Misc

I’m happy to announce the publication of the paper Windows memory forensics: Identification of (malicious) modifications in memory-mapped image files at this years DFRWS USA, and the release of the corresponding volatility plugin. With this research came also an update to the Ptenum family (affecting especially the ptemalfind plugin), which makes the plugins reliable in identifying modified pages despite memory combining, so make sure to grab the newest version from the Github repository.

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Although, more and more companies start to move their IT-Infrastructure from on-premise to public cloud solutions like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, public cloud providers are not an option for every organization. This is where private cloud platforms come into play as they give organizations direct control over their information, can be more energy efficient than other on-premise hosting solutions, and offer companies the possibility to manage their data centers efficiently. OpenStack is a widely deployed, open-source private cloud platform many companies and universities use.

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In symmetric-key cryptography, we typically distinguish two types of encryption schemes: block ciphers and stream ciphers. Block ciphers divide a plaintext into blocks of a fixed size (e.g., 64 or 128 bits) and encrypt one such block of data as a whole. Stream ciphers, on the other hand, consider the plaintext as a continuous stream of data. The stream cipher maintains an internal state and in each step it outputs one bit or several bits and updates its internal state. The output bit stream is then combined with the plaintext, usually using the XOR operation. One advantage of stream ciphers is that their resource requirements are lower than those of block ciphers in many application scenarios. This makes them particularly useful in lightweight cryptography targeting resource constrained devices such as low-cost RFID tags.

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The IMF Conference is the International Conference on IT Security Incident Management & IT Forensics. This year it took place from May 23 to 24 in Munich. The schedule lists a lot of interesting talks. One of the talks was my presentation on a paper about Ceph forensics, based on my Master Thesis:

The concept of Software Defined Storage (SDS) has become very popular over the last few years.  It is used in public, private, and hybrid clouds to store enterprise, private, and other kinds of data. Ceph is an open-source software that implements an SDS stack.

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Hi!

We’re excited to announce the nearly complete composition of the Active Directory & Azure Security Track on Troopers 23 with fantastic speakers!

Here we go:

“Dumping NTHashes from Azure AD”
(Nestori Syynimaa)

“Hidden Pathways: Exploring the Anatomy of ACL-Based Active Directory Attacks and Building Strong Defenses”
(Jonas Bülow Knudsen, Alexander Schmitt)

“Priority for Effective Action – A Practical Model for quantifying the Risk of Active Directory Attacks”
(Mars Cheng, Dexter Chen)

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In this blog post, we are sharing summaries of talks from the Hack in the Box Conference in Amsterdam (HITBSecConf2023), the final HITB conference in Amsterdam. Before we do that, however, we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to the organizers of the conference for putting together such an insightful and engaging event.

Dr. Bramwell Brizendine – Windows Syscalls in Shellcode: Advanced Techniques for Malicious Functionality

The talk by Bramwell Brizendine covered the topic of syscall usage in shell code. The general idea here is to hide from AV/EDR systems by not using APIs such as CreateProcessA, which may be monitored, but to directly call into the corresponding kernel functions. This can be accomplished for example with the syscall CPU instruction (see ¹, ² and ³ for more information). While this technique is not perfectly stealthy and can still be detected (e.g., with a kernel driver), it circumvents at least inline-hooks in user space. Another downside is the effort of building shell code that directly uses syscalls. Besides more overhead in preparing everything for the syscall (for example manually creating appropriate structs), the correct syscall ID must be gathered, which can change between kernel versions.

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Hey there,

I am going to disclose two bug classes I found a while ago in CheckPoint R77.30: Two buffer overflows in the username (no shit) and HTTP method of a request to the administrative UI pre-auth and some interesting injections into the TCL web interface.

Let’s start with the TCL part. The web interface reacted pretty weird when a payload contained a colon. Diving deeper into this it became clear that a colon would actually cause an error from the TCL interpreter. By going down this rabbit hole and learning some TCL (:D) you could see that injecting a colon breaks some part of the application code, probably because colons are control characters in TCL e.g. preceding a global variable in TCL (::MyVar) or separating namespaces.

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Spymax is a mobile Remote Administration Tool (RAT) that enables an attacker to control victims’ devices through an Android malware. Once the malware is installed on a phone, the attacker can execute many attacks that highly impact the confidentiality and integrity of the victim’s data, as well as the victim’s privacy. It is powerful, widely available, and does not require root privileges on the victim’s device. In this blogpost, I show the capabilities of this RAT and analyze how its Android malware works.

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Over the course of the last 2 years we performed vulnerability research on several Endpoint Management & Monitoring Solutions. The results were already partially presented in security advisories which were published on this blog during the last two years. The advisories can be found here:

• Ivanti DSM Suite
• Solarwinds N-Central
• Nagios XI
• Broadcom Automic Automation (UC4)

We also recently presented the results on Troopers 2022. Now the results have been published in a more in-depth manner in the form of a technical whitepaper. The whitepaper can be found here.

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Updated on 20.06.22 with CVEs and link to Broadcom Security Notice.

In April 2021 we reported seven vulnerabilities in Broadcom Automic Automation (UC4) 12.3.5+hf.3. CVE IDs were assigned on 16.06.22, the corresponding Broadcom Security Notice can be found here.

The vulnerabilities have been found in the course of a research project, in which we analyzed the security of multiple Endpoint Management solutions. Similar vulnerabilities have been found in other solutions as we pointed out in previous posts about the Ivanti DSM Suite, Nagios XI, and Solarwinds N-Central.  The outcome of the research project will be published as a whitepaper and a conference talk at Troopers 2022.

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