On this weblog concerning the design, deployment and automation of the Black Hat Asia community, we’ve the next sections:
- Designing the Black Hat Community
- AP (Entry Level) Placement Planning, by Uros Mihajlovic
- Safety Middle Investigations, by Uros Mihajlovic
- Meraki and ThousandEyes, by Uros Mihajlovic
- Meraki Dashboards, by Steven Fan
- Meraki Alerting, by Connor Loughlin
- Meraki Techniques Supervisor, by Paul Fidler
- Constructing Instruments for Black Hat Workers, by Ryan MacLennan
- A Higher Solution to Design Coaching SSIDs/VLANs, by Paul Fidler
Cisco is honored to be a Associate of the Black Hat NOC (Community Operations Middle), and was the Official Community Tools, Cellular System Administration, Malware Evaluation, and DNS (Area Title Service) Supplier of Black Hat Asia 2023.
This was Cisco’s seventh 12 months as a NOC accomplice for Black Hat Asia and the second time constructing the community. Beneath are our fellow NOC companions offering {hardware}, contributing to construct and safe the community for our joint buyer: Black Hat.
Designing the Black Hat Community
We used the experiences of Black Hat Asia 2022, Black Hat USA 2022 and Black Hat Europe 2022 to plan the community topology design and gear, with Black Hat, and the NOC companions.
It was a crew effort to construct an enterprise degree community in 2 ½ days. We recognize the exhausting work of the 12 Cisco Meraki and Cisco Safe engineers on website (plus 4 nearly supporting engineers) to construct, function and safe the community; and nice NOC management and collaborative Companions.
Constructing this community is a problem. On one hand, we should permit actual malware on the Black Hat community for coaching, demonstrations, and briefing classes. On the opposite, we have to shield the attendees from assault inside the community from their fellow attendees and stop dangerous actors from utilizing the community to assault the Web.
It’s a essential stability to make sure everybody has a secure expertise, whereas nonetheless having the ability to be taught from actual world malware, vulnerabilities and malicious web sites.
Along with the weekly conferences with Black Hat and the opposite companions, the Cisco Meraki engineering crew additionally mentioned the challenges in a Webex house, with different engineers who labored on previous Black Hat occasions.
The mission:
- Deploy 63 (11 spares) Meraki entry factors to supply Wi-Fi to 10 coaching programs, dozens of briefings, keynotes, and the Enterprise Corridor
- Deploy 63 ten-foot (three meter) tripods and brackets offered to Black Hat by Cisco Meraki international occasions
Division of labor is important to scale back errors and keep laser centered on safety scope. Uros ensured each AP and Swap was tracked, and the MAC addresses have been offered to Palo Alto Networks for DCHP assignments. Stephen and Connor spent two days within the server room with the NOC companions, making certain each change was working and configured accurately.
AP Placement Planning, by Uros Mihajlovic
Within the weeks earlier than deployment, Jeffry Handal centered on planning and making a digital Wi-Fi website survey. A number of necessities and restrictions needed to be considered. The report was primarily based on the Marina Bay Sands ground plan and the house allocation necessities from Black Hat. Fortuitously, we had extra APs obtainable to us than required.
Beneath is the Sign Energy plan for the 4th ground of the convention centre on the 5 GHz band.
Utilizing the expertise of Black Hat Asia 2022, discussing the necessities of Black Hat and dealing with the Marina Bay Sands IT, we finalized the AP deployment plan previous to arrival. We additionally grouped entry factors per room, so we might accurately deploy them in related areas. This additionally allowed Marina Bay Sands IT crew to precisely lay out vital cabling for the entry factors.
Earlier than the APs have been even on-line, we configured any vital settings within the Meraki dashboard. This concerned wi-fi radio profiles, SSID configuration, site visitors shaping guidelines, and many others. Along with basic Black Hat SSID for all attendees, we additionally had particular SSIDs that ought to broadcast solely in particular areas. Utilizing Cisco Meraki’s SSID availability function, we might tag entry factors accordingly to their location, which allowed us to broadcast applicable SSIDs.
Because the APs had been pre-staged and added to the Meraki dashboard, together with their location on the ground maps, the primary work was inserting and cabling them bodily. Due to good planning, we might begin deploying the 63 APs as quickly because the convention house was obtainable, with solely a small variety of adjustments to optimize the deployment on-site. With a serving to hand from our Cisco Safety colleagues, we swiftly deployed tripods across the venue. As you’ll be able to see from the picture under, this was additionally an incredible crew bonding expertise.
Throughout operations, the ground plans within the Meraki Dashboard have been a visible assist to simply spot an issue and navigate the crew on the bottom to the precise spot, if one thing needed to be adjusted.
Because the sponsors and attendees stuffed every house, within the Meraki dashboard, we have been capable of see in real-time the variety of purchasers linked to every AP, presently and over the time of the convention. This enabled fast response if challenges have been recognized, or APs could possibly be redeployed to different zones. Beneath is the Marina Bay Sands Degree 4. We might drill into any AP, as wanted.
Meraki’s built-in Location Analytics helped us visualize bodily house utilization. We might see the variety of attendees who handed via the lined space of the convention, with out them even connecting to the community. This gave us insights into customer footfall developments, akin to areas of curiosity, most visited cubicles, school rooms, or classes. For instance, under you’ll be able to see the twond day of coaching, with busy school rooms, whereas Enterprise Corridor in setup. You may also discover lengthy dwell occasions nearer to the world overlooking the bay.
The Location Heatmap was displayed stay exterior the NOC. Beneath you’ll be able to see the 9am Opening Keynote on 11 Might, earlier than the Enterprise Corridor opened.
Bodily safety can also be an necessary facet of cybersecurity. We have to know the way units transfer in house, know the place worthwhile property are positioned, and monitor their security. Christian Clasen takes this obtainable information to a brand new degree in Half 2 of the weblog: Correlating Meraki Scanning Information with Umbrella DNS Safety Occasions.
Meraki wi-fi community allowed us to supply a constant and distinctive expertise to occasion guests and workers. Every day, on common greater than 500 purchasers linked to the wi-fi community.
Safety Middle Investigations, by Uros Mihajlovic
Throughout our time within the NOC, we had the prospect to work with different vendor engineers and a few use circumstances that got here up led to attention-grabbing collaborations. We actively regarded for violations of the Black Hat Code of Conduct. Examples are utilizing the community as a platform to assault the Web, attacking others on the community and/or disrupting the community.
These alerts have been seen within the Safety & SD-WAN -> Safety Middle -> MX Occasions. Search for Half 2 of this weblog to study this investigation and response: Script Kiddie will get a Timeout, by Ben Greenbaum and Shawn Coulter
We have been capable of simply establish the shopper’s approximate location primarily based on the entry level they have been linked to. Consumer location allowed us to establish the place the shopper was in a bodily location.
If the habits continued and we would have liked to dam wi-fi purchasers, we might simply accomplish that by attaching a gaggle coverage via the Meraki Dashboard, together with a quarantine VLAN and a splash web page. As well as, we might use a script that may be triggered via the interfaces of the opposite safety merchandise to use the identical group coverage by way of the Meraki APIs (Software Programming Interfaces). This integration was simply one of many many collaboration bits that we labored on.
Meraki and ThousandEyes, by Uros Mihajlovic
On the convention, an necessary gross sales utility, used for partaking with occasion prospects, was having points connecting to the server. The gross sales crew reached out to the NOC leaders to report the appliance slowness, which they suspected may be resulting from our community.
Utilizing Meraki Wi-fi Well being, we might simply examine shopper efficiency and wi-fi expertise. Observing the complete stack map from the shopper perspective additionally confirmed that upstream switching infrastructure just isn’t reporting any efficiency or latency points.
This allowed us to raised perceive the standing of our community. If any of those units within the shopper path have been reporting a problem, we might have simply remoted the difficulty to that gadget and troubleshoot. Contemplating all the pieces was reporting wonderful community well being, the subsequent step was to examine efficiency information in additional element. After analyzing the efficiency information, we might quicky and successfully decide that problem in not resulting from our community.
Ruling out the community, now we might deal with the subsequent step of the troubleshooting course of: to exhibit the difficulty just isn’t resulting from our community. One of the simplest ways to do that is by having proof to indicate the place the difficulty is going on. First, we needed to establish the server vacation spot the place the appliance was being hosted. Trying on the Meraki utility analytics, we might see that utility is reaching out to a particular area. Subsequent, utilizing Cisco ThousandEyes cloud brokers, along with endpoint agent put in on our laptops, we configured scheduled artificial assessments that may probe the appliance area. This instantly confirmed that constant latency from our host gadget to the server was round 200ms, with frequent spikes as much as 600ms (about half a second). Moreover, ThousandEyes helped us visualize the site visitors path for the app area. Utilizing this, we observed that area is hosted in AWS (Amazon Internet Companies) in Dublin, with site visitors path going via Paris. Every hop added latency, which was inflicting the reported points.
It is a notable instance of how Cisco instruments come collectively to scale back Imply-Time-To-Decision (MTTR). Meraki community well being offered us with visibility of property we personal (e.g., wi-fi and switching community), whereas ThousandEyes offered insights into property, we wouldn’t have management over (e.g., service and utility suppliers). Subsequently, this offered us with a holistic view of dependencies, permitting us to pinpoint the precise supply of the difficulty.
Meraki Dashboard, by Steven Fan
The Meraki dashboard supply a complete and user-friendly interface for observing the well being of the community. This consists of the whole suite of options offered by Meraki, amongst which the Entry Factors (APs) and Switches are integral parts. These dashboards supplied wonderful information visualization capabilities, permitting customers to rapidly comprehend and work together with the system’s standing. The power to combination information meant that we might collect and show info from a number of sources, giving us a holistic view of the community’s efficiency. Moreover, the dashboards enabled us to delve into the small print of any change, AP, or shopper swiftly, making troubleshooting and efficiency evaluation sooner and extra environment friendly.
All through the distinct phases of the convention, the Meraki dashboards have been invaluable. Within the three days main as much as the convention, through the setup section, we might monitor the community’s standing in real-time, making certain that each one parts have been functioning accurately and that any points could possibly be addressed promptly. This was essential in making certain a easy and dependable community setup.
In the course of the first two days of the convention, which have been devoted to centered and intense coaching, the Meraki dashboards allowed us to maintain a detailed eye on community utilization and efficiency. We might see how the community was dealing with the elevated demand and made any vital changes to make sure a steady and strong service.
Lastly, as we transitioned to the briefings and Enterprise Corridor phases of the convention, we might visualize the community site visitors. This visualization was essential in understanding how the community was getting used, figuring out any potential bottlenecks or points, and making certain that each one attendees might entry and use the community companies successfully.
The brand new Abstract Report operate within the Meraki system served as a worthwhile device for offering high-level statistics related to the community’s operation. This report contained an outline of an important metrics and information, enabling us to rapidly perceive the community’s efficiency.
One of many noteworthy options of this report was its automated emailing operate. Each morning, the system would ship this report on to our crew’s inbox. This meant that we might begin every day with a right away understanding of the community’s standing, with no need to manually collect and analyze the information ourselves.
Along with saving time, this automated report additionally helped us keep proactive. If there have been any important adjustments within the community’s efficiency, we’d be alerted instantly via the report, permitting us to swiftly reply and tackle any potential points. This was notably helpful for executive-level workers who wanted a fast, complete overview of the community’s well being with out getting too concerned within the technical particulars.
Because the individual with core duties for the change configuration and uptime, the Meraki dashboard made it fairly easy to rapidly change the community topology, in line with the wants of the Black Hat buyer. In abstract, the Meraki dashboards have been a strong device in managing and optimizing our community all through the convention.
Meraki Alerting, by Connor Loughlin
Meraki Dashboard permits for alerting by way of Syslog, SNMP and Webhooks. For Black Hat, we utilized Webhooks to submit a wide range of alerts to again Slack and Cisco Webex; this implies we are able to leap to motion ought to there be a change in community connectivity or if sure thresholds (akin to shopper dangerous roaming) with out having to look at Dashboard all day.
Configuration for that is straightforward; taking solely two steps to get this arrange. Firstly, configure the incoming webhook in your chosen platform after which paste the Webhook URL into Dashboard.
We enabled alerts for change & APs going offline, change port occasion adjustments, Dashboard configuration adjustments, and wi-fi shopper connectivity occasions.
Wi-Fi Roaming Timeline
A brand new addition to Dashboard is Consumer Roaming Timeline and Analytics. It gives community directors an incredible troubleshooting device for when customers complain about dropped calls or lowered throughput sometimes brought about poor roaming expertise. The brand new timeline exhibits how a tool roams between APs and whether or not they skilled a profitable, suboptimal roam, dangerous roam, ping-pong (when a tool continually bounces between APs), or the dreaded disconnect.
On this instance, I used to be strolling across the Enterprise Corridor with my iPhone in my pocket. You may see many of the roams have been optimum and fortunately my connectivity was not impacted. This degree of visibility helps community directors achieve worthwhile perception about purchasers roam round their community, probably highlighting AP placement or density points. (This additionally exhibits that correct planning and utilizing predictive website surveys paid off.)
Wi-Fi Air Marshal
In the course of the first day of coaching, within the Meraki dashboard Air Marshal, we noticed packet flood assaults towards we have been capable of adapt and stay resilient.
We additionally noticed an AP spoofing. We rapidly recognized the situation of the assault on the Foyer exterior the Enterprise Corridor. Ought to the assaults proceed, bodily safety had the knowledge to intervene. We additionally had the flexibility to trace the MAC addresses all through the venue, as mentioned in Christian Clasen’s part partly two.
Meraki Techniques Supervisor, by Paul Fidler
Provisioning of units
As we did in Las Vegas and London in 2022, a few of the iOS units needed to be restored once more. Utilizing the blueprint helped almost about time taken, however, once more, the limiting issue was the sheer period of time taken to obtain the 6GB file (which, when utilizing Apple Configurator, doesn’t like community interruptions). Studying level: guarantee all pictures are downloaded forward of time.
To obtain the iOS and restore, add the cell config and put together the 28 units, between two of us, took 2.5 hours. Clearly, there was some disruption as a result of community nonetheless being constructed, which contributed to this time, however, even so, this was nonetheless a substantial variety of hours of toil. We have now fed again to the Black Hat administration crew how leveraging Apple’s Automated System Enrollment might definitely simplify this process. There’s a safety profit with utilizing this as nicely: If somebody wipes a tool both on objective or by chance, when the gadget subsequent connects to the web, it is going to mechanically re-enroll into Meraki Techniques Supervisor, stopping the person from organising the gadget with out administration. Supervision (A course of that Apple requires to show that you just bodily have the gadget) can also be utilized, which leads to extra MDM profiles being obtainable to be despatched all the way down to the gadget, akin to Safe Endpoint / Readability, the flexibility to put in functions silently, and issues like Residence Display format and Lock Display messages, all of that are used at Black Hat.
Search logic
We have now traditionally left alone as soon as enrolled units within the dashboard, to save lots of time for future classes, by not having to rename / re-tag units. Nonetheless, over time, this has resulted within the development of stale units in dashboard. It might have been smart to have purged stale units earlier than we received right here, however that didn’t occur. So, as units have been briefly turned on then off, the information in dashboard was not simply used to find out stale vs non stale. So, the enrollment date was used to tag units with a brand new tag (Black HatAsias2023). Nonetheless, dashboard doesn’t assist you to present units that are NOT tagged with one thing. Fortunately, there are some rudimentary logic search capabilities to leverage.
For instance:
Give me units which have the leadretrieval tag however NOT the leadretrievalspecial tag
(tag:”leadretrieval” NOT tag:”leadretrievalspecial”))
System Identification
Renaming of units: iOS units for session scanning, lead retrieval and registration have an asset barcode on the again of them which is how they are usually referenced by Swapcard. Because the units are in circumstances, it’s painful for the registration workers to search out the asset quantity within the occasion of a problem, of function reassignment for that gadget (from session scanning to steer retrieval, for instance). So, what we do is twofold:
- The very first thing that we do is take the packing checklist of asset quantity, serial quantity and run a script that makes use of the Meraki API to rename every gadget within the Techniques Supervisor Dashboard
- The following factor we’ve is a coverage in Techniques Supervisor that units the textual content on the backside of the Residence Display while locked, so customers can see immediately which gadget it’s, with out having to take the case off / log in to the gadget, and open Settings > Basic > About
Clearly, utilizing the serial quantity to establish units on the Lock Display has safety implications.
The perils of third-party libraries and monitoring
In direction of the beginning of registration, Umbrella picked up a couple of occasions pointing to TikTok.com and some different blocked domains. An investigation was launched. Preliminary pondering was that the appliance used to examine attendees in had used some third-party libraries (that is in all probability true to the units reaching out to a respectable app improvement web site). Nonetheless, after speaking to the SwapCard workers, it was decided that, on the time of gadget setup, the units go to an authentication web page, which is only a net web page. This net web page comprises a couple of monitoring capabilities, akin to Google Tag Supervisor which incorporates TikTok.com. We blocked these monitoring domains in Umbrella, to raised safe Black Hat.
Consumer Vs MDM Administration
Many of the info we get again from a tool is by leveraging Apple MDM instructions. This consists of put in apps, certs and profiles, for instance, but in addition info akin to basic gadget info. Nonetheless, there’s some info that just isn’t obtainable by way of MDM. This consists of:
- Location
- Jailbreak detection
- SSID
The rationale that the final is related is that the Registration app on the iPads has its personal VLAN that runs throughout the Black Hat community to a handful of servers that course of that info, maintaining issues secure and safe. Nonetheless, these servers are NOT accessible exterior of this VLAN. I used to be wanting via the standing of the managed units and observed a few iPads have been NOT linked to the correct SSIDs. A fast chat to the registration workers highlights that once they have been handed out to Expo Corridor workers, the SSIDs for the iPads and iPhones weren’t up and working, so that they have been joined to the attendee Wi-Fi!
Visibility is King!
However it does spotlight an issue with Apple Administration, particularly on cell: If that app is NOT working, then we don’t get that info. It turns into stale. So, I’m researching methods to make sure that, ought to a person / admin kill the SM app, it may be remotely spawned by sending a person a push notification.
Constructing Instruments for Black Hat Workers, by Ryan MacLennan
After deploying all of the iOS units for the Black Hat workers to make use of through the convention, we determined there wanted to be a method for them to see the battery degree of the units whereas they’re in Kiosk mode. Kiosk mode makes the chosen utility use full display screen mode and can’t be exited. This mode occurs to cover the battery degree and different standing symbols which might be on the high of the gadget. This has brought about points prior to now the place the employee may have their gadget die in the midst of lead era or checking in an attendee.
We are able to see the battery ranges of the units within the Meraki Dashboard; nevertheless, permitting entry to the Meraki Dashboard to anybody not managing the community just isn’t one thing we wish to do. This is the reason we created an internet utility utilizing NodeJs, Categorical, Meraki APIs and ReactJs to permit the employees to view the battery ranges of the units. The applying is containerized and deployed so the employees can simply get to the appliance and instantly see the bottom battery degree units.
The above picture exhibits the interface of what the employees see and when the appliance will carry out its subsequent replace to refresh the gadget checklist. If they should discover a particular gadget, they simply search by the fields proven or by the meta information saved, however not proven for every gadget.
A Higher Solution to Design Coaching SSIDs/VLANs, by Paul Fidler
Deploying a community like Black Hat takes a whole lot of work, and repetitive configuration. A lot of this has been lined in earlier blogs. Nonetheless, to make issues simpler for this occasion, as an alternative of the 60+ coaching SSIDs we had in Black Hat USA 2022, the Meraki crew mentioned the advantages of shifting to iPSKs with Black Hat NOC Management, which accepted the plan for Black Hat Europe 2022 and once more for Asia 2023.
For context, as an alternative of getting a single pre shared key for an SSID, iPSK performance permits you to have 1000+. Every of those iPSKs could be assigned its personal group coverage / VLAN. So, we created a script:
- That consumed networkID, SSID, Coaching identify, iPSK and VLAN from a CSV
- Created a gaggle coverage for that VLAN with the identify of the coaching
- Created an iPSK for the given SSID that referred to the coaching identify
This solely entails 5 API calls:
- For a given community identify, get the community ID
- Get Group Insurance policies
- If the group coverage exists, use that, else create a gaggle coverage, retaining the group coverage ID
- Get the SSIDs (to get the ID of the SSID)
- Create an iPSK for the given SSID ID
The majority of the script is error dealing with (The SSID or community doesn’t exist, for instance) and logic!
The consequence was one SSID for all of coaching: BHTraining, and every classroom had their very own password. This lowered the coaching SSIDs from over a dozen and helped clear the airwaves.
Take a look at Half 2:
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the Cisco NOC crew:
- Meraki Community: Steven Fan, Connor Loughlin, Uros Mihajlovic and Jeffrey Chua; with digital help by Evan Basta and Jeffry Handal
- Meraki Techniques Supervisor: Paul Fidler and Connor Loughlin
- Cisco Safe: Christian Clasen, Alex Calaoagan, Ben Greenbaum, Ryan Maclennan, Shaun Coulter and Aditya Raghavan; with digital help by Ian Redden and Adi Sankar
Additionally, to our NOC companions: NetWitness (particularly David Glover, Iain Davidson and Alessandro Zatti), PNOCalo Alto Networks (particularly James Holland), Corelight (particularly Dustin Lee), Arista, MyRepublic and the whole Black Hat / Informa Tech workers (particularly Grifter ‘Neil Wyler,’ Bart Stump, Steve Fink, James Pope, Mike Spicer, Jess Stafford and Steve Oldenbourg).
About Black Hat
For 25 years, Black Hat has offered attendees with the very newest in info safety analysis, improvement, and developments. These high-profile international occasions and trainings are pushed by the wants of the safety group, striving to deliver collectively the perfect minds within the business. Black Hat evokes professionals in any respect profession ranges, encouraging development and collaboration amongst academia, world-class researchers, and leaders in the private and non-private sectors. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held yearly in the US, Europe and USA. Extra info is out there at: Black Hat.com. Black Hat is dropped at you by Informa Tech.
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