Last week Will “harmj0y” Schroeder published an excellent technical article titled “Not A Security Boundary: Breaking Forest Trusts” in which he lays out how a highly critical security compromise can be achieved across a forest boundary, resulting from a combination of default AD (security) settings and a novel attack method. His post is a follow-up to the DerbyCon talk “The Unintended Risks of Trusting Active Directory” which he had given together with Lee Christensen and Matt Nelson at DerbyCon (video here). They will also discuss this at the upcoming Troopers Active Directory Security Track (details on some more talks, including Sean Metcalf’s one, can be found in this post or this one).
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White Paper on Incident Analysis and Forensics in Docker Environments
In this article, we describe the impact of the increased use of Docker in corporate environments on forensic investigations and incident analysis. Even though Docker is being used more and more (Portworx, Inc., 2017), the implications of the changed runtime environment for forensic processes and tools have barely been considered. We describe the technological basics of Docker and, based on them, outline the differences that occur with respect to digital evidence and previously used methods for evidence acquisition. Specifically, we look at digital evidence within a Docker container which are lost or need to be acquired in different ways compared to a classical virtual machine, and what new traces and opportunities arise from Docker itself.
Continue reading Continue readingWhite Paper on Multi-Factor Authentication in Microsoft Windows Environments
A new ERNW whitepaper was just published. I wrote this whitepaper in the course of my bachelor thesis and it examines multi-factor authentication in Microsoft Windows environments:
Credential theft and the subsequent reuse of stolen credentials are a significant problem in today’s information security. To counter the associated risks, a planned approach is required as part of a comprehensive security architecture program. This includes the implementation of multi-factor authentication as an important building block. This whitepaper covers the relevant steps of implementing a multi-factor authentication system in an enterprise environment and closes with a security evaluation.
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White Paper on Incident Handling First Steps, Preparation Plans, and Process Models
We just published my Whitepaper about First Steps, Preparation Plans, and Process Models for Incident Handling, that I wrote to pass the time between Christmas and New Year. The whitepaper sums up information that I consider to be useful to prepare for IT security incidents as a conclusion from the incidents in which we supported over the past year.
Have you for example thought about classes of incidents that are most likely to affect you and formulated Incident Handling Preparation Plans for those incidents?
Continue reading Continue readingAn MLD Testing Methodology
Based on recent research in the ERNW IPv6 lab and with our MLD talk looming we’ve put together a (as we think) comprehensive document discussing how to thoroughly test MLD implementations in various components (network devices or servers/clients). We hope it can contribute to a better understanding of the protocol and that it can serve as either a checklist for your own environment or as a source of inspiration for researchers looking at MLD themselves.
Continue reading Continue readingEvaluation of IPv6 Capabilities of Commercial IPAM Solutions
Originating from a customer IPv6 deployment project, in early 2014 we defined a number of requirements as for the IPv6 capabilities of IPAM solutions, with a certain focus on security-related requirements (due to the specific environment of the project). We subsequently performed a practical evaluation of several commercial solutions, based on documentation, lab implementation and vendor communication.
We just released
a newsletter describing the requirements and the results of the evaluation.
It
should be noted that in the interim newer versions of the evaluated products
might be available which might have enhanced features. Hence, from our
perspective, understanding the requirements of an individual environment might
even be more important than the actual results described in that document (as
those only reflect a certain point of time). We hope to contribute here to a
well-informed requirements definition and decision taking process on your
side.
Feel free to get back to us on any of the points laid out or, even better, join
us at the Troopers
IPv6 Security Summit
in Heidelberg on Mar 16th/17th in order to discuss any related points.
Dynamics of IPv6 Prefixes within the LIR Scope in the RIPE NCC Region
To contribute to the current debate on IPv6 route deaggregation & “strict-filtering” performed by certain ISPs we just released a white paper on “Dynamics of IPv6 Prefixes within the LIR Scope in the RIPE NCC Region“. I will give a talk on the overall topic later today at the Routing Working Group. We sincerely hope that the IPv6 community becomes aware of the inherent issues, and that practical solutions can be found which consider & meet the needs of the different parties involved.
Continue reading Continue readingERNW 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.
Continue reading Continue readingVMDK 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
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 ;-)).
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