I have the pleasure to visit this year’s USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, DC. Besides the nice venue close to the national mall, there are also several co-located workshops. Every night I will try and provide a summary of those presentations I regard as most interesting. However, I hope to manage to keep up with it as there are a lot of interesting events, people to meet, and still some projects to keep up with. The short summaries below are from the 6th USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats.
Continue reading Continue readingMFD Vulnerabilities
A recent post describing some nasty vulnerabilities in HP multifunction devices (MFDs) brings back memories of a presentation Micele and I gave at Troopers11 on MFD security. The published vulnerabilities are highly relevant (such as unauthenticated retrieval of administrative credentials) and reminded me of some of the basic recommendations we gave. MFD vulnerabilities are regularly discovered, and it is often basic stuff such as hardcoded $SECRET_INFORMATION (don’t get me wrong here, I fully appreciate the quality of the published research, but it is just surprising — let’s go with this attribute 😉 — that those types of vulnerabilities still occur that often). Yet many environments do not patch their MFDs or implement other controls. As it is not an option to not use MFDs (they are already present in pretty much every environment, and the vast majority of vendors periodically suffer from vulnerabilities), let’s recall some of our recommendations as those would have mitigated the risk resulting from the published vulnerability:
Continue reading Continue readingCross-Site Request Forgery with Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
During one of our last projects in a large environment we encountered an interesting flaw. Although it was not possible to exploit it in this particular context, it’s worth to be mentioned here. The finding was about Cross-Site Request Forgery, a quite well-known attack that forces a user to execute unintended actions within the authenticated context of a web application. With a little help of social engineering (like sending a link via email, chat, embedded code in documents, etc…) an attacker may force the user to execute actions of the attacker’s choice.
Continue reading Continue readingIPv6 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…]
Basic OS X Hardening & DMA
In the course of a recent endpoint assessment, we also had a OS X 10.8 client system as a target. While we still rely on the Firewire “capability” of unlocking systems on a regular base (using this great tool), we noticed that Apple released a patch to disable Firewire DMA access whenever the system is in a locked state (e.g. with an active screensaver or no user logged in). As we test the Firewire DMA access vulnerability quite often (at least we thought so 😉 ) to prepare for demonstrations in the board room or client assessments, we were quite surprised that we must have actually missed that nice update. In order to verify the effectiveness of the patch, we ran our typical test bed and can quite happily confirm that the update successfully mitigates Firewire DMA access in locked system states.
Continue reading Continue readingSNMP 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).
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.
Continue reading Continue readingIPv6 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.
Continue reading Continue readingBlackBerry 10 USB Modes
So we got these shiny new BlackBerry Q10 and Z10 device laying on the desk one morning. It’s my first BlackBerry, I have to admit, but never the less, the hole wushy GUI and touchy glass stuff wasn’t my main concern, instead i took a look at the stuff going on while you connect the phone (do i have to call it blackberry? its a phone, isn’t it?) to your computer.
Continue reading Continue readingSome 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.
Continue reading Continue reading