Taking the chance from a discussion on the IPv6 hacker’s mailing list and the freshly proposed draft RFC regarding the deprecation of the generation of IPv6 Atomic Fragments, I decided to test very quickly what is the current status related with the latest and some of the most poplar Operating Systems (OS) status (whether they send Atomic Fragments in response to Packet Too Big messages, or not). The motivation behind this was to check which one of them is potentially vulnerable to the DoS attack using the technique described in the above proposed RFC and taking it for granted that Atomic Fragments are blocked in the real world (but more about this, in another blogpost in the near future).
once again, we welcomed Michael Ossmann at the ERNW headquarters for fun with SDR. This time with Mike´s advanced SDR workshop. And to be up front about it…it was plain awesome. For everybody who is not familiar with Software Defined Radio (SDR): Let’s regard it as the ultimate tool when working with radio signals. Take a look a this to learn more.
Mike showed us the new revision of his HackRF One and explained us some more advanced techniques when it comes to Radio Frequnecies hacking. Compared to last time, the workshop focused on reversing signals and how to synthesize them. So this time we were crafting RF packets ourselves instead of just replaying a capture. This introduces different attack types which can be carried out over the air for example bruteforcing or fuzzing of radio devices.
GreatScottgadgets.com HackRF One
We thought about some devices that would be worth taking a look at because you probably dont want to start reversing your car`s remote key.So we ended up analyzing “simpler” devices for training purposes and decided to mess around with a Shutter remote control and an Instant Messaging device.
The remote shutter control operates the shutter of a DSRL so you can take pictures without holding the camera in your hands. So a user could focus the cam and take pictures. An attacker on the other hand could take pictures when the camera is not supposed to or simply jam the reciever to prevent from pictures being taken. This was quite easy and worked very well, so we went on to other interesting devices…
Mike brought a modified version of the IM-Me (Instant Messenging device for children). We tried to record and analyze its signals to be able to spoof messages and run arbitrary shell commands on a remote system that has installed a special “IM-Me” Server application based on previous research. Our goal was to synthesize commands which are sent to the device e.g “ls”. The first step in doing this is to capture a clean signal and filter it properly to be able to demodulate the signal into binary data to process it further. Mike explaind pretty handy tricks to accomplish these tasks on which we will talk about in further posts, so stay tuned.
Im-Me
If yo are interested in the IM-me take a look at this and this to learn more.
So THANKS a lot Mike. It once again has been quite interesting to see
where RF testing is heading and how much more is to be learned on this field.
Information security conferences are known to be attended because of several reasons. For some it’s the technical content, for others the networking potential and for some others simply meeting old friends. Pinpointing our motives is clearly a challenging task, but the following wrap-up ought to share our personal highlights of the week we spent visiting Black Hat USA 2014 and DEFCON 22 in Las Vegas.
While fairytales often start with “Once upon a time…”, our blogposts often start with “During a recent security assessment…” — and so does this one. This time we were able to spend some time on VMware’s vCenter Operations Manager (herein short: VCOPS). VCOPS is a monitoring solution for load and health of your vSphere environment. In order to provide this service, two virtual machines (analytics engine and Web-based UI) must be deployed (as a so-called vApp) that are configured on startup by various scripts (mainly /usr/lib/vmware-vcops/user/conf/install/firstbootcommon.sh) to match the actual environment and communicate via an OpenVPN tunnel that is established directly between the two machines. To gather the monitoring data, read-only access to the vCenter is required.
Last week we had the opportunity and pleasure to present some of our research results at BlackHat US 2014 (besides of meeting a lot of old friends and having a great researchers’ dinner).
Enno and Antonios gave their presentation on IDPS evasion by IPv6 Extension Headers, described here.
The material can be found here: Slides, tools (the main tool used was Chiron, authored by Antonios) & whitepaper.
Ayhan and me presented our results of the security analysis of Cisco’s EnergyWise protocol. The protocol enables network-wide power monitoring and control (ie turning servers off or on, putting phones to standby — basically controlling the power state of all EnergyWise-enabled or PoE devices). The main problem (besides a DoS vulnerability we found in IOS, see official Cisco advisory) is its PSK-based authentication model, which enables an attacker to cause large-scale blackouts in data centers if the deployment is lacking certain controls (for example our good old favorite, segmentation…). There will be a longer blogpost/newsletter on this topic soon.
The material can be found here: Slides & tools
In the “A Novel Way of Abusing IPv6 Extension Headers to Evade IPv6 Security Devices” blogpost I described a way to evade a high-end commercial IDPS device, the Tipping Point IDPS (TOS Tipping Point, Package 3.6.1.4036 and vaccine 3.2.0.8530 digital), by abusing a minor detail at the IPv6 specification. As I promised at the end of that blogpost, this is not the end. In this blogpost I am going to describe several new and different ways of evading another popular IDPS, an open-source one this time, Suricata.
In the light of the recent release of version 5.0 of Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) on July 31, it seems to be more than appropriate to talk a bit about the new features and some general things to take into account when using EMET (for the new certificate pinning feature of EMET 4.0, see Friedwart’s comment). For all of you who don’t know EMET, in short, it’s a free mitigation tool for Windows developed by Microsoft, helping the user by preventing vulnerabilities in software from being successfully exploited. The tool works by protecting applications via a number of security mitigation technologies, vastly extending Windows operating system mitigation capabilities as Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR).
Recently we started playing around with Cisco’s virtual router, the CSR 1000V, while doing some protocol analysis. We found Cisco offering an BIN file for download (alternatively there is an ISO file which contains a GRUB boot loader and the BIN file, or an OVA file which contains a virtual machine description and the ISO file) and file(1) identifies it as DOS executable:
$ file csr1000v-universalk9.03.12.00.S.154-2.S-std.SPA.bin
csr1000v-universalk9.03.12.00.S.154-2.S-std.SPA.bin: DOS executable (COM)
We didn’t manage to get the file running, neither in a (Free-)DOS environment, nor in a wine virtual DOS environment, except using the boot loader from the ISO file. So we became curious as for the structure and ingredients of the file.
We’re currently involved in a number of IPv6 activities in different organizations and one of the questions we are still facing – even in cases where there’s already a (in most cases networking team driven/originated) “project” (incl. budget, project sponsor, milestones etc.) – is along the lines of “How to sell IPv6 to our management?”.
In the following I will shortly lay out the line of reasoning and the terminology we usually employ for the task. Furthermore I’ve anonymized a presentation which we recently prepared as “input” for the network team of an enterprise organization; it can be found here. In case you want to get this as a PPT (for recyling purposes) pls send me a direct email (in exchange, we might ask you for a small donation of your will to the Troopers charity project… ).
Some weeks ago, at RIPE 68 in Warsaw, Sander Steffann gave a presentation about revising RIPE 554 which, in his own words, “is a template guideline for procurement of stuff that should do IPv6” (here’s the steganography transcript of the IPv6 working group session). Some of you will probably know RIPE 554 as a quite helpful document for identifying reasonable real-world requirements for IPv6 capable network devices (in particular at times when vendors quite willingly put an “IPv6 ready” sticker on all their gear…).
