Welcome to an OWASP Sweden seminar March 7, with one of the world's foremost experts on HTML5 security, Mario Heiderich. This event will be in English.

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The Speaker

Mario Heiderich works as a researcher for the Ruhr-University in Bochum, Germany and currently focuses on HTML5, SVG security and security implications of the ES5 specification draft while finishing his PhD thesis. Mario invoked the HTML5 security cheat-sheet and maintains the PHPIDS filter rules. In his spare time he delivers trainings and security consultancy for larger German and international companies. He is also one of the co-authors of Web Application Obfuscation: '-/WAFs..Evasion..Filters//alert(/Obfuscation/)-' - a book on how an attacker would bypass different types of security controls including IDS/IPS.

Presentation One – The forbidden image - Security impact of Scalable Vector Graphics on the WWW

Scalable Vector Graphics are about to conquer the web. Unlike most of their raster based companions from the GIF, PNG and JPEG family, their vector based structure allows to display them on many different devices with various screen sizes without losing visual information. The open XML based SVG sources permit addition of meta data, helping even the visually impaired and blind to get the most out of these images. Additional modules, such as animations, events, SVG fonts, several scripting APIs and inclusion of hyper-links, other images and documents and even arbitrary content from cross-domain sources make SVG the perfect image format for the future WWW.  

Nevertheless, a powerful standard such as SVG certainly poses a lot of risks. This presentation provides a close look at SVG from a security perspective. How can attackers abuse this mighty image format, which ways exist to execute script code and worse, and what should web developers and browser vendors consider when dealing with SVG. How will HTML5 change the way to work with SVGs and why does it matter for security professionals to know about things like SVG Tiny, in-line SVG, SVGz and other acronyms from a world where imaging and scripting collide? Besides many examples of malicious SVGs the talk will shed light on a novel filtering tool capable of filtering and sanitizing SVG images without loss of important content.

Presentation Two – Locking the Throne Room - ECMA Script 5, a frozen DOM and the eradication of XSS

Cross Site Scripting has been a topic in countless presentations over the last decade. That easy to grasp but hard to solve problem has been shaking the web and caused major trouble on hundreds to thousands of high traffic and commercial and well as governmental websites. Mitigation techniques have been developed and discussed in depth - starting with restrictive content filters, educational programs and trainings, programmer's best practices and guidelines, proxy filters and many more. Still XSS remains a major problem far from being solved. The multilayer model on which the web relies causes too much reciprocity to find an easy cure - and the DOM as the actually affected layer is still lying unprotected open for the attacker.

This presentation introduces and discusses a novel approach of encountering XSS and similar attack techniques by making use of several new features included in the ECMA Script 5 specification draft. It will be shown how to create a simple JavaScript to seal important DOM properties, and take away the attackers ability to read and modify sensitive data in a tamper resistant and light-weighted way - without being "too loud". Modern browsers, such as Chrome 8 and Firefox 4, for the first time provide the possibility of creating and using client side IDS/IPS systems, written in JavaScript and running without special execution privileges. The presentation will show how these work, what the implications are, and what the future of XSS mitigation and eradication might look like.