HTTP/2 & QUIC - Teaching Good Protocols To Do Bad Things

Black Hat USA 2016

Presented by: Catherine Pearce, Carl Vincent
Date: Wednesday August 03, 2016
Time: 10:20 - 11:10
Location: South Seas ABE

The meteoric rise of SPDY, HTTP/2, and QUIC has gone largely unremarked upon by most of the security field. QUIC is an application-layer UDP-based protocol that multiplexes connections between endpoints at the application level, rather than the kernel level. HTTP/2 (H2) is a successor to SPDY, and multiplexes different HTTP streams within a single connection. More than 10% of the top 1 Million websites are already using some of these technologies, including much of the 10 highest traffic sites. Whether you multiplex out across connections with QUIC, or multiplex into fewer connections with HTTP/2, the world has changed. We have a strong sensation of Déjà vu with this work and our 2014 BlackHat USA MPTCP research. We find ourselves discussing a similar situation in new protocols with technology stacks evolving faster than ever before, and Network Security is largely unaware of the peril already upon it. This talk briefly introduces QUIC and HTTP/2, covers multiplexing attacks beyond MPTCP, discusses how you can use these techniques over QUIC and within HTTP/2, and discusses how to make sense of and defend against H2/QUIC traffic on your network. We will also demonstrate, and release, some tools with these techniques incorporated.

Catherine Pearce

Carl Vincent

Carl Vincent (better known as Vyrus) is a Customer Solutions Consultant forthe recently consolidated Cisco Security Solutions group, where he performs avariety of security assessment types. As information security professional, aswell as personal hobbyist, his passion is to continually research everincreasingly elaborate methods of elegantly executed hypothetical crime. Healso practices personal information warfare, and most of his biographicdetails online are somewhat exaggerated.


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