This blogpost contains summaries of talks from this year’s TROOPERS18 Defense & Management Track.
All Your Cloud Are Belong to Us
The talk “All Your Cloud Belong Are Belong to Us” was held by Nate Warfield, who is a Senior Security Program Manager for the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC).
Before Microsoft he worked as a network engineer about 18 years and 10 of this for a large amount of cell phone companies.
Nate gives an overview about the state of the cloud solution provided by Microsoft, Azure, and how he hunts vulnerabilities in this environment.
Finally he concludes that the giving up your infrastructure to the cloud doesn’t mean that you give up your responsibility.
In various scenarios it might be helpful or even required to have a statically compiled version of Nmap available. This applies to e.g. scenarios where only limited user privileges are available and installing anything to the system might not be desirable.
For such cases I’ve started to create recipes to build such binaries. Similar projects are already available on GitHub, but there are several reasons why I chose to create my own tools:
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.
In this post we’ll take a detailed look at the properties of the Windows Server 2016 IPv6 stack.
I perform(ed) this exercise for several reasons:
Server 2016 is the latest OS released by Microsoft so this might give an indication as for their plans & strategy when it comes to supporting certain specifications.
(here you may keep in mind that the ~50 IETF meetings having passed since the publication of RFC 2460 provided ample opportunity for creative minds to come up with ever new ideas for “enhancing” IPv6, without too much real-life feedback/reality checks from enterprise space though, as simply not many of such organizations have deployed it at scale… or are incentivized to send their employees to week-long meetings in expensive hotels on other continents twice a year…).
as I laid out in this post the configuration approach an organization takes for their servers might depend on the support of specific features.
obviously for both IPv6 planning and operations it might be helpful to understand the respective behavior of individual operating systems (which is why we researched stuff like this or this in the past).
many years ago Microsoft published white papers with details as for the TCP/IP parameters of their OSs (incl. stuff like registry parameters to control it etc.) but I’m not aware of such a document for Server 2016 or Windows 10. I hence hope this post can somewhat contribute to public knowledge of the intricacies of their latest IPv6 stack.
Last week, we decided to take a look onto the EMET library provided by Microsoft. This library is intended to introduce several security features to applications which are not explicitly compiled to use them.
It also adds an additional layer to protect against typical exploiting techniques by filtering library calls, preventing usage of dangerous functions/components and inserting mitigation technologies.
As EMET is already a target for many researchers, we currently only started to get an overview of it’s structure and how the different components are interacting with each other. Today we would like to share some of our results with you.
In a recent assessment, we had to evaluate how Microsoft’s System Management Server (SMS) certificate management solution (CMS) stores and handles certificates. This question came up because sensitive, encrypted user certificates were to be stored in the SMS CMS. Due to the sensitivity of the handled certificates, we assessed the protection capabilities of the certificate management solution against extraction attempts from a local attacker with administrative privileges.
How did we do it?
We determined a five steps approach to gain access to the certificates and be able to decrypt the accessed certificate material:
Ever got a backdoor installed on your computer by your beloved mouse? Here’s the story of a poor mouse that got really, really sick.
Agent “Danger Mouse”
Do you remember the times where people put Teensy-boards and USB hubs in their mouses? [Chris? ;)] Their aim was to attach an additional Human Interface Device (HID, like keyboards or mouses) with some payload in kind of e.g. keystrokes or mouse movements. Also, there are devices available like the USB Rubber Ducky in the housing of a USB thumb drive.
The principle is easy: The tools are using a programmable microcontroller with the capability to emulate USB HID. That’s it. Just program your board of choice with the payload fitting your needs and plug it in at the target computer. The latter will recognize it as a keyboard/mouse and the payload-keystrokes will be entered.
But why should external hardware be used? Many modern gaming peripherals provide functions to store macros on them, including enough onboard memory for little payloads.
Usually I’m not the kind of guy who talks about such economic topics. Because I’m an engineer / security researcher who is exclusively concerned with understanding technical problems and if possible, solving them accordingly. My whole education is based on this and contains predominantly technical aspects of information security. This sometimes makes it difficult to understand what the market cares about (and why some products are being developed / exist on the market 😉 ). Nevertheless, a current engagement for one of our customers made me stumble upon such a product.
A talk about DirectAccess (an IPv6-only VPN solution) was given by our colleague Ali Hardudi during IPv6 summit. Ali has recently finished his master thesis on this topic.
The DirectAccess VPN technology was introduced by Microsoft starting from Windows server 2008. It allows users remotely, seamlessly and securely connect to their internal network resources without a need to provide user credentials, which is done using different technologies such as Windows domain group policies.
PowerView does not use the built in AD cmdlets to be independent from the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT)-AD PowerShell Module which is only compatible with PowerShell 3.0+ and by default only installed on servers that have Active Directory services roles. PowerView, however, is compatible with PowerShell 2.0 and has no outer dependencies. Furthermore, it does not require any installation process.
