle of a night and the print was done by zooming an A4 print to an A1 format, which is not necessarily the best thing to do. But it saved me 10 Euro.

The last part began with the third lecture. It was about trusted computing in mobile environments. The third part then was then mainly about taken precautions and upcoming hardware, used by the Sparkasse. In the near future there will be a small chipcard reader available, that generates a special TAN out of the current EC card and som values of the transaction. But I don’t like the idea too much, because, if I loose my EC card, someone else might be able to generate TAN numbers out of it.

All in all it was really fun. This was one of the seldom chances get to know students from other universities and cities. It gave us the chance to build up connections between individuals with similar interest and, which may be even more interesting not that similar interests and thus a different point of view. I also learned some things about the ways Computer Science is handled in other cities, which was as well pretty interesting.

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