Monthly Archives: October 2013

Everyone shuffles in slowly on the second morning of the con. I spent the pre-keynote hour with other attendees sitting around looking tired and comparing notes on gout symptoms.  (PSA: if the ball of your foot starts hurting really bad one day, it’s gout, take a handful of Advil and go to your doctor immediately.)

• Impact Security
• NetIQ
• SWAMP

You can also see a bunch of great pictures from the event courtesy Catherine Clark!

Blindspots

The keynote this morning is from Robert “RSnake” Hansen, now of White Hat. It’s about blind spots we all have in security.  Don’t take this as an attack, be self reflective.

Blindspot #1 – Network & Host Security

Internetworked computers is a very complex system and few of us 100% understand every step and part of it.

How many people do network segregation, have their firewall on an admin network, use something more secure than a default Linux install for their webservers, harden their kernel, log off-host and log beyond standard logs? These are all cheap and useful.

Like STS, it was only considered very tightly and the privacy considerations weren’t identified.

Blindspot #2 – Travel and OPSEC

Security used to be more of a game. Now the internet has become militarized. Don’t travel with your laptop. Because – secret reasons I’ll tell you if you ask. (?)

[Ed. Apparently I’m not security 3l33t enough to know what this is about, he really didn’t say.]

Blindspot #3 – Adversaries

You seed to be able to see things from “both sides” and know your adversary (personally ideally). Some of them want to talk! Don’t send them to jail, talk and learn. Yes, you can.

Blindspot #4 – Target Fixation

Vulnerabilities aren’t created equal. Severities vary. DREAD calculations vary widely. Don’t trust a scanner’s DREAD. Gut check but then do it on paper because your gut is often not correct. Often we have “really bad!” vulnerabilities we obsess about that aren’t really that severe.

Download Fierce to do DNS enumeration, do bing IP search, nmap/masscan/unicornscan for open ports.

Blindspot #5 – Compliance vs Security

These aren’t very closely related.  Compliance gets you little badges and placated customers. Security actually protects your systems and data. Some people exercise willful negligence when they choose compliance over security. Compliance also pulls spend to areas that don’t help security. Compliance doesn’t care about what hackers do and it doesn’t evolve quickly.

Blindspot #6 – The Consumer

Consumers don’t really understand the most rudimentary basics of how the Internet works and really don’t understand the security risks of anything they do. They’re not bad or stupid but they can’t be expected to make well informed decisions. So don’t make security opt in.

We the security industry are not pro-consumer – we’re pro-business. Therefore we may be the first ones against the wall when the revolution comes. Give them their privacy now.

So pick one, work on it, we’ll be less blind!

Big Data, Little Security?

By Manoj Tripathi from PROS in Houston.

Big Data is still emerging and doesn’t have the mature security controls that older data platforms have.

Big data is a solution to needs for high volume, high velocity, and/or rich variety of data.  Often distributed, resilient, and not hardware constrained (but sometimes is).

Hadoop is really a framework, with HDFS, Zookeeper, mapreduce, pig/hive, hbase (or cassandra?). He’ll talk a lot about this framework because it’s so ubiquitous.

NoSQL – Cassandra (eventually consistent, highly available, partition tolerant), MongoDB (consistent, partition tolerant).

Security is an afterthought in Big Data.  It can be hard to identify sensitive data (schemaless). He says there’s provenance issues and enhanced insider attacks but I don’t know… Well, if you consider “Big Data” as just large mineable data separate from the actual technology, then sure, aggregate data insights are more valuable to steal… His provenance concern is that data is coming from less secured items like phones/sensors but that’s a bit of a strawman, the data sources for random smaller RDBMSes aren’t all high security either…

Due to the distributed architecture of hadoop etc. there’s a large attack surface. Plus Hadoop has multiple communication protocols, auth mechanisms, endpoint types… Most default settings in Hadoop on all of these are “no security” and you can easily bypass most security mechanisms, spoof, accidentally delete data… Anonymous access, username in URL, no perm checking, service level auth disabled, etc.

Hadoop added Kerberos support, this helps a lot. You can encrypt data in transit, use SSL on the admin dashboards.

But – it’s hard to configure, and enterprises might not like “another” auth infrastructure. It also has preconditions like no root access to some machines and no communication over untrusted networks. And it has a lot of insecure-by-default choices itself (symmetric keys, http SPNEGO has to be turned on in browsers, Oozie user is a super-user with auth disabled by default). No encryption at rest Kerberos RPC is unencrypted. Etc, etc, etc.

To Cassandra.  Same deal. CLI has no auth by default. Insecure protocols.

NoSQL vulns – injections just like with SQL. Sensitive data is copied to various places, you can add new attributes to column families.

Practical Steps To Secure It

Cassandra – write your own authorization/authentication plugin.  [Ed. Really?] But this has keyspace and column family granularity only. 1.2 has internal auth. Enable node-node and client-node encryption. If you do this at least it’s not naiively vulnerable. Also, use disk support for encryption.

Hadoop – basically wait for Project Rhino. Encryption, key mgmt, token based unified auth, cell level auth in hbase. Do threat modeling. Eliminate sensitive data, use field level encryption for sensitive fields, use OS or file level encryption mechanisms. Basically, run it in a secured environment or you’re in trouble.  Apache Knox can enforece a single point of access for auth to Hadoop services but has scalability/reliability issues. Can turn on kerberos stuff if you have to…

Also. commercial hadoop/cassandra have more options.

We move into the afternoon of LASCON. The vendor room was all abuzz, complete with lockpicking village.

Stupid Webappsec Tricks

Zane Lackey, Security Engineer Manager from Etsy (@zanelackey)

XSS

Data driven security – look at your data instead of using your presuppositions about how attacks work.

Overwrite common methods but only phone home on interesting payloads.

8477 XSS attempts with mostly alert(), prompt(), confirm() (or multiples thereof). The payloads are mostly what you’d expect, “XSS,” document.cookie, integers (from scanners). Note you can’t match on “document.cookie” because it’ll already be expanded, so look for your domains, unique cookies, etc.

What else detects XSS well?  Chrome’s XSS Auditor. Works great.  But it can defend the user but doesn’t fix the XSS.

Server side attempt –

1. Scan input for HTML esscapes/tag creation.
2. If found, set flag to true and create array of hostile input.
3. At output time, check flag, see if any hostile input is being output as valid HTML.
4. If hostile input is being output, alert!

Need to fail open, stripping will break your app… And it should take you 20 minutes to push to production so detect to fix is a short path!

SQL Injection

These are attack chains that can be instrumented. Detection step then exploit step.

Alert on SQL syntax errors showing up in your application today. It’s a bug even if it’s not an exploit.

Watch logs for unique sensitive db table names in requests.  Occasional false positives are OK.

A SQL injection exploit response will be huge sized, often larger than is normal, detect that. Whitelist stuff that is supposed to give huge responses.

The more alerts you have in an attack chain the more visibility you have, but false positives happen. But if it’s happening in order down the chain, it’s probably not false.

“Temporary” debug stuff is permanent. How do you find this automatically? Access logs.

Map access logs to code paths. Endpoints that don’t get requests are anomalous. Alert off it then go take it out.

Attacker Trix

Cheapest way to find webapp vulns – Automation. Your best attackers are doing it manually anyway, but may as well beat out the kiddies. Break off-the-shelf scanners. They give off strong detection signals. User agents, request patterns, requests for stuff that doesn’t exist (*.asp or php on a Java site, for example).

Blocking IPs is easy but dangerous. You’ll break lots of legit things. IPs are not a strong correlation to identity.

1. Classify a request as being from a scanner
2. If yes, weight based on confidence
3. Feed request into rate limiter (see Nick G’s rate limiting at scale talk) and drop if above threshold. They return a 439 “Request Not Handmade” 🙂

This doesn’t impact browsing but does scripting. Set your thresholds high; allows for false positives but a scanner will definitely peg it.

Be ready for the weirdness that is the Internet! Tried auto-banning accounts that do scanning. They saw 437 scanners over the last week and only 10 were authenticated and 5 were false positives. Browser plugins is our guess. So don’t auto-ban.

Attacks don’t always happen like you’d expect.  Look at the data before you make decisions. Get the instrumentation you need to make those decisions.

“Run a bug bounty program and the Internet shows up!”

And of course you can then insert false data sets to screw with people and increase the cost of attack.

We don’t run scanners of our own because it’s a time sink and requires manual babysitting. We have taken WAF concepts and build them into the apps; since we deploy 30x/day we don’t need the “coverage in the meanwhile” functionality they provide.

Stalking a City for Fun and Frivolity

By Brendon O’Connor, CTO of Malice Afterthought and law student. About CreepyDOL wifi surveillance. He was wearing a kilt and started out by telling us we’d “lost the mandate of heaven.” Why is this? Well…

Everything leaks too much data. Privacy has been disregarded. Fundamental changes are needed to fix this. We need to democratize security – the government is the worst way to do this.

Especially the case of the US persecuting legitimate security researches like Weev for doing things like accessing public information on Web sites.

Wireless.  Your devices advertise networks they know for all our convenience. His little doodads find your probe list of wifi locations and gps location. Now we need a distributed way of doing this on a large scale with no centralized control. Academic sensor networks are kinda like this, but expensive. Hence, the F-BOMB hardware gizmo.

Raspberry Pi based, 5W, $57.08. Uses connection to municipal wifi to phone home, with automatic portal-clickthrough. Reticle, leaderless command and control software. Uses TOR to go out.

CreepyDOL is distribute computation for distributed systems. Want to digest on the nodes to minimize net traffic. Centralized querying for centralized questions only.  Filters include Nosiness, Observation, and Mining. Visualization using Unity (the game engine). Oh look, you can see a map mashup of people wandering around and click on them and find their name and other useful info.

Bottom line is that all these technologies leak info about you like it’s going out of style and it’s pretty simple to get Orwellian levels of visibility on you for one low price.

Gauntlt

I missed this in favor of the next talk; I’ve seen about a dozen gauntlt presentations over time since I know James, but here’s the slides! Integrate security into your CI pipeline you freaks!

Penetration Testing: The Other Stuff

David Hughes, OWASP Austin president and Red Team analyst for GM.

This started as being about organizational skills… It’s general tips on making your life as a pen tester easier.

• Clients aren’t always right about their environment and scope creep can happen.
• Don’t assume you’ll have Internet, there’ll be proxies…
• Prep your tools and do updates and test it ahead of time.
• Rehearse your toolchain
• Title your terminals
• Use mind maps (Freemind), outline tools (NoteCase Pro) to organize tools, systems
• HTTP-Screenshot module does screenshots as nmap scans
• Use output options or pipe to a file
• Reporting – keep organized, do it as you go, use ASCIIdoc to take text to pdf
• Do things the easy way – look for low hanging fruit. DEfault credentials, bad passwords, cleartext, social engineering, dumpster diving, open wireless. Easy stuff is higher risk and the client cares more than esoteric crap.
• Don’t rush recon, look for clues, broken windows
• Have a plan (PTS framework) but range off as needed
• Protect your customer’s data
• Encrypt your stuff
• Have backups
• Learn and use a scripting language
• Don’t rub it in with the client
• Get involved with the community!

And that’s everything but the drinking… Time for happy hour and the mechanical bull!

Here’s some pictures of the volunteers hard at work, the speakers’ green room (there were chair massages there in the afternoon!), and organizer Josh Sokol with Robert “RSnake” Hansen!