Enno Rey

Events
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IPv6 Hackers Meeting @ IETF 87 in Berlin / Slides

That meeting was actually a great event. Once more, big thanks! to Fernando for organizing it and to EANTC for providing the logistics.
A couple of unordered notes to follow:

a) The slides of our contribution can be found here. Again, pls note that this is work in progress and we’re happy to receive any kind of feedback.
[given Fernando explicitly mentioned Troopers, we’ve allowed ourselves to put some reference to it into this version of the slide deck…]

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Breaking
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SNMP Reflected Amplification DDoS Attacks

Just recently on the NANOG mailing list a discussion popped up titled “SNMP DDoS: the vulnerability you might not know you have“.
There’s a couple of points here:

a) if you’re interested in the technical details of these attacks (and mitigation advice), pls see this excellent technical report the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group published last year (apparently Comcast had observed such attacks before).

b) Daniel and I gave a talk on attacking SNMP at HITB Dubai 2007 (Hi Amy & Dhillon! 😉) laying out the basic idea for that type of attack and we later described it in a bit more detail at ShmooCon 2009 where we even demoed it publicly (camera recording stopped at that point, for obvious reasons). We used (a slightly modified version of) this tool.
From the research we did at the time we can confirm this was/presumably still is a huge problem, at least for European carriers’ broadband segments (acting as amplifiers).

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Misc
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Responsible Disclosure and Academic Freedom, Again

Reading this article from the Guardian,  on this guy apparently being banned from fully discussing research results in his talk at upcoming USENIX Security, leaves me scratching my head once more. Things might (as so often) be more complex than they seem, but this looks like yet-another misconception as for the contribution of security research (and its public discussion) to the greater good of us all. Which is unfortunate for the speakers (I’ve been in a similar situation once, receiving a threatening legal letter from a very large organization one day before one of our Black Hat presentations and can tell you that stuff like that doesn’t add to one’s anticipation of the talk or the event…), for the audience (including some ERNW guys who will be a USENIX-SEC, so, btw, expect a summary post here) and for the whole community of security researchers.

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Events
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IPv6 Hackers Meeting @ IETF 87, Berlin

Next to IETF 87 going on in Berlin in a few days there will be an informal meeting of the “IPv6 Hackers” on Tuesday. We really look forward to personally meet a number of people who we (so far) only know from the associated mailing list or similar machine-enhanced exchange. We hope to contribute as well. Based on the stuff of this workshop from the IPv6 Security Summit at Troopers13 we might give a short project presentation along the lines of “Some Notes on Testing the Real-World IPv6 Capabilities of Commercial Security Products”, providing an overview of some testing done on commercial gear, together with a discussion of testing approaches, tools and key aspects.

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Building
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Some Notes on Types of Security Controls & the Way they’re Implemented in Enterprise Environments

Welcome back, Dear Reader,

in this post I’d like to share some reflections on the (potentially inefficient) way some security controls can be observed to be deployed in complex organisations and what this may mean for the future of those controls.

In general the space of security controls can be categorized according to different schemes, such as:

  • By fundamental principle (preventive, detective, reactive, corrective, deterrent, compensating etc. security controls. see for example this overview or this one or some illustration here).
  • By “state of matter” (e.g. components, implementation, operations. again, for some supplemental information look at this one).
  • By type of admission: whitelisting vs. blacklisting (some general discussion here, the respective Schneier-Ranum Face-Off to be found here, and this is only Bruce’s half, but with a number of comments).
  • Related to the overall architecture of implementation: centralized vs. distributed.

For today’s topic I’ll just focus on the latter two and will introduce those shortly.

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Misc
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Ganz Gallien?

“Nein! Ein von unbeugsamen Galliern bevölkertes Dorf hört nicht auf, dem Eindringling Widerstand zu leisten.”

This is a famous quote pretty much every German kid used to know. Not sure if this still applies though, my three haven’t touched Asterix comics so far. Anyhow, you might ask why I cite this.

Simple answer: see this recent article from the Guardian on a Utah-based ISP “resisting some pressure”. That’s the spirit…

Have a great Sunday everybody,

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Breaking
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Slides & Scripts from Antonios Atlasis’ “Advanced Attack Techniques against IPv6 Networks” Workshop

After his great presentations on IPv6 Extensions Headers and security problems related to fragmentation we had invited Antonios Atlasis to Heidelberg to give  this workshop at ERNW. It was a great experience with many fruitful discussions between the participants (mostly security practitioners from very large organizations planning to have their Internet edge IPv6 enabled within the next 6-12 months) and him/us. Antonios thankfully decided to make his slides and scripts available for those interested in further research on the topics (it should be noted that the scripts have not been tested thoroughly and he’s happy to receive feedback of any kind at antoniosDOTatlasisDOTgmailDOTcom). Today Marc (Heuse) gives his workshop on pentesting in the IPv6 age. Hopefully such events help to move things into the right direction in the IPv6 security space…

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