JPCERT/CC Eyes

Hello, Taki here, and its currently rainy season in Japan.

Just recently, I attended the 27th FIRST Annual Conference, held on June 14-19 , 2015 in Berlin – a city that I visited for the first time.

(Photo by Hiroshi Kobayashi)

I would like to go over some activities that JPCERT/CC was involved in during the conference.

This year I attended together with 3 colleagues, Yurie Ito, Koichiro (Sparky) Komiyama and Hiroshi Kobayashi. The conference was themed “Unified Security: Improving the Future”, focusing attendees’ collective efforts on improving the future of security together. As usual, it was great to catch up with the various people that work in the industry and also getting to know some new people as well. Many discussions around work over the past year and prospective collaboration over the next year were had.

JPCERT/CC was involved in 3 different presentations at the conference and I would like to take the time to briefly introduce each of them.

First, Yurie's presentation was titled, "A Proposal for Cybersecurity Metrics Through Cyber Green". Cyber Green, currently led by JPCERT/CC, is a project that aims to measure the health of the Internet by aggregating data sets of key risk factors, enabling comparisons over time and around the world, in order to identify what can be improved to make the Internet a better place. The presentation centered around the overview of the project, along with some details on the methods as to how the data is collected, analyzed and shown.

I was a co-presenter in a talk titled, "VRDX-SIG: Global Vulnerability Identification" along with Mr. Art Manion of CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) and Dr. Masato Terada of the Hitachi Incident Response Team (HIRT). The FIRST VRDX-SIG (Vulnerability Reporting and Data eXchange Special Interest Group) was chartered in 2013 to study existing practices on how vulnerabilities are identified, tracked and exchanged, and to develop recommendations on how to better the existing practices across disparate vulnerability databases (including Vulnerability Notes Database by CERT/CC, Japan Vulnerability Notes (JVN) by JPCERT/CC and Information-technology Promotion Agency, Japan (IPA), Open Sourced Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) and other vendor security advisories). This talk presented results of the work of the VRDX-SIG, including the creation of a vulnerability database catalog and some findings about vulnerability identification and tracking.

The last presentation that JPCERT/CC was involved in was a presentation by Hiroshi titled, "Keeping Eyes on Malicious Websites - “ChkDeface” Against Fraudulent Sites". He first talked about some noteworthy features of defaced websites reported to JPCERT/CC, and then introduced a tool called "ChkDeface", developed and implemented at JPCERT/CC, to collect various information on the defaced websites through a secure and efficient monitoring method. JPCERT/CC is planning to share the source code of this tool with some CSIRTs in the FIRST community, and eventually to open source the tool so that it can be practically utilized to trigger deeper discussion among security experts about more precise detection methods ― so here's hoping for a follow-up blog entry when that happens.

JPCERT/CC was a part of a few working groups as well, including the Energy-SIG, Vulnerability Coordination-SIG and CVSS-BoF in addition to the aforementioned VRDX-SIG. While I am unable to provide any insight about what was actually discussed, I believe that the work being done is worthwhile and when there is any output provided, I hope to notify through this blog or some other forms of communication.

Lastly, Berlin was a wonderful city, a little colder than I had expected, and hope to create a chance to visit again.

That's all for today.

Thank you for reading.

(Photo by Hiroshi Kobayashi)

- Takayuki (Taki) Uchiyama