HITB originally started as an information resource and public repository of happenings within the security industry. We’ve always believed that knowledge should be accessible to everyone, which is why we go out of our way to ensure conference slides and materials are released almost immediately after the speaker leaves the stage, video recordings are not sold but uploaded to our Youtube channel and we even live-stream our CommSec track as well. We’ve also always made it a point to not only offer student tickets at essentially cost price, but also discounted tickets for participating hackerspaces and community members. No doubt things like flying 50+ international speakers from all over the world isn’t cheap, which is why we depend on the support of our sponsors to keep doing what we do. This year will be the 9th year we are in Amsterdam. We’re also working on bringing the conference to China in October which should be really interesting.
What can we expect to see at the Amsterdam event this year?
We’ll continue with our tried and tested format of intensive hands-on trainings for the first couple of days followed by our 2-day conference which features both 60 and 120 minute hands on sessions. There’ll also be an expanded industry exhibition and a free-to-access contest area with a LOT of new challenges for people to play with. Some prizes even include a trip to Hong Kong! We will also have our usual CommSec track – another area that is free to attend with 30-minute talks that we are proud to say does not include any vendor talks or marketing lectures. Even though the CommSec track is free, we take great pride in ensuring accepted speakers deliver not only in-depth presentations, but research that is new, fresh and of course, non-ccommercial. We’ve also got some very interesting keynote speakers lined up for the main conference, with Marion Marschalek from Intel set to deliver the opening keynote on the 12th. Marion is a former malware analyst and reverse engineer who now works with Intel on low-level research and her keynote will most likely also be highly technical. On Day 2, Jennifer Legio will kick things off for us and the closing keynote will be delivered by Amber Baldet, Executive Director, Blockchain Program Lead, J.P. Morgan. Needless to say, we’re very excited about this too.
What are some burning issues that are going to be discussed in the conference?
There are always several talks that are going to be ‘big’ and this year is certainly no exception. I’m personally interested in seeing Don Bailey’s talk on attacks against secure elementsת allowing any adversary to impersonate any device on the network. There’s also a new data ex-filtration attack called Ghost Tunnel by the Qihoo360’s Unicorn Teamת that should be absolutely fantastic. They’re going to show a new hardware implant they’ve developed which provides a wireless bridge into a target machine including the ability to load exploit software onto it. I’m also looking forward to the work Bernard Mueller has done looking for flaws within Ethereum smart contracts. He’s going to detail various methods of exploring smart contracts and the use of symbolic analysis to detect different types of vulnerabilities within them. Should be fun.
How do you choose your locations?
We look at places where we would he most valuable to the community. In the US there are more security conferences than you could count which is why we’re present everywhere else but there. When we decided to expand to Dubai back in 2007 for example, there we’re hardly any highly technical security conferences in the region, and the few that you could find were widely commercialized and less aimed for researchers and students. So we kind of pick our countries based on where we think there is a ‘need’. For The Netherlands, however, we were already friends with the guys at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) out of Germany and as they also organize a huge outdoor hacker camp in The Netherlands every 4 years, we figured bringing a HITB Security Conference to Amsterdam would help complement that and at the same time create a gathering for the Dutch hacker community.
Schedule, Dates and Tickets for HITB Conference 2018
HITBSECCONF2018 will take place in AMSTERDAM on 9th - 13th April 2018 At NH Grand Krasnapolsky. Training - 9th, 10th and 11th of April 3-DAY TRAINING 1 – The ARM Exploit Laboratory 3-DAY TRAINING 2 – Modern Malware Warfare 3-DAY TRAINING 3 – Making & Breaking Machine Learning Systems 3-DAY TRAINING 4 – Source Code Auditing Like a Ninja 3-DAY TRAINING 5 – Exploiting Highly Secured Enterprise Networks 3-DAY TRAINING 6 – Out Of The Blue: Attacking BLE, NFC, HCE and More 3-DAY TRAINING 7 – Mastering Burp Suite Pro: 100% Hands-On Conference - 12th & 13th of April Get your tickets at https://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2018ams/register/.
