okay i'm coming in from the rsa cyber security conference it's the virtual conference so really i'm coming in from the living room but i'm going to be providing commentary throughout the week as this conference goes on about the best presentations news and talks and hopefully be able to talk to a few people at the conference we're at the end of day one now and i will admit it's been a pretty full on day there is so much to get through in this conference and it's done really well if i must say so myself so coming from this after being a bit overwhelmed i thought i might start off by just talking about what was my favorite presentation today why it wasn't some of the key takeaways so after watching a few presentations the one that really stood out to me was one titled attack and defend protecting modern distributed applications and components now this was a talk by johannes urich and jason lam why i loved this presentation so much was because they had two presenters and they presented very clearly a red and blue team so that is an attacker and a defender so jason was playing the role of an attacker and ulrich was defending these attacks and this just worked so well because it let you get into the mind of both what an attacker would be thinking how they're going to try and exploit a distributed modern web application and earlier which provided some really clever insights of how we might protect it and things that we haven't possibly thought of one of the best things that i i took away from this was the the use of manipulating authentication and services they use the example of a bearer token which is kind of the upgraded version of a session id of cookies and all the things that can be done with this how you could bypass an api gateway if it's not set up correctly and using this really to kind of map out some of the infrastructure and services around it they also showed using quite a cool tool jwt.io that a bearer token is really looks like a high entropy string it is but it's readable information uh tucked away in there so when you unpack that you can actually gather some valuable information and they use this information in an example web app of how they could map out what jason called the juicy targets and i thought this was so interesting because this is information that you might not think of a bearer token is essentially your own authentication so when i think of credentials and secrets as you will i think of things that provide me access to services an idea is key that i shouldn't have but they're talking about how you can use credentials that essentially you own as a user and then manipulate them stretch them to get access to things that you shouldn't have and it shouldn't be public and then what's really interesting is learning about how you can defend this so this was really my favorite talk i thought it was quite unique i loved the approach of it now i will admit after day one i haven't seen every presentation so hey maybe i'm going to find something better but i think this was a really key takeaway for me so let me know if you're at the rsa conference let me know what you thought was the best presentation of the day what are some of the key takeaways and what you're looking forward to going on to the week so i'll be uh tuning in with videos like this throughout the uh throughout the week as the conference goes on so feel free to reach out to me and let me know what your thoughts are