OWASP DC June Meeting June 9, 2010

Our next meeting will be at 2201 G St NW, Room 553D on the GWU campus in Washington DC

Alexander Meisel from Art of Defence will be presenting on Redesigning the WAF for the Cloud

Doug Wilson will update on plans for future meetings and upcoming events.

About our Speakers

Alex Meisel

A member of OWASP Germany, Alexander Meisel is CTO and founder of 'art of defence'. He is in charge of product development, professional services and support.

His interest and expertise in the area of security dates back to his thesis in which he wrote about avoiding and tracing distributed denial-of-service attacks. He worked for a Swiss IT service provider as a Web security expert; later he joined LINX, Europe’s largest Internet exchange, where he took care of member network security issues. After working for three years as a senior consultant designing and implementing large Web farms, including security audits with a leading traffic management company, Alexander switched to the SPX Corporation, where he was the main project manager for Web application solutions in the SAP area.

Alex is one of the major contributors to OWASP’s whitepaper “Best Practices Guide: Web Application Firewalls,” which was released by the OWASP Germany Chapter has been translated into English, French, and Chinese.

Abstract

The current trend towards cloud computing forces everybody to deploy services in a virtual environment. In current dedicated environments WAFs or Web Application Firewalls are mostly deployed as a hardware (black) box which is easy at first but limits them to only low performance web cluster architectures.
Moving those systems virtualized into a cloud environment makes almost no sense because of the resource limitations. The is solution is a redesign which enables WAFs to be part of a true message based cloud system. This talk explains how truly virtualized and distributed web applications are architected, work and scale in high performance environments.

Note on Transportation and Parking

Parking on campus is at a premium and visitors are encouraged to use public transportation when visiting the campus. The nearest METRO stop, Foggy Bottom/GWU located on the Orange/Blue lines, is a short 3 block walk from the Marvin Center

The Marvin Center Garage operates from 7am - midnight Monday through Friday and is closed on weekends. Make sure you have your car out by 11:45pm. A visitor's parking garage is located between 23rd and 22nd Streets and H and Eye Streets. The visitor entrance is on Eye Street.

Official Website: http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Washington_DC