Insinuator.net – Page 57 – Bold Statements

January 28, 2015 by Enno Rey

The Persistent Problem of State in IPv6 (Security)

I’ve discussed the heavy complexity of IPv6 and its negative impact on security architectures relying on state – you know, “stateful” firewalls and the like 😉 – before (here and here. btw, the widely discussed IPv6-related network outage at MIT last year was a state problem as well: switches keeping track of multicast groups, of which in turn many existed due privacy extensions combined with the unfortunate relationship of MLD and ND).

One of the conclusions I’ve drawn in the past was recommending to minimize the amount of state one might use within security architectures in the IPv6 world. First, this is bad news for quite some well-established security controls that need a certain amount of state to work properly, like IDPS systems – which subsequently have hard times to work properly in IPv6 networks.
Secondly there’s another severe caveat. As I fully realized yesterday, at Cisco Live Europe, in Andrew Yourtchenko‘s excellent breakout session on “Advanced IPv6 Security in the Core”, this carries some consequences for stateless (and hence: seemingly “unaffected”) security controls, too.

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Breaking

January 28, 2015 by Enno Rey

Evasion of Cisco ACLs by (Ab)Using IPv6 & Discussion of Mitigation Techniques

This is a guest post of Antonios Atlasis.

During our blogpost regarding DHCPv6 Guard evasion, one of the side-effects was that Access Control Lists (ACLs) configured to block access to UDP ports 546 can be evaded by abusing (again) IPv6 Extension headers. Having that in mind, we decided to check the effectiveness of Cisco IPv6 ACLs under various scenarios. Our goal was to examine whether the IPv6 ACLs of Cisco routers can be evaded, as well as under which conditions this can take place. To this end, several representative scenarios from enterprise environments or other potential ones are examined.

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Building

January 28, 2015 by Enno Rey

Evaluation of IPv6 Capabilities of Commercial IPAM Solutions

Originating from a customer IPv6 deployment project, in early 2014 we defined a number of requirements as for the IPv6 capabilities of IPAM solutions, with a certain focus on security-related requirements (due to the specific environment of the project). We subsequently performed a practical evaluation of several commercial solutions, based on documentation, lab implementation and vendor communication.

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Events

January 27, 2015 by Christopher Werny

Observations from the Cisco Live Europe Wifi Infrastructure

Given that Enno and I are network geeks, and that I am responsible for setting up the Troopers Wifi network I was curious which components might be used at Cisco Live and which IPv6 related configuration was done for the Wifi network to ensure a reliable network and reduce the chatty nature of IPv6. Andrew Yourtchenko (@ayourtch) already did an amazing job last year at Cisco Live Europe explaining in detail (at the time session BRKEWN-2666) the intricacies of IPv6 in Wifi networks, and how to optimize IPv6 for these networks. He was also a great inspiration for me when setting up the Troopers Wifi network a couple of weeks later. Thank You!

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Building

January 23, 2015 by Matthias Luft

Evaluating Behavior-based Malware Detection

Quite some organizations complemented their traditional AV solutions with a technology that can best be described as behavior-based malware detection. While we all know we are talking about products like Fireeye Email/Network Security, zScaler Web Security/APT Protection, or Cisco WSA, there are a lot of terms around to describe this type of products (such as next generation malware analysis/detection, Secure Web Gateways, or behavior-based malware detection). Those offerings typically promise the detection of malware by analyzing the behavior of ‘samples’ (which are files captured in transit of different types, such as executables or PDF documents). However, beyond the taxonomy challenges, both assessment and consulting work gets us frequently in contact with those solutions. While the main task during assessments is to bypass those solutions, the main question in the consulting context typically is “to what degree are the solutions suited to protect from common targeted attacks in the enterprise context”. Luckily, the experience from assessment work allows us to tackle this question in a structured way (which is our approach for consulting anyways: Benefit from our assessment experiences in order to provide reasonable consulting advice…).

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Events

January 20, 2015 by Enno Rey

Troopers15 IPv6 Security Summit

We’ve finalized the agenda for this year’s IPv6 Security Summit. Here’s an overview of the event:

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Breaking

January 20, 2015 by Brian Butterly

Riding the Z-Wave, Part 1

Simple everyday work dialog:
“The heater in the basement is still missing a proper thermostat, the ‘binary solution’ isn’t that effective”
– “Buy one…”
– “Ok”
– “Get one you can break…”
– “Ok, but then I’d like a few tools, too”
– “Go for it.”
(That’s the way work should be!)
Result of the dialog: a Danfoss Living Connect Z ( 014G0013 ) and a TI CC1100 Wireless Mini Dev Kit plus a copy of Z-Force to start with.
Goal: Talk to the thermostat!

Continue reading “Riding the Z-Wave, Part 1”

Misc

January 17, 2015 by Enno Rey

Main IPv6 Related Mailing Lists

We’re sometimes approached with the question “Which IPv6 mailing lists do you guys read/subscribe to?” – here’s a quick overview of the main ones guys like Christopher, Patrick, Rafael, Antonios and myself are periodically lurking at, to discuss IPv6 (network|security) related stuff with other practitioners and to learn from them:

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Breaking

January 15, 2015 by Brian Butterly

(In-)secure SD cards on WP8.1

During our first year of testing Windows Phone 8 applications we had yet another, let’s say: “surprising” finding. It all started with the first approaches on pentesting mobile applications on that new and rather closed platform. Lacking jailbreak, root, and similar approaches we had a closer look at alternate approaches to have a look at an apps interior. We quickly hooked onto using modified firmwares (with deeper system access) and found a perfect solution in a little flaw concerning the handling of SD cards in WP8.1. A flaw that was, sadly for us, fixed silently….

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Misc

January 15, 2015 by Friedwart Kuhn

Skeleton Key – a Nasty Piece of Malware. Some Remarks.

Just recently, Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit(TM) (CTU) researchers published details (see http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/skeleton-key-malware-analysis/ ) on a especially nasty piece of malware that bypasses authentication on Active Directory (AD) systems which implement single-factor (password only) authentication. Once deployed the malware stays quite noiseless in the Domain Controller´s (DC) RAM, and the DC´s replication issues caused by it weren´t interpreted – in this case – during months as a hint for system compromise. Probably the malware´s modification on the LSASS process reduced the DC´s ability to perform DC-to-DC authentication, but this is only speculation and not where we would like to go today.

So, what to do? The relevant mitigations, pointed out by Dell´s CTU, as event log monitoring and scanning processes on suspicious systems with the published YARA signature should be applied.
Still, let’s discuss for a second which long-term, preventative measures could come into play as well. Continue reading “Skeleton Key – a Nasty Piece of Malware. Some Remarks.”