Breaking
by Florian Grunow

RedStar OS Watermarking

During the last few months information about one of North Koreas operating systems was leaked. It is a Linux based OS that tries to simulate the look and feel of a Mac. Some of it’s features have already been discussed on various blog posts and news articles. We thought we would take a short look at the OS. This blog post contains some of the results.

As you can imagine, most interesting for us was to investigate features that impact the privacy of the users. There are some publications concerning the security of the OS, this is an aspect that we will not cover in this post. We will stick to a privacy issue that we identified in this post. As ERNW has a long history of “Making the World a Safer Place”, we consider this topic an important one. The privacy of potential users (especially from North Korea) may be impacted and therefore we think that the results must be made available for the public. So, here we go … Continue reading “RedStar OS Watermarking”

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Misc
by Benjamin Schwendemann

Solving sound issues when using WebEx with Linux and Firefox

Hello everybody,

Some of you might use WebEx in their daily life. And some of you might use Linux (as I and many of us do). However, this combination often results in issues with your PC’s sound or microphone use in a WebEx session.

The problem here is that WebEx won’t run as intended with Firefox and JRE x64. But the solution is quite easy! Use the x86-versions of each.

Probably you don’t want to replace your x64 versions of either of them — and neither do I. So I wrote a little script which helps you to quickly switch to the x86 versions, while you still have the x64 versions installed. And here is how to do it:

Continue reading “Solving sound issues when using WebEx with Linux and Firefox”

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Misc
by Enno Rey

Reflections on Vulnerability Disclosure

In this post I’ll discuss some aspects of vulnerability disclosure. I don’t want to delve into an abstract & general discussion of vulnerability disclosure (for those interested here’s some discussion in the context of Google’s Project Zero, this is the well-known CERT/CC approach, this a paper from WEIS 2006 laying out some variants, and finally some statement by Bruce Schneier back in 2007). Instead I will lay out which approach we followed in the past (and why we did so) and which developments make us consider it necessary to re-think our way of handling. The post is not meant to provide definitive answers; it was also written not least to provide clarity for ourselves (“write down a problem in order to better penetrate it”) and, maybe, to serve as a starting point for a discussion which will help the community (and us) to find a position on some of the inherent challenges.

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Breaking
by Enno Rey

Evasion of Cisco ACLs by (Ab)Using IPv6 – Part 2

When we wrote our initial blogpost regarding the evasion of Cisco ACLs by (Ab)Using IPv6, where we described (known to Cisco) cases of Access Control Lists (ACL) circumvention, we also suggested some mitigation techniques including the blocking of some (if not all) IPv6 Extension Headers.
Almost a month later, we got a comment from Matej Gregr that, even if the ACLs of certain Cisco Switches are configured to block IPv6 Extension headers like Hop-by-Hop or Destination Options headers, this does not actually happen/work as expected. Of course this made us re-visit the lab in the interim ;-).

Continue reading “Evasion of Cisco ACLs by (Ab)Using IPv6 – Part 2”

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Events
by Matthias Luft

BT SnoopCon

I had the honour to be invited to BT‘s SnoopCon, which is their annual internal conference for people involved with security at BT. There were several external and internal speakers and I was stunned by the quality of the talks and the collaborative atmosphere. Since this event is somewhat internal (even though I’m obviously allowed to talk about it), I won’t go into details, however there were two particularly great talks about military war games (which I personally enjoyed very much given my history in CTF contests) and PoS security.

I was presenting on our progress in the area of Connected Car security and presented the lessons we learned from our lab and the Troopers Connected Car Roundtable (which we will have again for TR16) and how they will influence our traditional pentesting approach when it comes to cars (slides can be found here).

Best,

Matthias

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Events
by Michael Schaefer

NANOG64

I recently had the pleasure to join the 64th NANOG (North American Network Operators’ Group) meeting in San Francisco, which can be understood as one of the largest Internet engineering conferences at all. It takes place three times a year at different locations in North America.

What I personally like about NANOG is its strong collaborative and cooperative character. It is not about single persons and also not too much about spectacular projects but more about discussing technologies, ideas, challenges and numbers. Every talk has a comparatively large time slot reserved for discussion, which is often more than fully used. Discussion is typically actively focused and is more time-consuming (and even more relevant) than the talk itself. Which often is intended by the community. The climate of discussion is almost always impressively polite and constructive, even for controversially discussed topics.

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Building
by Dominik Phillips

Internet Information Service 7.5 Hardening Guide

Internet Information Services (IIS) contains several components that perform important functions for the application and Web server roles in Windows Server. As it is designed to be used in an enterprise environment, the security of this system must be kept at a high level.

By default IIS implements a lot of basic security measures, but are these the relevant ones to protect your business? Continue reading “Internet Information Service 7.5 Hardening Guide”

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Building
by Enno Rey

IPv6 Adress Planning / Some Notes

In the course of a customer project I recently documented some thoughts and general objectives of IPv6 address planning, expanding on stuff I wrote a while ago in the series on “Address Plan Considerations”. An excerpt of that (newer) document can be found here. Due to the context it originates from it’s in German, still I hope it’s useful for some readers.
If you’re interested in the topic it might be a good idea to listen to Tom Coffeen‘s talk at the upcoming IPv6 Business Conference, too.

Everybody have a great day

Enno

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