Our workshop “TLS in the enterprise” was held for the first time at Troopers
2018 and was our special contribution to the IT Security world to increase the
usage of TLS and point out the pitfalls, when switching to TLS.
But time is changing and TLS is a kind of standard nowadays, at least when
looking at HTTPS, but there are still a lot of things to do regarding other
protocols like
The next major release of DirectoryRanger is now available for customers, and
for everyone who would like to try it ;-). Current attacks show that quite often
the topic of Active Directory Security is not on the security agenda, but it
should be, and this was the reason for us to build the tool and, of course, to
maintain and improve it. So what are the major new features released with
DirectoryRanger 1.5.0? Here we go:
With version 1.1.0 our tool DirectoryRanger introduces a new feature:
informational audit checks. These checks do not have a severity rating because
they are just “for your information” and the included information might or might
not contain security issues, depending on other facts. But these checks can help
to reduce your Active Directory attack surface by pointing you to some aspects
which need your attention and at least require to be discussed and documented
(and they might also imply governance measures like a risk acceptance).
As our journey to the new product continues we are facing the typical challenges
of phase 2 in the software development life cycle, the design phase (see
part 1 for the overview of
the phases):
Design and Components
The new tool will deal with Active Directory security so it has to integrate
into large scale Windows based customer environments, which in turn makes the
decision about the components quite easy ;-). We have chosen .NET as our primary
development platform including key components from Microsoft to run our
application, these components include the IIS and Microsoft SQL Express/Server
and of course one Windows Server.
ERNW has a new baby, so please say “hello” to the new ERNW SecTools GmbH ;-).
But why another ERNW company? Short answer: Because we want to contribute to
changing the way how software is built today: insecure, focused on profit and
sometimes made by people who ignore lessons from history. So how can we
contribute in this space? Start changing it ;-).
Confucius said: “The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small
stones” and that’s our way to go. It is not about building error free or
unbreakable software, it is about changing the way how software is built today,
about improving security and about raising the bar.
Our new workshop about
TLS/SSL in the enterprise
will be held for the 1st time at Troopers 2018. So I would like to take the
opportunity and post a short teaser about stuff we will cover in this workshop.
TLS/SSL is a complicated topic especially in enterprise environments due to the
fact, that
encrypted traffic should be inspected e.g. for malware
customers/users must be able to use important applications
crypto attacks are complex and sometimes considered to be only a problem in
theory
the internal CERT wants to have every issue fixed, if feasible or not 😉
impact of configuration changes can not be foreseen
Software inventory is incomplete (do you want to make a bet that Heartbleed is
fixed completely in your environment ;-)? )
… and so forth
In the workshop we will cover all these points, discuss them and share our
experience regarding feasibility and useful mitigating controls. We will explain
the most common SSL vulnerabilities/attacks, demonstrate tools to test (and
sometimes to exploit) them, point out pitfalls and recommend what to do. Let us
have a look at one example, Heartbleed:
Our new
workshop about mobile application testing,
held for the 1st time at the Troopers conference 2013, is coming closer. So I
would like to take the opportunity and post an appetizer for those who are still
undetermined if they should attend the workshop ;-).
While the topic of mobile application testing is a wide field that may contain
reverse engineering, secure storage analysis, vulnerability research, network
traffic analysis and so forth, in the end of the day you have to answer one
question: Can I trust this application and run it on my enterprise devices? So
first you have to define some criteria, which kind of behavior and
characteristics of an application you regard as trustworthy (or not). Let us
peek at malware … besides harming your devices and data, malware is typically:
Microsoft takes this vulnerability quite serious and was acting fast. The
Microsoft Security Response Center announced the availability of a fix last
night in the
MSRC Blog.
The fix will be available via Windows Update on friday, the 21st of september.
So it’s time to get ready for this update ;-).
Actually a Windows Vulnerability
(Microsoft Advisory 2757760) related
to the Internet Explorer Version 7, 8 and 9 is in the news. Microsoft is aware
of the problem, but there’s no patch available yet. We call this a 0-Day :-).
Making the problem even worse, on monday reliable
exploit code
was released within the Metasploit project, so exploit code is already in the
wild.
Disabling Active X and Active Scripting in the Internet Settings
But both of them have some impact: EMET must be deployed before any usage (btw.
EMET can be configured via Group Policies) and disabling Active X and Active
Scripting might break some business relevant web sites (that can be added to the
“Trusted Sites” Zone, but might produce major operational effort).
Some days ago another
advisory
related to a web application firewall (WAF) product was published. This time the
product Airlock by Ergon was affected by a vulnerability
that combines Encoding and NULL Byte attacks to circumvent the pattern based
detection engine. We have described these attacks in detail in our newsletter
“Web Application Firewall Security and The Swiss Army Knife for Web Application Firewalls”
because they belong to a well known category of attacks against WAFs.