A quick update on the workshop we’ve just finished at Hack in the Box 2012 Amsterdam:
Due to popular demand we decided to bring the slides online without wasting any more time. The official website of the conference is currently experiencing some problems due to high interest in all the stuff what was released in the last two days. Great conference!
Here you go: HITB2012AMS ERNW VMDK Has Left the Building [PDF, 6MB, link fixed]
Continue readingUpdate #1: Slides are available for download here.
In the course of our ongoing cloud security research, we’re continuously thinking about potential attack vectors against public cloud infrastructures. Approaching this enumeration from an external customer’s (speak: attacker’s 😉 ) perspective, there are the following possibilities to communicate with and thus send malicious input to typical cloud infrastructures:
As there are already several successful exploits against management interfaces (e.g. here and here) and guest/hypervisor interaction (see for example this one; yes, this is the funny one with that ridiculous recommendation “Do not allow untrusted users access to your virtual machines.” ;-)), we’re focusing on the upload of files to cloud infrastructures in this post. According to our experience with major Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud providers, the most relevant file upload possibility is the deployment of already existing virtual machines to the provided cloud infrastructure. However, since a quick additional research shows that most of those allow the upload of VMware-based virtual machines and, to the best of our knowledge, the VMware virtualization file format was not analyzed as for potential vulnerabilities yet, we want to provide an analysis of the relevant file types and present resulting attack vectors.
Continue readingReading this advisory I’m quite tempted to emit another rant on the relationship of heavy use of 3rd party components, lack of (security) quality assurance and services running at times where they’re not needed (see second workaround here). I’ll refrain from that for today. Just wanted to let you know that the underlying vulnerability in Struts2 was initially discovered by Meder Kydyraliev who gives this talk at Troopers in two weeks. He’ll certainly describe the inner workings of this one, and others… 😉
Continue readingJust 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.
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