Building

Agile Development & Security

I’m a big fan of Chris Gates’ publications on DevOops and From Low to Pwned. The content reflects a lot of issues that we also experience in many assessments in general and assessments in agile environments in particular. In addition, we were supporting several projects recently that were organized in an agile way. In this post, I want to summarize some thoughts on how security work can/should be integrated into agile projects. Continue reading “Agile Development & Security”

Continue reading
Building

Considerations on DMZ Design in 2016, Part 3: Some Notes on Firewall Rule Management

This is the 3rd part of this loose series on considerations of (operating) DMZs in 2016 (part 1 on the role of a DMZ is can be found here, part 2 on reverse proxies here).
Again, I dare to deviate a bit from the plan & order I initially had in mind – today I will cover one process whose maturity may significantly influence the overall security posture of a DMZ environment: firewall rule management.

Continue reading “Considerations on DMZ Design in 2016, Part 3: Some Notes on Firewall Rule Management”

Continue reading
Building

(Securely) Updating Smart Devices / Some Considerations

How to provide updates to IoT devices – yes, I’m aware this might be a overly broad generalization for many different devices – has been the topic of many discussions in the last years (for those interested the papers from the “Internet of Things Software Update Workshop (IoTSU)” might be a good starting point).
Given Matthias and I will moderate the respective session at tomorrow’s IoT Insight Summit I started writing down some points that we consider relevant in this context.

Continue reading “(Securely) Updating Smart Devices / Some Considerations”

Continue reading
Building

IPv6 Source Address Selection

As we all know an IPv6 enabled host can have multiple addresses. In order to select a source address for a to-be established outbound connection, operating systems implement a source address selection mechanism that evaluates multiple source address candidates and selects the (potentially) best candidate. Criteria for this selection are defined in RFC6724 (which obsoletes RFC 3484).

Continue reading “IPv6 Source Address Selection”

Continue reading
Building

Diving into EMET

Last week, we decided to take a look onto the EMET library provided by Microsoft. This library is intended to introduce several security features to applications which are not explicitly compiled to use them.

It also adds an additional layer to protect against typical exploiting techniques by filtering library calls, preventing usage of dangerous functions/components and inserting mitigation technologies.

As EMET is already a target for many researchers, we currently only started to get an overview of it’s structure and how the different components are interacting with each other. Today we would like to share some of our results with you.

Continue reading “Diving into EMET”

Continue reading
Building

Considerations on DMZ Design in 2016, Part 2: A Quick Digression on Reverse Proxies

This is the second part of a series with considerations on DMZ networks in 2016 (part 1 can be found here). Beforehand I had planned to cover classification & segmentation approaches in this one, but after my little rant on how “the business” might approach & think about reverse proxies in the first part, I felt tempted to elaborate a bit further on this particular topic. I kindly ask for your patience 😉 and will digress a bit for the moment.

Continue reading “Considerations on DMZ Design in 2016, Part 2: A Quick Digression on Reverse Proxies”

Continue reading