Just a short notice today on some recent presentations from our team. As some of you might know we regularly give talks at conferences. This not only encompasses highly sophisticated security events like Black Hat or Troopers. Additionally – on our mission for a safer world – we try to spread the (security) word at various industry events that are usually focused on some aspect of the large and ramified IT world, not necessarily equipped with a strong focus on information security.
A number of such events took place in the last few weeks and here’s some links on presentations given there. While not being as technically deep as the average Black Hat or Troopersattendee might expect, we still hope that one or another valued reader finds them useful (pls note that some parts are in German).
This one is a talk given by myself on “Compliance in the Cloud” in the course of the “Azure Day” of BASTA which is one of the largest and most important developer events here in Germany. The presentation discusses what to keep in mind if compliance with some “regulatory frameworks” is strived for when going to “the [public] cloud”.
Here‘s a piece on virtualization security, namely the architectural changes on basic security principles induced by (server) virtualization. It was provided at the “IIR Admin Tech Talk 2010” and, again, I myself was the speaker.
Rene Graf, who’s a member of the “Architecture and Risk Team” at ERNW and a long-time large-environment security guy, gave this overview talk on “Industrial Firewalls” at the LANline TechForum “Industrial Ethernet” which took place in Stuttgart.
Last but not least, Matthias Luft (being another member of the same team and pursuing his academic career in parallel) delivered this talk on DLP at ISSE in Berlin, together with Thorsten Holz.
Have a great day everybody,
Enno
Btw: our next stop will be at fabulous Day-Con. If any of our readers from the US – very appropriately – is worried about missing it, pls shoot me an email. Given our long term friendship with Angus we might be able to provide you a ticket.
Finding exploitable vulnerabilities is getting harder. This statement of Dennis Fisher published on Kaspersky’s Threatpost blog summarizes a trend in the development lifecycle of software . The last published vulnerabilities that were gaining some attention in the public had all one thing in common, they were quite hard to exploit. The so called jailbreakme vulnerability was based on several different vulnerabilities that had to be chained together to break out of the iPhone sandbox, escalate its privileges and run arbitrary code. Modern software and especially modern operating systems are more secure, they contain less software flaws and more protection features that make reliable exploitation a big problem that can only be solved by very skilled hackers. Decades ago it was just like this, but intelligent tools and sharing of the needed knowledge enabled even low skilled people to develop working exploits and attack vulnerable systems. Nowadays we are going back to the roots where only a few very knowledgeable people are able to circumvent modern security controls, but that doesn’t mean that all problems are gone. Attackers are moving to design flaws like the DLL highjacking problem, so only the class of attacks is changing from the old school memory corruption vulnerabilities to logical flaws that still can be exploited easily. But the number of exploitable vulnerabilities is decreasing, so this might be a sign that we are on the right way to develop reliable and secure systems and that developing companies are adopting Microsofts Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) to produce more secure software. As stated in my previous blogpost the protection features are available, but not used very often. But if they are used and if the developers are strictly following the recommendations of the SDL, this trend of “harder to exploit vulnerabilities” proves that it can be a success story to do so.
During the keynote of the Intel Developer Forum, Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini explained their motivation for the acquisition of McAfee. Basically, Intel wants to provide a possibility to shift computer security from a known bad model to something that is a known good model.
Coming back to some of our recentblog posts, we think that a reliable and working approach to implement application whitelisting would increase security in corporate environments — especially when thinking of the latest vulnerabilities with exploit code in the wild that could not be catched up by any AV solution. As covered by this article, the possibility that such an approach succeeds depends heavily on the critical mass that would use it. The widespread x86 architecture therefore is the perfect plattform for accomplishing a widely used known good m Continue reading “Intel’s Known Good Approach — Chances for a Paradigm Shift?”
One of the four vulnerabilities rated “critical” from yesterday’s MS patchday, that is MS10-063, has an interesting “Workarounds” section as for MS Internet Explorer. There it’s stated:
“Disabling the support for the parsing of embedded fonts in Internet Explorer prevents this application from being used as an attack vector.”
which, according to the advisory, should/can be done by setting the “Font Downloading” parameter to “Disable”.
Which is exactly what this document suggests. So taking a preventive approach, once more, might have saved some concerns (“Will we be targeted by this one”) and patch/testing time…
Recently I noticed this news titled “New email worm on the move”. At roughly the same time I received an email from a senior security responsible from a large customer asking for mitigation advice as they got “hit pretty hard” (by this exact piece of malware).
Given I’m mainly an infrastructure and architecture guy usually I’m not too involved in malware protection stuff (besides my continuous ranting that – from an architectural point of view – endpoint based antivirus has a bad security benefit vs. capex/opex ratio). So I’m by no means an expert in this field. Still I keep scratching my head when I read the associated announcements (like this, this or this) from major “antivirus”, “malware protection” or “endpoint security” vendors – to save typing, in the remainder of the post I call them SNAKE vendors (where “SNAKE” stands for “Smart Nimble APT Kombat Execution”… or sth equally ingenious of the valued reader’s choice… 😉
The following (not too) heretical questions come to mind:
a) What’s the corporate need to allow downloading .scr files at all? Maybe I’m missing sth here or I’m just not creative enough but I (still) don’t get it. Why not block .scr at the network boundaries at all?
[yes, I know, there’s no such thing like “well-defined network boundaries” any more, but here we’re talking about “HTTP based downloads” which happen to pass through – a few – centralized points in quite some environments].
a1) So, maybe blocking downloads of .scr files (as this document recommends, funnily enough together with the recommendation to “filter the URL” on gateways… which really seems an operationally feasible thing for complex environments… and a very effective one, for future malware, too ;-)) might be a viable mitigation path.
In my naïve world the approach of just allowing a certain (“positive”) set of file/MIME types for download would be even better, wouldn’t it?
This reminds me of a consulting project we did for a mid-sized bank (20K users) some years ago. They brought us in to evaluate options to increase their “malware protection stance” and we finally recommended a set of policy and gateway configuration adjustments (instead of buying a third commercial antimalware software which they had initially planned). Part of our recommendations was to restrict the file types to be accepted as email attachments. For a certain file type (from the MS Office family and known as a common malware spread vector at the time) they strongly resisted, stating “We need to allow this, our customers regularly send us documents of this type”. We then suggested monitoring the use of various filetypes-in-question for some time and it turned out that for this specific type they received three (in numbers: 3) legitimate emails within a six month period…
b) In their mentioned announcements all major vendors boast disposing of “updated signatures providing total protection” for this piece of malware.
Hmm… again, very naïvely, I might ask: so why did our customer get “hit pretty hard” (and, following the press, other organizations as well)? They are not a small shop (actually they’re one of the 50 largest corporations in the world), there’s a lot of smart people working in the infosec space over there and – of course! – they run one of the main “best of breed” antimalware solutions on their desktops.
So why did they get hit? I leave the answer to the reader… just a hint: operational aspects might play a role, as always.
“Upon further investigation, we found that the malware used for this attack was just an unpacked version of a file that we already detected as WORM_AUTORUN.NAD. It is possible that the cybercriminals behind this attack got hold of the code for WORM_AUTORUN.NAD and modified it for their usage.”
Indeed, looking at this entry in Microsoft’s malware encyclopedia from august 19th there are remarkable similarities.
So, dear SNAKE vendors: do I get it correctly that (most of) you need a new signature when there’s an unpacked version of some malicious piece of code, as opposed to a packed version (of the same code)?
Seems quite a difficult exercise for all those super-smart heuristic adaptive engines … in 2010…
Sorry, guys, how crazy is this? And it seems the stuff was initially observed back in july.
[did you note that they don’t even feel embarrased by admitting this, but proudly display this as a result of their research, which of course takes place in the best interest of their valued customers?]
For completeness’ sake it should be mentioned that this piece of malware (no, I won’t rant on the fact that – still, in 2010 – it seems not possible to have a common naming scheme amongst vendors) performs, amongst others, the following actions on an infected machine:
– turning of security services.
– modification of some security-relevant registry keys.
– sharing system folders.
On most Windows systems all those actions can only be performed by users… with administrative privileges…
Overall, this “classic piece of worm” might remind us, that maybe effective desktop protection should be achieved by
– controlling/restricting which types of code and data to bring into a given environment.
– or, at least, _where_ to get executable (types of) code/data from.
– which executables to run on a corporate machine at all (yes, I’m talking about application whitelisting here ;-).
– reflecting on the need of administrative privileges.
and _not_ by still spending even more money for SNAKE oil.
I renew my plea from this post:
So, please please please, just take a small amount (e.g. 1%) of the yearly budget you spend on antimalware software/support/operational cost, get a student intern in and have her start testing application whitelisting on some typical corporate desktops. This might contribute to a bit more sustainable security in your environment, one day in the future.
This is currently the most frequent search term leading Internet users to the Troopers website.
Probably Sheran Gunasekera’s great presentation “Bugs & Kisses – Spying on BlackBerry users for fun” is the piece they are after. Whatever they look for, this search term may help to shed light to an aspect that seems a bit overlooked in the ongoing debate about governments (U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, India) trying to get their hands on communication acts performed with BlackBerries in their countries.
[For those interested in that discussion this blog entry of Bruce Schneier may serve as a starting point.]
Given that most readers of this blog using a BlackBerry will most likely do so with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) installation, in this post I’ll focus on those deployments and will subsequently not cover BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) scenarios.
RIM, very understandably, stresses the fact that in the current BES architecture – presumably – they [RIM] can only process (thus “see”) the data stream encrypted (by symmetric ciphers regarded sufficiently secure) between the BES servers usually placed on corporate soil and the endpoint devices (the Blackberries themselves).
What they don’t mention is the simple fact that cryptographic techniques quite often only secure some data’s transport path, but not elements on the endpoints (where the data is unencrypted and further processed). What if either the (BlackBerry) devices provide means to eavesdrop on the traffic – and Sheran discussed the relevant APIs in his talk, referring to the “Etisalat case” where in 2009 the major U.A.E. telecommunications provider distributed a software application for Blackberries that essentially allowed somebody [who?] to eavesdrop on emails by sending a copy of each email to a certain server – or even the BES itself is “somehow interfered with”? This article from Indiatimes at least suggests the latter possibility for BES servers located in India. Here’s a quoted excerpt:
“Significantly, the only time an enterprise email sent from a BlackBerry device remains in an un-encrypted or ‘readable’ format is when it resides in the enterprise server. ‘Feeding the email from the enterprise server to the ISP’s monitoring systems can, accordingly, help security agencies access the communication in pure text form’, DoT [India’s Department of Telecommunications] proposal said.”
So, in short, just discussing if BlackBerry based communication can be intercepted in transit may be a bit short-sighted. Thinking about the devices and the code they run (and who’s allowed to install applications, by what means/from which sources, yadda yadda yadda) or considering “some countries’ regulatory requirements” when deploying BES servers might be helpful, too.
It should be noted that we do not allege RIM any dishonest motives whatsoever (actually we have a quite positive stance as for the overall security posture of their products, if nothing else see for example this newsletter analysing the over-the-air generation of master encryption keys between the BES and the devices).
We just want to raise some awareness to the mentioned “blind spots” in the current debate.
For those of you who missed it: Microsoft released the associated advisory yesterday, together with a hotfix introducing a new registry key that allows users to control the DLL search path algorithm. For a detailed explanation of the problem we refer to the excellent article on Ars Technica.
For the record: no, AV (anti-virus software) will – in most cases – not protect you from security problems related to this one. And, no, there is no easy patch for this one either.
Carefully reading the “Mitigating Factors” and “Workarounds” section in the MS advisory or this entry from our blog might provide ideas how to address this or similar stuff (in the future).
Wishing you all some sunny summer days,
Enno
Update: this article gives some more technical details and this one describes some real attack paths against popular applications. Sorry, guys, good luck with fighting this one with traditional AV…
Just wanted to let you know that we sent out ERNW Newsletter 32 end of last week. As we promised it includes the results of research regarding the question “Is browser virtualization a valid security control in order to mitigate browser based security risks?”.
Simon did a great job with writing the latest newsletter. It’s a 30-page document which should help you to have a basis for well-informed decisions when it comes to the deployment of an application virtualization technology.
Download a signed version of the PDF here, or visit the archive to browse other issues of our highly technical newsletters.
Everybody who is interested in our newest tool ‘Loki’ is welcomed to head over to ERNW’s tool section and download it. Take this monster for a spin and let us know in the comments how you like it. Loki’s coding father Daniel is more than happy to answer your questions and criticism.
You don’t even know what Loki is?
In short: An advanced security testing tool for layer 3 protocols.
In long: Have a read in the Blackhat2010 presentation slides and mark TROOPERS11 in your calendar to meet the guys behind the research and for sure get a live demo of the capabilities – development is still ongoing, so prepare yourself for even more supported protocols and attack types.
And again: Talking about TROOPERS11… we’ve already selected the first round of speakers. Details to be published soon 🙂
One of the biggest pains in the ass of most ISOs – and subsequently subject of fierce debates between business and infosec – is the topic of “Browser Security”, i.e. essentially the question “How to protect the organization from malicious code brought into the environment by users surfing the Internet?”.
Commonly the chain of events (of a typical malware infection act) can be broken down to the following steps:
1.) Some code – no matter if binary or script code – gets transferred (mostly: downloaded) to some system “from the Internet”, that means “over the network”.
2.) This code is executed by some local piece of software (where “execution” might just mean “parse a PDF” ;-).
[btw, if you missed it: after Black Hat Adobe announced an out-of-band patch scheduled for 08/16, so stay tuned for another Adobe Reader patch cycle next week…]
3.) This code causes harm (either on it’s own, either by reloaded payloads) to the local system, to the network the system resides in or to other networks.
Discussing potential security controls can be centered around these steps, so we have
a) The area of network based controls, that means all sorts of “malicious content protection” devices like proxies filtering (mainly HTTP and FTP) traffic based on signatures, URL blacklists etc., and/or network based intrusion prevention systems (IPSs).
Practically all organizations use some of this stuff (however quite a number of them – unfortunately – merely banks on these pieces). Let me state this clearly: overall using network based (filtering) controls contributes significantly to “overall protection from browser based threats” and we won’t discuss the advantages/disadvantages of this approach right here+now.
Still it should be noted that this is what we call a “detective/reactive control”, as it relies on somehow detecting the threat and scrubbing it after the detection act).
b) Controls in the “limit the capability to execute potentially harmful code” space. Which can be broken down to things like
– minimizing the attack surface (e.g. by not running Flash, iTunes etc. at all). The regular readers of this blog certainly knows our stance as for this approach ;-).
– configuration tweaks to limit the script execution capabilities of some components involved, like all the stuff to be found in IE’s zone model and associated configuration options (see this document for a detailed discussion of this approach).
– patching (the OS, the browser, the “multimedia extensions” like Flash and Quicktime, the PDF reader etc.) to prevent some “programmatic abuse” of the respective components.
Again, we won’t dive into an exhaustive discussion of the advantages/disadvantages of this approach right here+now.
c) Procedures or technologies striving to limit the harm in case an exploit happens “in browser space” (which, as of our definition, encompasses all add-ons like Flash, Quicktime etc.). This includes DEP, IE protected mode, sandboxing browsers etc.
Given the weaknesses the network based control approach might have (in particular in times of targeted attacks. oops, sorry, of course I mean: in times of the Advanced Persistent Threat [TM] ;-)) and the inability (or reluctance?) to tackle the problem on the “code execution” front-line in some environments, in the interim another potential control has gained momentum in “progressive infosec circles”: using virtualization technologies to isolate the browser from the (“core”) OS, other applications or just the filesystem.
Three main variants come to mind here: full OS virtualization techniques (represented, for example, by Oracle VirtualBox or VMware Workstation), application virtualization solutions (like Microsoft App-V or VMware ThinApp) and, thirdly, what I call “hosted browsing” (where some MS Terminal Server farm potentially located in a DMZ, or even “the cloud” may serve as “[browser] hosting infrastructure”).
In general, on an architecture level this is a simple application of the principle of “isolation” – and I really promise to discuss that set of architectural security principles we use at ERNW at some point in this blog ;-).
While I know that some of you, dear readers, use virtualization technologies to “browse safely” on a daily (but individual use) basis, there’s still some obstacles for large scale use of this approach, like how to store/transfer or print documents, how to integrate client certificates – in particular when on smart cards – into these scenarios, how to handle “aspects of persistence” (keeping cookies, bookmarks vs. not keeping potentially infected “browser session state”) etc.
And, even if all these problems can be solved, the big question would be: does it help, security-wise? Or, in infosec terms: to what degree is the risk landscape changed if such an approach would be used to tackle the “Browser Security Problem”?
To contribute to this discussion we’ve performed some tests with an application virtualization solution (VMware ThinApp) recently. The goal of the tests was to determine if exploits can be stopped from causing harm if they happened within a virtualized deployment, which modes of deployment to use, which additional tweaks to apply etc.
The results can be found in our next newsletter to be published at the end of this week. This post’s purpose was to provide some structure as for “securing the browser” approaches. and to remind you that – in the end of the day – each potential security control must be evaluated from two main angles: “What’s the associated business impact and operational effort?” and “How much does it mitigate risk[s]?”.
Have a great day,
Enno
