Bold Statements
During penetration tests, we often find interesting files on web servers. Almost as often, those files enable us to carry out further attacks with much higher impact. Inspired by Chris Gate’s great series From Low to Pwned, we decided to share the following small piece.
Continue reading “Files Your Webserver Shouldn’t Deliver”
Continue readingToday I had to give the pleasure to give a keynote at the SIGS DC Day on the need to evaluate Cloud Service Providers in a way that looks behind (or at least tries to) security whitepapers and certification reports. The slides can be found here.
I also particularly enjoyed the following two talks:
Sean O’Tool from Swisscom AG covered challenges of an infrastructure to cloud migration. Even though he only briefly touched the topic, I enjoyed his description of their firewalling model: Seeing that centralized firewall operation (or more precisely, rule design and approval) is limited/challenged by the understanding of the application, they transferred control over firewall rule sets (beyond a basic set of infrastructure/ground rules) to the application teams (using of features like OpenStack’s security groups, where he also talked about limitations of those). They compensated the loss of “centralized enforcement by a security group” with rule reviews — an approach that will become way more relevant (and necessary) in the future.
Marc Holitscher from Microsoft covered their “second line of defense”, which is a strong audit framework for controls they implement for their Azure/Office cloud environment. The relevant information (which was new for me too) was that they published a lot of audit information just recently. Details are described here.
Cheers,
Matthias
Last month the annual USENIX Security Symposium with its co-located workshops (WOOT, CSET, FOCI, ASE, and HotSec) was held in Austin, Texas. The program of the conference together with the published papers can be found here and information on the workshops can be found here.
The research topics were quite diverse and included subjects such as low-level attacks, cryptographic attacks, and vehicle attacks. To give you an impression on the research that has been presented at the conference, let us discuss some of the talks in the following:
Continue reading “25th USENIX Security Symposium & WOOT Workshop”
Continue readingSome years ago I discussed the meaning of the term “control” in this post, but at the time I was mainly referring to the noun “control”. Given I’ll extensively use the term “control” as a verb in the next parts of “the DMZ series” and some upcoming talks I reflected a bit on its meaning (as a verb). In the following I’ll lay out the definition/understanding to be employed at those occasions.
Continue reading “To Control Something”
Continue readingInternal workshops are one of the reoccurring events at ERNW, that help us to gain knowledge in areas outside our usual expertise. One of the recent workshops which happened during the week from August 22nd-25th was Hardware Hacking. Held by Brian Butterly (@BadgeWizard) and Dominic Spill (@dominicgs), this workshop took place in two parts. Brian kickstarted the introductory session by guiding us through the fundamental steps of Hardware Hacking. Brian did an excellent job of making things simpler by giving a detailed explanation on the basic concepts. For a beginner in hardware hacking, the topic could be rather intimidating if not handled properly.
Continue reading “Hardware Hacking Week @ ERNW”
Continue readingThis 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 readingUsers of the KNX, a standard for home automation bus systems, may already have come across KNXnet/IP (also known as EIBnet/IP): It is an extension for KNX that defines Ethernet as a communication medium for KNX which allows communication with KNX buses over IP driven networks. Additionally, it enables one to couple multiple bus installations over IP gateways, or so called KNXnet/IP gateways.
In the course of some KNX related research we’ve had access to various KNXnet/IP gateways from different vendors, most of them coupled in a lab setup for testing purposes. The typical tools used for such tasks are ETS, the professional software developed by the creators of KNX (proprietary, test licenses available) and eibd, an open source implementation of the KNX standard developed by the TU Vienna.
Continue reading “KNXmap: A KNXnet/IP Scanning and Auditing Tool”
Continue readingThis year’s MRMCD16 had a topic that immediately let me submit a talk about medical device security: “diagnosis:critical”. Or to quote the official website:
Security issues in soft- and hardware have a low chance of healing, especially in medical IT.
Despite years of therapy using code reviews and programming guidelines, we still face huge amounts of vulnerable software that probably is in need of palliative treatment.
Security vulnerabilities caused by the invasion of IT in the medical sector are becoming real threats. From insulin pumps over analgesic pumps through to pace makers, more and more medical devices have been hacked already. This year's motto "mrmcd2016 - diagnosis:critical" stands summarizing for the current state of the whole IT sector.
Continue reading “MRMCD16 – diagnosis:critical”
Welcome back to the radare2 reversing tutorials. If you’ve missed the previous parts, you can find them here and here.
Last time we’ve used the rabin2 application to view the strings found inside the challenge01 binary to find password candidates. Based on the results we looked into the assembly to find the correct password. In this post, we’ll go through the next challenge and try out some of the features provided by radare2.
Continue reading “Reverse Engineering With Radare2 – Part 2”
Continue readingI’m currently involved in a “DMZ Redesign” effort in a sufficiently large enterprise (800+ hosts in “the DMZ”) and I thought this might be an opportunity to reflect on some aspects of “DMZ networks” in a series of posts.
Continue reading “Considerations on DMZ Design in 2016, Part 1”
Continue reading