Conference:  Defcon 31

Authors: Cory Doctorow

2023-08-01

The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. It doesn't have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four" (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users - reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures - leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification. We don't have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking - through privacy laws and other protections - and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!

Conference:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Authors: Joseph Irving

2023-04-19

Challenges of running real-time game servers in a Kubernetes cluster

• Real-time game servers require stable connections and low latency
• Kubernetes can be a good fit for hosting websites and APIs but may not work well for real-time game servers
• PlayStation is using Agones, an open source project, to run game servers in a Kubernetes cluster
• Agones allows for fine-grain control and game-specific logic in scaling game servers
• Multi-region deployment can be achieved through a ping-based approach and a Matchmaker software can group players together based on various parameters

Conference:  Global AppSec Dublin 2023

Authors: Gil Cohen, Omri Inbar

2023-02-16

Two vulnerable websites which were found to be vulnerable to CRLF injection, caused Google Chrome to behave differently. This trigged an exciting research journey ending in finding weaknesses in reverse proxies, Chrome and other browsers as well as a new hacking technique named Frontend server hijacking or Frontjacking in short. Frontjacking combines CRLF injection, poorly configured servers and shared hosting, enables attackers to execute any reflected XSS and phishing related payloads while bypassing any defensive mechanisms including CSP (Content Security Policy), HttpOnly cookie attributes, WAFs (Web Application Firewalls), CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) and HTTPS certificate validation.

Conference:  OWASP 20th Anniversary Event

Authors: Spencer Pearlman

2021-09-24

Common NGINX misconfigurations that leave web servers vulnerable to attack

• NGINX is a popular web server powering one-third of all websites
• Detectify's Security Research team analyzed almost 50,000 unique NGINX configuration files and discovered common misconfigurations
• Missing root directive can lead to sensitive files being accessed
• Off by slash vulnerability can allow access to sensitive files
• Remediation involves using specific paths and ensuring they do not contain sensitive files