The human race commonly fears what it doesn’t understand. In a time of war, this fear is even greater if one side understands a weapon or technology that the other side does not. There is a constant war which plagues cybersecurity; perhaps not only in cybersecurity, but in the world all around us is a battle between good and evil. In cyber security if the “evil” side understands or pays more attention to a technology than the “good” side, we see a spike in cyber-attacks.
This course of events demands that both offensively and defensively minded “good guys” band together to remove the unknown from as much technology as possible. One of the most common unknown pieces of technology in cybersecurity that professionals see on a regular basis are proprietary protocols running across their networks. By using both the tactics and perspectives from red and blue teams it is possible to conquer and understand these previously unknown packets. This strategy is exactly what we, Douglas McKee and Ismael Valenzuela, hoped to communicate in our webinar ‘Thinking Red, Acting Blue: Hacking Proprietary Protocols”.
Proprietary protocols are typically a mystery to many practitioners. Vendors across many industries develop them for very specific purposes and technologies. We see them in everything from the Internet of Things (IOT), to Industrial Controls Systems (ICS), to medical devices and more. Since by its nature “proprietary” technology is not shared, there is generally no public Request for Comments (RFC) or public disclosure on how they work. This provides an opportunity for attackers and a challenge for defenders. Attackers are aware these networking protocols are less reviewed and therefore more susceptible to vulnerabilities, while defenders have a hard time understanding what valid or b ..
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