Man, it just wouldn’t be a hacker conference without some sort of controversy. Last week, Derik mentioned that a security talk on a flaw in OS X’s FileVault feature, due to be presented at the upcoming Black Hat conference, was cancelled.
The presenter, security researcher Charles “Krypted” Edge, reputedly cancelled the talk because he had signed a confidentiality agreement with Apple. (This shouldn’t be confused with a separate cancelled session that Derik primarily discusses in the post above, which was a panel on Apple security).
Now comes news from the Black Hat conference organizers that Edge’s talk never existed in the first place—they say the researcher never submitted a paper to the conference at all. Spooooooky.
This isn’t the first time that the Black Hat conference has been in the news vis-a-vis Apple security. In 2006, a tempest in a teapot erupted over a Black Hat presentation that reputedly showed a stock MacBook being hacked over Wi-Fi in sixty seconds. Interestingly enough, one of the key people involved in that dispute was Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs, the same writer who broke the story of Edge’s supposed cancellation.
This is a bit fishy: I understand that if Edge is bound by a confidentiality agreement he might not want to talk about this, but he ought to at least be able to say whether or not he submitted a paper to the conference. And, for that matter, where did Krebs’s initial information come from if there was never ay talk?
I’m guessing we haven’t heard the last of this—not that I’m looking forward to that, either, as I’m still being stalked by the occasional nightmare of the whole MacBook hacking saga. No more!
