OWASP AppSec Conf Delhi – Day 1

Special Note: I don’t have my Canon EOS 350D with me nowadays, so I had to borrow my roomates Canon Powershot. 🙁 The quality sucks, but still, the pictures are here.

I’ll be honest, going by the conf prices and some of the talk titles; I was expecting OWASP AppSec Delhi to be targeted mainly for managers. Moreover, I didn’t really have enough hopes for the first day talks, at least. It felt even worse when I realized that Dinis Cruz hasn’t been able to make it. I was looking forward to his workshop in App Sec Code Review. But boy, what a day! 🙂

The registration was scheduled to begin at 8:15 AM and I reached at 7:45. As if that was not enough, the registration was delayed by another 40-45 minutes. I like to be punctual, but end up playing the endless wait-game more than often.  However, on the bright side I got to interact with a couple of great guys, like Amit Parekh (MPS). Quite surprisingly, I also came across Manjula (Aujas Networks). I say surprisingly because when we had discussed about the conference at a previous OWASP Bangalore chapter meet, she had no plans to visit. I am glad she decided at the last moment. 🙂

Before I mention about the talks, I feel obligated to thank Nitin of OWASP Delhi chapter for letting me attend the conference even though my company has failed to pay the conference fees at the moment due to some strange procedural issues.

Bipin & Amit

Bipin & Amit

The day began with the keynote speeches by Dhruv Soni and Puneet Mehta (OWASP Delhi Chapter), Murli Krishna(HP), Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj (DSCI), Jason Li(OWASP), and Mano Paul(ISC^2). The welcome notes by Dhruv and Puneet were followed by Dr. Bajaj and Murli Krishna’s keynotes. I couldn’t help but wish I could get seniors from the network management unit of my firm. I would love to believe that they would have had a heart change with respect to application security after the keynote 😉 . Jason spoke on behalf of Dinis and introduced the newbies to OWASP and a couple of its projects. In case you are unaware (like me), there has been an interesting addition to the OWASP projects called ESAPI. It looks good at first glance. Hopefully, I’ll be having a closer look pretty soon. Finally, Mano Paul provided some interesting metaphors to the security scenario, and also introduced the youngest hacker in the crowd, his two year old son. It’ll surely be fun to attend his workshop on Advanced Thread Modelling.

Following the Keynote speeches, Jason Li introduced the crowd to his AntiSamy project. I especially liked the way he’d organized his talk to compare several XSS mitigation techniques and then prove why AntiSamy’s (or HTMLPurifier’s) approach is better 😉 . His talk was followed by Rajesh Nayak’s (HP) talk titled Web App Security: Too costly to ignore. Although, it was more of a sales pitch, it did have some valid points; and we did manage to have our share of fun. When a certain demo of his failed a couple of times and he had to restart his system, I couldn’t control my tendency to pass on loud remarks and asked whether it was an HP laptop 😛 .

Bipin & Amit

Manjula, Sheeraj, & Amit

The much awaited Sheeraj Shah’s talk on Web 2.0 Security came after the lunch. As expected of him, the talk was pretty technical and wasn’t really for the noobs. He also talked about his home-brewed scripts to analyze Web 2.0 enabled/hyped portals. Later, Roshan Chandran of Paladion presented a very interesting case study on Testing 200+ applications in a $10 Billion Enterprise. This talk provoked a lot of techies in the crowd who were silent till now. Finally, Nischal Bhalla delivered a talk on Building Enterprise AppSec Program. This is something I’ve been trying to do at my workplace (with the help of my Bosses) and I guess I’ll be mailing Nischal for the presentation.

To summarize, none of the talks were any ground breaking research that we were not aware of, but the difference always comes in with experience; and that’s what made it an amazing day. It was great to look at things from the perception of these uber hackers. I am eagerly looking forward for tomorrows workshop’s – Advanced Threat Modelling by Mano Paul, and App Sec Code Review by Gaurav Kumar (which was originally scheduled by Dinis Cruz.

Oh and yes! The food was pretty good too. 🙂