Building

ERNW Newsletter 42: Dangers of Disabled Pre-Boot Authentication in Corporate Environments

It’s been a long time… we just published an ERNW Newsletter. Here’s the abstract:

In order to protect sensitive data on corporate laptops, most companies are using full disk encryption solutions. While native encryption products like Microsoft Bitlocker, Apple FileVault and open source solutions like TrueCrypt were already heavily scrutinized by security researchers, many popular commercial third party products are to some point still black boxes.

In this paper, we discuss Check Point Full Disk Encryption (FDE) with active “Windows Integrated Logon”. Checkpoint FDE is a software package that is part of Check Point Endpoint Security and offers full disk encryption on Microsoft  Windows and Mac OS X systems. The “Windows Integrated Logon” feature reduces total cost of ownership by disabling pre-boot authentication. Check Point themselves warn about security risk associated with using this feature.

We argue that missing TPM integration and integrity checks make Check Point FDE with activated ”Windows Integrated Logon“ highly insecure against sophisticated attackers. Furthermore, we demonstrate the extraction of AES encryption
keys on a running system and subsequent decryption of the encrypted disk. Our analysis is limited to Check Point FDE v.7.4.9 on Windows operating systems and was performed during a penetration test of an encrypted customer enterprise laptop. Therefore, we concentrate on the client architecture and ignore other aspects like enterprise management interfaces.

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The document itself can be found here.

Enjoy reading & Happy Holidays to everybody

Enno

 

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Breaking

VMDK Has Left the Building — Newsletter

We are pleased to announce that we summarized the results from our VMDK research in our latest newsletter.

We hope you enjoy the reading and will get some “food for thought”!

The newsletter can be found at:
ERNW_Newsletter_41_ExploitingVirtualFileFormats.pd

A digitally signed version can be found at:
ERNW_Newsletter_41_ExploitingVirtualFileFormats_signed.pdf

Enjoy your weekend,
Matthias

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Building

Windows Server 2008 R2 BSI-compliance

Recommendations by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI – Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) are obligatory for German government agencies, civil services and authorities (like recommendations of the NIST are relevant to American government agencies and authorities). They are often used as references and security best practices in other countries as well. Hence it is hard to understand why the recommendations on how to harden Windows Server 2008 based systems were published only some weeks ago and only on a preliminary draft basis (which is, obviously, better than nothing ;-)).

We at ERNW, however, did an overall baseline security approach of Windows Server 2008 R2 and Active Directory for a large German authority last year. The aim was to fullfil the requirements of the German Federal Office for Information Security without having precise technical guidelines by the BSI itself (from our side we do have guidelines of course ;-)). The hardened Windows Server 2008 R2 environment was then approved at the end of 2011 by the German BSI. Now we published the results of our overall approach in our latest newsletter [German language].

Enjoy reading!
Friedwart Kuhn

PS: There’s also a digitally signed version of the newsletter. (Because it is signed with a qualified certificate, the validation requires an appropriate validation software, for example SecSigner from SecCommerce – which is free software).

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Misc

Sell Your Own Device – A Field Study on Decommissioning of Mobile Devices

On Friday we released our latest technical newsletter with the fancy title “Sell Your Own Device – A Field Study on Decommissioning of Mobile Devices”. It is the result of a field study on decommissioned mobile business devices bought on eBay and about how stored data may be extracted in different ways.

As always we love to share plenty of practical advise: At the end of the newsletter you will find the mitigating controls to securely handle mobile devices at the end of their life cycle process.

Find the newsletter here.
And a digitally signed version here.

Special thanks go to Sergej Schmidt for performing the field study.

Talking about our great team: Meet the whole ERNW crew at TROOPERS12, or even better: Dig deeper into mobile security together with Rene Graf during the mobile security workshop. There are a few slots left.

Enjoy the newsletter & hopefully see you soon in Heidelberg!
Florian

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Breaking

A Wrap-up on MFD Security

On last year’s TROOPERS11, Matthias (mluft) and I gave a talk on Multifunction Devices. Hardly surprising: It was related to the state of secure operation of MFDs. It was heavily motivated by experiences we collected out in the wild. We faced a frightening low level of awareness concerning the role of MFDs for the overall security picture – in particular regarding the processing of sensitive data…

However, instead of only showing and proving well-known weaknesses and vulnerabilities, we decided to adapt ERNW’s Seven Sisters model in order to match the needs of secure MFD operation and to develop some kind of guideline. As Matthias already lost some words on this, I’m not gonna waste your valuable time by repeating, what has already been said. However I described our approach and our thoughts on that topic in a recently published ERNW Newsletter. If for what ever reason you didn’t see our talk or even didn’t attend TROOPERS11 at all, have a look on Newsletter 37 and give us feedback on what you think about the whole topic…

Btw: Enno just wrote some lines about what’s so special about the TROOPERS conference. In case you might want to discuss mentioned and related topics at first hand, think about joining TROOPERS12. For our part, we cannot wait to come together at Heidelberg next March.

See you there
Michael alias Micele

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Building

Certificate Based Device Authentication with iOS Devices

We recently performed a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) implementation of certificate based auth with iPads in some large environment. So far the focus has been mainly on WLAN access; VPN and EAS authentication are going to follow in the next step.

As we figure that the topic might be of interest for some of you, we’ve extracted a certain, not-too-customer-specific part of the deliverable and converted it into an ERNW newsletter. Special thanks go to Rene Graf for leading the project! 😉

Of course, this stuff is going to be covered in much more detail in the Troopers12 edition of our “iOS Security Workshop” (see here for the agenda of this year or here for a German version of the current one).

Enjoy reading (& implementing)!

thanks

Enno

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Breaking

Research on “Application Virtualization” – Results online now

Just wanted to let you know that we sent out ERNW Newsletter 32 end of last week. As we promised it includes the results of  research regarding the question “Is browser virtualization a valid security control in order to mitigate browser based security risks?”.

Simon did a great job with writing the latest newsletter. It’s a 30-page document which should help you to have a basis for well-informed decisions when it comes to the deployment of an application virtualization technology.

Download a signed version of the PDF here, or visit the archive to browse other issues of our highly technical newsletters.

Best wishes,
Florian

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