“This document was produced jointly with the OWASP mobile security project. It is also published as an ENISA deliverable in accordance with our work program 2011. It is written for developers of smartphone apps as a guide to developing secure apps. It may however also be of interest to project managers of smartphone development projects.
In writing the top 10 controls, we considered the top 10 most important risks for mobile users as described in (1) and (2). As a follow-up we are working on platform-specific guidance and code samples. We hope that these controls provide some simple rules to eliminate the most common vulnerabilities from your code.”
After having a first look at the document’s content I can, while not being a developer myself, state there’s a lot of valuable guidance in it. Which is particularly useful as our assessment experience shows that quite some things (examples to be discussed in this upcoming talk at Troopers) can go wrong as for application security on smartphones.
We’re delighted to provide the first announcement of talks of next year’s Troopers edition. Looks like it’s going to be a great event again 😉
Here we go:
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Andreas Wiegenstein: Real SAP Backdoors
Abstract: In the past year the number of lecture sessions with traumatizing headlines about hacking SAP systems has dramatically risen. Their content, however, is usually the same. Insecure implementations of algorithms, side effects in commands, flawed business logic and designs that brilliantly miss the point of security. In essence, security defects built into the SAP framework by mistake.
This session, however, demonstrates several security defects in SAP NetWeaver that do not appear to have been created by mistake. In order to make a point, I will first discuss with the audience what exactly defines a backdoor. Then I will demonstrate several zero day security defects discovered by me & my team and finally discuss with the audience if these defects qualify as backdoors. All security defects shown are highly critical and have never been publically discussed before. They enable attackers to remotely execute arbitrary ABAP commands and arbitrary OS commands. In essence, full control over SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP.
Bio: Andreas Wiegenstein has been working as a professional SAP security consultant for 9 years. He performed countless SAP code audits and has been researching security defects specific to SAP / ABAP applications. He leads the CodeProfiler Research Labs at Virtual Forge, a team focusing on SAP/ABAP specific vulnerabilities and countermeasures. At the CodeProfiler Labs, he works on ABAP security guidelines, ABAP security trainings, an ABAP security scanner as well as white papers and publications.
Andreas has trained large companies and defense organizations on ABAP security and has spoken at SAP TechEd on several occasions as well as at security conferences such as BlackHat, HITB, Troopers and RSA. He is co-author of the first book on ABAP security (SAP Press 2009). He is also a founding member of BIZEC.org, the Business Security community.
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Mike Ossmann: Welcome to Bluetooth Smart
Abstract: Bluetooth Smart, formerly known as Bluetooth Low Energy, is an entirely new wireless protocol that is not backward compatible with “classic” Bluetooth. With consumer devices emerging in early 2012, this is the perfect time to review Bluetooth Smart and how it works. Packet captures from actual devices will be dissected, and particular attention will be given to the new security procedures specified for Bluetooth Smart. Depending on what devices are commercially available by the time of the conference, I may or may not have a live demo prepared with actual consumer devices. At the very least, I will be able to do a demo using development boards as targets.
Bio: Michael Ossmann is a wireless security researcher who makes hardware for hackers. He founded Great Scott Gadgets in an effort to put exciting, new tools into the hands of innovative people.
Previous work includes:
ShmooCon 2011: Project Ubertooth: Building a Better Bluetooth Adapter
ToorCon 2010: Real Men Carry Pink Pagers (with Travis Goodspeed)
ShmooCon 2010: Bluetooth Keyboards: Who Owns Your Keystrokes?
ShmooCon 2009: Building an All-Channel Bluetooth Monitor (with Dominic Spill)
Black Hat USA 2008: Software Radio and the Future of Wireless Security
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Daniel Mende & Enno Rey: Protecting Voice-over-IP in 2012
Abstract: We’ve recently conducted a number of pentests in (mostly large) VoIP environments. While the fraction of “traditional VoIP attacks” (re-direct/sniff VoIP traffic, reconstruct VoIP calls) has decreased over time, we’ve been able to severely compromise pretty much every environment due to implementation flaws on the infrastructure or “supporting systems” level. Based on a number of warstories, in this talk we will lay out what went wrong in the respective cases and how to protect from the (types of) attacks we performed. Some demos will add spice to the talk. Furthermore a number of previously undisclosed severe vulnerabilities in the crypto architecture of a major vendor’s VoIP solution will be presented.
Bios: Daniel and Enno are long time network geeks who love to explore network devices & protocols and to break flawed ones.
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Graeme Neilson: DISCQO: “Discourse on Implications for Security and Cryptography from Quantum Oddness”
Abstract: Quantum computing is a fascinating, emerging technology with a potentially huge impact on security. This talk introduces the principles of quantum computing and the current state of the art. This is followed by a discussion on the uses of quantum based computer systems within security, the potential implications for cryptography, now and in the future, and the possibility of hacking current quantum based cryptography systems.
What is quantum computing?
What is quantum key exchange?
Can quantum key exchange be hacked?
Will a quantum computer be able to decrypt all my encrypted data?
Do I need a quantum computer?
Do quantum computers even exist?
What are the implications of quantum computing on my current cryptography?
Bio: Graeme Neilson is NOT a quantum physicist or any other kind of physicist…not in this universe anyway…
Still, he does think it’s probable that he can help illuminate the subject of quantum computing for other non-physicists in IT. With over 14 years of experience in IT security Graeme currently works as a security researcher / consultant for Aura Information Security with specialisations in cryptography, reverse engineering and networking. Based out of New Zealand he is a regular speaker at international conferences including Blackhat, H2HC, CanSecWest, DayCon and Troopers.
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Pete Herzog: Securing Robot Mosquitoes with Laser Beams for Eyes in the Enterprise
Abstract: One day employees start bringing robot mosquitoes into the office. They have robot mosquitoes at home and just they’re so damn useful for checking mail, making appointments, singing naptime songs, and spying over the neighbor’s fence. So why wouldn’t they? Your security policy doesn’t expressly forbid robot mosquitoes with laser beams for eyes or anything like it so here they are: riding the internal WiFi, carrying who knows what diseases and parasites from public, cyber ponds, melting the plastic plants, boiling the water cooler, and causing all sorts of other disruptions. Before you can ban them though you see that the CEO starts to bring his robot mosquito with laser beams for eyes in too. And he wants you not only support it but to make sure it doesn’t get hacked. Sounds familiar, right?
There will always be new technologies. Many of those new technologies pose new risks, perhaps even risks we hadn’t considered as risky to us before. So someone has to secure those new technologies. But how do we secure something we know so little about? Well, there’s a methodology for that. This talk will cover how to test new technologies, how to create the right policy for them, and how to control them, including robot mosquitoes with laser beams for eyes.
Bio: Pete Herzog is the Managing Director of the security research organization ISECOM and the creator of the OSSTMM.
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Chema Alonso: Excel (and Office apps) Kills the Citrix (or Terminal Services) Star
Abstract: Microsoft Office (and Excel) are common applications in big companies and in a big amount of cases they are published through Terminal Services or Citrix. However, securing that environment against malicious users is very complicated. In this talk you’ll see a lot of demos hacking Citrix and Terminal Services using Excel… and maybe you’ll be scared after having seen this session.
Bio: Chema Alonso is a Security Consultant with Informatica64, a Madrid-based security firm. Chema holds respective Computer Science and System Engineering degrees from Rey Juan Carlos University and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. During his more than six years as a security professional, he has consistently been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP). Chema is a frequent speaker at industry events (Microsoft Technet / Security Tour, AseguraIT) and has been invited to present at information security conferences worldwide including BlackHat Briefings, Defcon, ShmooCon, HackCON, Ekoparty and RootedCon. He is a frequent contributor on several technical magazines in Spain, where he is involved with state-of-the-art attack and defense mechanisms, web security, general ethical hacking techniques and FOCA, the meta-data extraction tool which he co-authors.
Abstract: In many organizations “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) approaches are either subject to intensive discussion or are already practiced (with or without “proper governance”). Usually two security controls are of particular interest in BYOD scenarios, that are container solutions and acceptable use policies (AUPs).
The speakers have contributed to BYOD “implementations” in several environments and – based on actual case studies – are going to discuss three main aspects in their talk:
– What’s the role of the supply chain of a device, in BYOD settings? Is it possible to securely process – e.g. by means of a container solution – sensitive data on a device that was acquired on ebay or that the VIP using it received “as a present during an industry fair in an emerging market country”?
– What level of security is actually provided by container solutions? Do they sufficiently secure data (incl. temporary data) and which user behavior might be required for this?
– When are good AUPs needed and which elements should be included in those?
The goal of the talk is to enable the audience to realistically assess the security approaches and risks in BYOD scenarios.
Bios: Rene Graf leads the “Mobile Security” team at ERNW and has performed a number of BYOD projects including pentests of container solutions and forensic analyses of devices used by CxOs. Enno Rey leads the “Risk and Security Management” team at ERNW and has undertaken the risk assessments in several BYOD projects and written the accompanying AUPs.
Currently there’s quite some discussion ongoing why it took Apple so long to fix a severe vulnerability in the update process of iTunes. A severe vulnerability which could easily be exploited by means of an automated tool called evilgrade which can be downloaded here (Hi Francisco!). Just one small note here: did you know that evilgrade was first shown and released at the 2008 edition of Troopers? We had a number of initial releases of tools in the last years (like wafw00f at the 2009 edition and VASTO at the 2010 edition) and we will continue this fine tradition in 2012. I can already promise that some nice code is going to be released for the first time at Troopers12…
The above is the exact title of a Gartner research note published some days ago. Its main thesis is that an increased convergence of carriers’ MPLS and Internet infrastructures onto shared IP infrastructures requires that enterprises re-evaluate their security and performance risks.
While I do not agree with the overall line of reasoning in the paper, it still highlights a number of interesting points when it comes to MPLS security. Which in turn reminds me of quite some stuff we’ve done in the past, mainly our Black Hat Europe 2009 talk “All your packets are belong to us – Attacking backbone technologies”. Today we’ll release an updated version of the accompanying whitepaper as a kind-of technical report. Its title is “Practical Attacks against MPLS or Carrier Ethernet Networks” and it can be found here.
Enjoy reading,
Enno
btw: for those of you who have actually read the Gartner paper… did you notice their repeated reference to customer RFIs/RFPs not covering a carrier’s separation between their public Internet and MPLS infrastructures? Here’s a document that describes how a given carrier’s trustworthiness might be evaluated and which furthermore contains an excerpt from an RFI (written back in 2006!) which, amongst others, ask for this very point…
Once again there’s a reference to some action movie here, as some of you may have immediately spotted ;-).
For the record: this one is from “Snake Plissken”, the main protagonist in John Carpenter’s “Escape from New York”. There’s another well-known quote of the same character in the kind-of sequel “Escape from L.A.” which goes like: “The more things change, the more they stay the same”. I’m aware that this is not the initial source (but French novelist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr presumably is, at the time in French ;-)); still this gives a nice transition to today’s topic.
To make it short: there’s pieces of software out there which – regardless of ongoing attempts to patch or even rewrite them – just remain crap, security-wise. Regular readers of this blog may have seen (read) me mentioning some of those. Right now I’d like to draw your attention to another one of my all-time favorites in the “is crappy. has been crappy for a long time. will probably continue do to so for a long time” list. Curtain up! for ISC BIND.
ISC published this advisory today (in case you’re too lazy to follow the link, here some quick facts: “BIND 9 Resolver crashes after logging an error in query.c”; severity “serious”; exploitable “remotely”; CVSS 7.8). Apparently it’s exploited in the wild. It’s at least the 5th unauthenticated remote DoS in BIND 9 in the last twelve months (here’s their advisories). And here’s another quote, this time from the BIND 10 project page:
“The architecture of BIND 10 concentrates on these technical aspects: modularity, customizability, clusterization, integration, resilience, and runtime control.”
See what’s missing? You got it. So good luck to those of you still running BIND. Call it snake… oil…
This week I stayed some days in Zurich, to give a workshop and to meet both clients and fellow researchers (kudos again to C. for the awesome office tour @Google). In the course of one of those dinners somehow Troopers was mentioned and a guy asked: “I’ve heard of the conference. What’s so special about it?”
Funnily enough I didn’t even have to respond myself as a 2011 attendee coincidentally present at the table jumped in and started praising the event (“best con ever. great spirit, great talks”). Obviously this gave me a big grin… but it reminded as well me that some of you might ask themselves the very same question.
In my opening remarks of the 2011 edition I tried to describe the Troopers approach and spirit. You can find it here. As for the speakers’ perspective I’d like to point you to this blogpost that Chema (Alonso) wrote before the 2010 edition. It pretty much summarizes how we take care of “our rock stars”…
Btw: the CfP will be open in some days. As in the previous years, there are only few slots left (as most are already assigned to hand-selected speakers).
As a follow-up to this post somebody pointed us to this interesting article on S/MIME support and associated certificate mgmt in iOS 5. Nice read which some of you may find worthwhile.
On a related note: if anyone is aware of an easy way/good (3rd party) solution for pushing certs to iOS devices (besides SCEP) we would be very interested in that one. In that case pls leave a comment or shoot us an email.
This is a _very_ interesting paper just published by some researchers (mainly) from RUB (Ruhr-University Bochum). Here’s the abstract:
“Cloud Computing resources are handled through control interfaces. It is through these interfaces that the new machine images can be added, existing ones can be modied, and instances can be started or ceased. Effectively, a successful attack on a Cloud control interface grants the attacker a complete power over the victim’s account, with all the stored data included.
In this paper, we provide a security analysis pertaining to the control interfaces of a large Public Cloud (Amazon) and a widely used Private Cloud software (Eucalyptus).
Our research results are alarming: in regards to the Amazon EC2 and S3 services, the control interfaces could be compromised via the novel signature wrapping and advanced XSS techniques. Similarly, the Eucalyptus control interfaces were vulnerable to classical signature wrapping attacks, and had nearly no protection against XSS. As a follow up to those discoveries, we additionally describe the countermeasures against these attacks, as well as introduce a novel ‘black box’ analysis methodology for public Cloud interfaces.”
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While the actual described vulnerabilities have been fixed in the interim this stresses once more the point we made in this post: the overall security posture of the management (or “cloud control” as the authors of the above paper call it) interfaces is crucial for potentially all the data that’s processed by/on your cloud based machines or applications.
Great research from those guys! This will help to drive the discussion and security efforts for a reasonable use of cloud based resources in the right direction…
We recently performed a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) implementation of certificate based auth with iPads in some large environment. So far the focus has been mainly on WLAN access; VPN and EAS authentication are going to follow in the next step.
As we figure that the topic might be of interest for some of you, we’ve extracted a certain, not-too-customer-specific part of the deliverable and converted it into an ERNW newsletter. Special thanks go to Rene Graf for leading the project! 😉
Of course, this stuff is going to be covered in much more detail in the Troopers12 edition of our “iOS Security Workshop” (see here for the agenda of this year or here for a German version of the current one).
After having introduced the basic elements of our concept of trust, control and confidence in this post, today I’ll try to strengthen your (and maybe even my own as well ;-)) understanding of these ideas by applying them to another candidate, that is Dropbox. Hence this post is mainly about performing a certain analysis method to some object; conclusions as for the question if Dropbox is suited to be used in enterprise environments processing sensitive data are out of scope and are left entirely to you, the valued reader.
Two more preliminary remarks might be helpful to further understand the direction and intent of this post:
a) I don’t have any practical experience with Dropbox. I don’t use it personally and at ERNW using it for company-related data would require a risk acceptance, which – probably not too surprisingly – no company member has ever filed (and which would have a quite high likelihood of being turned down by the CEO anyway ;-)). In other words: I can’t imagine any occasion we’d use cloud based storage services for any of our data. It’s just that – given our idea of “highly skilled, thoughtful and responsible humans working here” – we don’t use terms like “xy is strictly forbidden” very often…
So feel free to jump in by PM or comment to this post if this stated lack of practical experience has lead to wrong conclusions or factual errors.
b) This post is not about blocking Dropbox in corporate networks by technical means (which – afaik – is relatively easy compared to, say, blocking Skype, as DB seems to operate mainly from a well-defined /24 network range). Doing so (technically blocking DB on corp firewalls) would not solve the underlying problem of potentially misplaced trust (or ignorance) and might just lead to yet-another-risk-acceptance popping up on the ISOs’ desks (I know, I know: some of you would be happy if at least a risk acceptance existed for DB within your organization…). And, of course, the corp_fw way would not address the aggregate problem of running Dropbox on mobile devices (at least assumed that no cloud based proxy services are in use for those, which is currently the case in most networks I know).
However this post is about asking a certain set of questions and clarifying some company’s or service’s attributes to induce a reasonable discussion about the exact company’s/service’s suitability for processing sensitive assets. To us, such an approach is aligned with our understanding of an ISO as a trusted business advisor (as opposed to the “paranoid pitbull” or “unfortunately unheard master of governing guidelines” mission understanding of ancient times).
Now let’s have a look at the object of today’s trust exercise, that is Dropbox. Founded in 2007 and fueled by US$ 7.2 million venture capital (as of this Forbes article) the California-based company provides cloud-based file storage services with a simple GUI and some nice collaboration capabilities for groups of users sharing files. The description in the CrunchBase profile goes: “Always have your stuff, wherever you are”. A technical overview can be found in this paper recently presented at USENIX Security.
As you might recall from the first post of this series, there I laid out some trust contributing factors, which I took from the ISECOM “Mastering Trust” methodology that is taught in their Trust Analyst course (pls note that my interpretation of these may be wrong as I never attended that course. sorry, Pete ;-)).
These are:
Size – “Who exactly are you going to trust?”
Symmetry – “Do they trust us?”
Transparency – “How much do we know about $TRUSTEE?”
Consistency – “What happened in the past?”
Integrity – “[How] Do we notice if $TRUSTEE changes?”
Value of Reward – “What do we gain by trusting?” (that’s the one that Ponzi schemes are based on)
Components – “Which resources does $TRUSTEE rely on?”
Porosity – “How separated is $TRUSTEE from its environment?”
Applying all these to Dropbox might yield the following answers:
a) Size
While this might seem a simple one given Dropbox is a not-too-big company presumably held by their founders and some investors/venture capital providers (plus maybe employees holding stocks or options or sth) it should be noted that, more or less obviously, there’s more entities in the overall picture => see below at section “Components”.
b) Symmetry
Usually this one is hard to apply to B2C scenarios, so I’ll skip it here.
c) Transparency
Honestly, as I’m not a user of their service I don’t have a ultimate attitude here. However from a trust analyst point of view I just note there’s a number of people out there who think that DB failed severely in this regard. And there’s a (still pending?) complaint for injuctive relief filed to the FTC stating that Dropbox “continues to make deceptive statements to consumers regarding the extent to which it protects and encrypts their data.”
So overall this one (transparency) seems at least debatable; see also discussion on factor “Integrity” below.
d) Consistency: well, probably most of you know that three months ago DB suffered a breach which exposed all online storage lockers to anyone entering any password for ~ 4 hours.
Strictly taking the “consistency road” this does not contribute to their trustworthiness, from my humble evaluation.
e) Integrity
This post from the Hunton & Williams privacy blog provides an overview how Dropbox’ security statements (on its website) changed over time. I tend to assume the majority of users is/was not aware of those changes. In general it seems that one of their main communication channels is their blog. Which – given that most of you probably read a blogpost right now 😉 – might certainly be a valid channel… for B2C scenarios in modern times at least. Not sure if this is the right channel for the security properties of corporate information assets though.
f) Components
This is a particularly interesting one. As obvious as this may be, most users are probably not aware that DB does not operate the servers providing the service themselves. To the best of my knowledge the (Dropbox) service heavily relies on Amazon S3 and EC2 instances, in a certain setup that Mulazzani et.al., in their paper, comment on as follows: “However, the fact that encryption and storage is done at the same place seems questionable to us, as Amazon is most likely able to access decryption keys”.
g) Porosity
We can’t provide an evaluation here as we do not dispose of any information as for clear demarcation lines on the financial (e.g. who might potentially influence DB’s decisions due to simple ownership of shares ;-)) or organization/infrastructure (which 3rd parties actually provide which type of supporting service, e.g. do they share their office space with other parties in a business/office incubator etc.) sides of things.
So, once again, taking a structured approach when evaluating some party’s trustworthiness (to counter the fact that trust – by it’s very (Diego Gambetta’s) definition that we used in the initial post – is sth subjective) leads to – hopefully – interesting insight and results. Still, in this particular case, there’s another potential use of this way of looking at things: when dealing with (business’ desire to use) Dropbox in your organization, you might convert this points into a simple (one slide ;-)) checklist containing questions like
Do you know who owns the company Dropbox?
Do you know where their servers are located?
Do you know if they own the servers providing the service themselves or who else does this on their behalf? And where the servers of that “other party” are located? Which legislation applies there?
Do you know that they just suffered a breach temporarily allowing anyone in the world to access any one of its 25 million customers’ online storage lockers, simply by typing in any password?
Do you know who owns the keys necessary to decrypt data stored under your account?
[in case you like to promote your concerns the FUD way – which we do not like or recommend – you might add: “If you were a well-funded attacker, maybe from an emerging market, would Dropbox be an interesting target for you?”…]
If some people within your organization are still going to use DB for corporate data then, well, that’s an “educated decision by business” [no, no, the quotes are not put here to hint there might be a contradictio in adjecto ;-)].
Stay tuned for more stuff to come in this series & have a good week,
Enno
btw: we’ll probably have a talk about Dropbox at next year’s Troopers which takes place on 03/21 and 03/22 2012 in Heidelberg.