Windows

On Saturday, April 26 Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer version 6 until version 11 is under potential risk against drive-by attacks from malicious websites, regardless of the underlying Microsoft operating system and the associated memory protection features integrated with the operating system. Microsoft has assigned CVE-2014-1776 to this unknown use-after-free vulnerability, which in the worst case could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted website. If an attacker successfully exploits this vulnerability, s/he will gain the same rights and privileges as the current user (once again, activated User Account Control [UAC] helps keeping privileges of the user low).

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Microsoft released EMET v4.0  with a new (security) feature that enables protection against fraudulent websites or compromised root certification authorities (do you remember Comodo, DigiNotar, DigiCert, Turktrust et al. ;-)?)

EMET defines via “certificate trust“ a trust chain between the domain name of a website (and its associated website certificate) and a root CA certificate. This is done through so called “pinning rules”. Here is one of the default pinning rules of EMET 4.0 for the domain name login.live.com:

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Today is a great day, its the day, Loki finally runs on all big operating systems. Im proud to announce the first Loki release for Windows!

There are a few things not working (yet / at all) under Windows. Those are:

• The WLCCP Module – ive not yet managed to build and link against asleap on windows [but time may help (-; ]
• TCP-MD5 Auth for BGP – This will never work, as Windows has no TCP-MD5 impl. in the kernel
• The MPLS Module – Had some hassle here with WinPcap, may be working in the future

The most testing so far was done on Windows 7 were all the other functions work as they do on Linux and Mac.

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Actually a Windows Vulnerability (Microsoft Advisory 2757760) related to the Internet Explorer Version 7, 8 and 9 is in the news. Microsoft is aware of the problem, but there’s no patch available yet. We call this a 0-Day :-). Making the problem even worse, on monday reliable exploit code was released within the Metasploit project, so exploit code is already in the wild.

Basically Microsoft suggests two workarounds:

• Usage of EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit)
• Disabling Active X and Active Scripting in the Internet Settings

But both of them have some impact: EMET must be deployed before any usage (btw. EMET can be configured via Group Policies) and disabling Active X and Active Scripting might break some business relevant web sites (that can be added to the “Trusted Sites” Zone, but might produce major operational effort).

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One of the four vulnerabilities rated “critical” from yesterday’s MS patchday, that is MS10-063, has an interesting “Workarounds” section as for MS Internet Explorer. There it’s stated:

“Disabling the support for the parsing of embedded fonts in Internet Explorer prevents this application from being used as an attack vector.”

which, according to the advisory, should/can be done by setting the “Font Downloading” parameter to “Disable”.

Which is exactly what this document suggests. So taking a preventive approach, once more, might have saved some concerns (“Will we be targeted by this one”) and patch/testing time…

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