Tag Archives: lascon

by | October 30, 2017 · 7:31 pm

LASCON 2017 Conference Notes

Well, last Thursday and Friday I went to LASCON, our local Austin application security convention! It started back in 2010; here’s the videos from previous years (the 2017 talks were all recorded and should show up there sometime soon.  Some years I get a lot out of LASCON and some I don’t, this one was a good one and I took lots and lots of notes!  Here they are in mildly-edited format for your edification.  Here’s the full schedule, obviously I could only go to a subset of all the great content myself.  They pack in about 500 people to the Norris Conference Center in Austin.

Day 1 Keynote

The opening keynote was Chris Nickerson, CEO of LARES, on pen testing inspired thoughts.  Things I took away from his talk:

  • We need more mentorships/internships to get the skills we need, assuming someone else is going to prep them for us (school?) is risible
  • Automate and simplify to scale and enable lower skill folks to do the job – if you need all security geniuses to do anything that’s your fault
  • There’s a lack of non made up measurements – most of the threat severities etc. are in the end pure judgement calls only loosely based on objective measures
  • Testing – how do we know it’s working?
  • How do all the tools fit together? Only ops knows… 2017-10-26 09.43.34.jpg
  • Use an attack inventory and continually test your systems
  • Red team automation plus blue team analytics gives you telemetry
  • Awareness of ego:2017-10-26 09.49.18.jpg

Security for DevOps

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Then the first track talk I went to was on Security for DevOps, by Shannon Lietz, DevSecOps Leader at Intuit. She’s a leader in this space and I’ve seen her before at many DevOps conferences.

Interesting items from the talk:

  • Give security defects to your devs, but characterize adversary interest so they can prioritize.
  • Reduce waste in providing info to devs.
  • 70-80% of bad guys return in 7 days – but 20% wait 30d till your logs roll

She likes to use the killchain metaphor for intrusion and the MITRE severity definitions.2017-10-26 10.24.58

But convert those into “letter grades” for normal people to understand!  Learn development-ese to communicate with devs, don’t make them learn your lingo.2017-10-26 10.36.15
Read the Google Beyondcorp white papers for newfangled security model:
1. zoning and containment
2. Asset management
3. Authentication/authorization
4. Encryption

Vendors please get to one tool per phase, it’s just too much.

2017-10-26 10.48.52.jpg
Other things to read up on…

Startup Security: Making Everyone Happy

2017-10-26 11.14.29By Mike McCabe and Brian Henderson of Stratum Security (stratumsecurity.com, github.com/stratumsecurity), this was a great talk that reminded me of Paul Hammond’s seminal Infrastructure for Startups talk from Velocity. So you are getting started and don’t have a lot of spare time or money – what is highest leverage to ensure product security?

They are building security SaaS products (sold one off already, now making XFIL) and doing security consulting. If we get hacked no one wants our product.

The usual startup challenges – small group of devs, short timelines, new tech, AWS, secrets.

Solutions:

  • Build security in and automate it
  • Make use of available tools, linters, SCA tools, fuzzing
  • Continuous testing
  • AWS hardening
  • Alerting
  • Not covering host security, office security, incident response here
    2017-10-26 11.24.12

They use AWS, codeship, docker (benefits – dev like in prod, run tools local, test local). JavaScript, golang, no more rust (too bleeding edge). Lack of security tooling for the new stuff.

Need to not slow down CI, so they want tooling that will advise and not block the build. The highest leverage areas are:

  • Linting – better than nothing. ESLint with detect-unsafe-regex and detect-child-process. Breaks build. High false positives, have to tweak your rules. Want a better FOSS tool.
  • Fuzzing – gofuzz based on AFL fuzz, sends random data at function, use on custom network protocols
  • Source code analysis – HP Gas
  • Automated dynamic testing – Burp/ZIP
  • Dependency checking. Dependencies should be somewhat researched – stats, sec issues (open/closed and how their process works)
  • Pull requests – let people learn from each other

Continuous integration – they use codeship pro and docker
Infrastructure is easy to own – many third party items, many services to secure

AWS Tips:

  • Separate environments into AWS accounts
  • Don’t use root creds ever
  • Alert on root access and failed logins with cloudwatch. [Ed. Or AlienVault!]
  • All users should use MFA
  • Rigorous password policy
  • Use groups and roles (not direct policy assignment to user)
  • Leverage policy conditions to limit console access to a single IP/range so you know you’re coming in via VPN
  • Bastion host – alert on access in Slack
  • Duo on SSH via PAM plugin
  • Must be on VPN
  • Use plenty of security groups
  • AWS alering on failed logins, root account usage, send to slack

See also Ken Johnson’s AWS Survival Guide

Logging – centralize logs, splunk/aws splunk plugin (send both direct and to Cloudwatch for redundancy), use AWS splunk plugin.

Building the infrastructure – use a curated base image, organize security groups, infra as code, manage secrets (with IAM when you can). Base image using packer. Strip down and then add splunk, cloudwatch, ossec, duo, etc. and public keys. All custom images build off base.

Security groups – consistent naming. Don’t forget to config the default sec group even if you don’t intend to use it.

Wish we had used Terraform or some other infrastructure as code setup.

Managing secrets – don’t put them in plain test in github, docker, ami, s3. Put them into KMS, Lambda, parameter store, vault. They do lambda + KMS + ECS. The Lambda pulls encrypted secrets out of s3, pushes out container tasks to ecs with secrets. See also “The Right Way To Manage Secrets With AWS” from the Segment blog about using the new Parameter Store for that.2017-10-26 11.42.38
Next steps:

  • more alerting esp. from the apps (failed logins, priv escalation)
  • terraform
  • custom sca (static analysis)
  • automate and scale fuzzing maybe with spot instances

Security is hard but doesn’t have to be expensive – use what’s available, start from least privilege, iterate and review!

Serverless Security

2017-10-26 13.54.30

By fellow Agile Admin, James Wickett of Signal Sciences.  Part one is introducing serverless and why it’s good, and then it segues to securing serverless apps halfway in.

Serverless enables functions as a service with less messing with infrastructure.

What is serverless? Adrian Cockroft – “if your PaaS can start instances in 20ms that run for half a second, it’s serverless.” AWS Lambda start time is 343 ms to start and 84 ms on subsequent hits, not quite the 20ms Cockroft touts but eh. Also read https://martinfowler.com/articles/serverless.html and then stop arguing about the name for God’s sake.  What’s wrong with you people.  [James is too polite to come out and say that last part but I’m not.]

Not good for large local disk space, long running jobs, big IO, super super latency sensitive. Serverless frameworks include serverless, apex, go sparta, kappa. A framework really helps. You get an elastic, fast API running at very low cost. But IAM is complicated.

So how to keep it secure?

  • Externalize stuff out of the app/infra levels – do TLS in API gateway not the app, routing in API gateway not the app.
  • There’s stack element proliferation – tends to be “lambda+s3+kinesis+auth0+s3+…”
  • Good talk on bad IAM roles – “Gone in 60 seconds: Intrusion and Exfiltration in Serverless Architectures” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ058hmLuv0
  • good security pipeline hygeine
  • security testing in CI w/gauntlt
  • DoS challenges including attack detection…
  • github/wickett/lambhack is a vulnerable lambda+api gateway stack like webgoat. you can use it to poke around with command execution in lambda… including making a temp file that persists across invocations
  • need to monitor longer run times, higher error rate occurrences, data ingestion (size), log actions of lambdas
  • For defense: vandium (sqli wrapper), content security policies

And then I was drafted to be in the speed debates!  Less said about that the better, but I got some free gin out of it.

Architecting for Security in the Cloud
2017-10-27 10.18.40

By Josh Sokol, Security Spanker for National Instruments! He did a great job at explaining the basics. I didn’t write it all down because as an 3l33t Cloud Guru a lot wasn’t new to me but it was very instructive in reminding me to go back to super basics when talking to people.  “Did you know you can use ssh with a public/private key and not just a password?” I had forgotten people don’t know that, but people don’t know that and it’s super important to teach those simple things!

  • Code in private GitHub repo
  • Automation tool to check updates and deploy
  • Use a bastion to ssh in
  • Good db passwords
  • Wrap everything in security groups
  • Use vpcs
  • Understand your attack surfaces – console, github, public ports
  • Analyze attack vectors from these (plus insiders)
  • Background checks for employees
  • Use IAM, MFA, password policies
  • Audit changes
  • The apps are the big one
  • Https, properly configured
  • Use an IPS/WAF
  • Keys not just passwords for SSH
  • Encrypt data before storing in db

Digital Security For Nonprofits

2017-10-27 10.58.21

2017-10-27 11.00.23

Dr. Kelley Misata was an MBA in marketing and then got cyber stalked.  This led to her getting an InfoSec Ph.D from Spaf at Purdue! Was communications director for Tor, now runs the org that manages Suricata.

Her thesis was on the gap of security in nonprofits, esp. violence victims, human trafficking. And in this talk, she shares her findings.

Non-profits are being targeted for same reasons as for-profits as well as ideology, with int’l attackers. They take money and cards and everything like other companies.
63% of nonprofits suffered a data breach in a 2016 self report survey.  Enterprises vet the heck out of their suppliers… But hand over data to nonprofits that may not have much infosec at all.

ISO 27000, Cobit 5… normal people don’t understand that crap. NIST guidance is more consumable – “watered down” to the infosec elite but maps back to the more complex guidelines.

She sent out surveys to 500 nonprofits expecting the normal rate of return but got 222 replies back… That’s an extremely high response rate indicating high level of interest.
Nonprofits tend to have folks with fewer tech skills, and they more urgent needs than cyber security like “this person needs a bed tonight.”  They also don’t speak techie language – when she sent out a followup a common question was “What does “inventory” mean?”

90% of nonprofits use Facebook and 53% use Twitter.  They tend to have old systems. Nonprofit environments are different because what they do is based on trust. They get physical security but don’t know tech.

2017-10-27 11.21.16.jpgThey are not sure where to go for help, and don’t have much budget. Many just use PayPal, not a more general secure platform, for funds collection. And many outsource – “If we hand it off to someone it must be secure!”

The scary but true message for nonprofits is that it’s not if but when you will have a breach. Have a plan. Cybersecurity insurance passes the buck.

You can’t be effective if you can’t message effectively to your audience. She uses “tinkerer” not hacker for white hats, because you can complain all you want about “hacker not cracker blah blah” but sorry, Hollywood forms people’s views, and normal people don’t want a “hacker” touching their stuff period.

Even PGP encrypting emails, which is very high value for most nonprofits, is ridiculously complicated for norms.

What to do to improve security of nonprofits? Use an assessment tool in an engaging way. Help them prioritize.
She is starting a nonprofit, Sightline Security for this purpose. Check it out! This was a great talk and inspires me to keep working to bring security to everyone not just the elite/rich – we’re not really safe until all the services we use are secure.

2017-10-27 11.42.09.jpg

Malware Clustering
2017-10-27 13.03.01

By Srini (Srivathsan Srinivasagopalan), a data scientist from my team at AlienVault!

Clustering malware into groups helps you characterize how families of it work, both in general and as they develop over time.

To cluster, you need to know what behavior you want to cluster on, it’s too computationally challenging to tell the computers “You know… group this stuff similarly.”

You make signatures to match samples on that behavior. Analyzed malware (like by cuckoo) generally gives you static and dynamic sections of behavior you can use as inputs. There’s various approaches, which he sums up.  If you’re not into math you should probably stop reading here so as to not hurt yourself.

To hash using shingling – concatenate a token sequence and hash them.2017-10-27 13.12.07.jpg
Jaccard similarity is computationally challenging.
Min-hashing2017-10-27 13.28.39
Locality sensitive hash based clustering

Hybrid approach: corpus vectorization

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Next…Opscode clustering! Not covered here.

TL;DR, there’s a lot of data to be scienced around security data, and it takes time and experimentation to find algorithms that are useful.

Cloud Ops Master Class

2017-10-27 14.00.48By @mosburn and @nathanwallace
Trying to manage 80 teams and 20k instances in 1 account – eek!  Limits even AWS didn’t know about.
They split accounts, went to bakery model. Workload isolation.
They wrote tooling to verify versions across accounts. It sucked.
Ride the rockets – leverage the speed of cloud services.
Change how the team works to scale – teach, don’t do to avoid bottlenecking. App team self serves. Cloud team teaches.

2017-10-27 14.29.04.jpgPolicies: Simple rules. Must vs should. Always exceptions.
The option requirement must be value in scope.
Learn by doing. Guardrails – detect and correct.
2017-10-27 14.29.10Change control boards are evil – use policy not approval.
Sharing is the devil.
Abstracting removes value – use tools natively.

  • Patterns at scale
  • Common language and models
  • Automate and repeat patterns
  • Avoid custom central services
  • Accelerate don’t constrain
  • Slice up example repos
  • Visibility
  • Audit trail
  • Git style diff of infra changes
  • Automate extremely – tickets and l1-2 go away
  • All ops automated, all alerts go to apps so things get fixed fast

He’s created Turbot to do software defined ops – https://turbot.com/features/

  • Cross account visibility
  • Make a thing in the console… then it applies all the policies. Use native tools, don’t wrap.
  • Use resource groups for rolling out policies
  • Keep execution mostly out of the loop

2017-10-27 14.22.32.jpg

And that was my LASCON 2017! Always a good show, and it’s clear that the DevOps mentality is now the cutting edge in security.

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Here’s my LASCON 2016 presentation on Lean Security, explaining how and why to apply Lean Software principles to information security!

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by | November 4, 2016 · 9:04 am
by | October 28, 2016 · 10:16 am

Three Upcoming DevOps Events You Should Attend

I wanted to mention a couple Austin area events folks should be aware of – and one international one!  November is full of DevOps goodness, so come to some or all of these…

The international one is called All Day DevOps, Tuesday November 15 2016, and is a one long day, AMER and EMEA hours, 3-track, free online conference.  It has all the heavy hitter presenters you’d expect from going to Velocity or a DevOpsDays or whatnot, but streaming free to all.  Sign up and figure out what you want to watch in what slot now!   James, Karthik, and I are curating and hosting the Infrastructure track so, you know, err on that side 🙂  There’s nearly 5000 people signed up already, so it should be lively!

Then there’s CD Summit Austin 2016.  There’s a regional IT conference called Innotech, and devops.com came up with the great idea of running a DevOps event alongside it. It’s Wednesday November 16 (workshops) and Thursday November 17 (conference) in the Austin Convention Center. All four of the Agile Admins will be doing a panel on “The Evolution of Agility” at 11:20 on Thursday so come on out!  It’s cheap, even both days together are like $179.

But before all that – the best little application security convention in Texas (or frankly anywhere for my money) – LASCON is next week!   Tues and Wed Nov 1-2 are workshop days and then Thu-Fri Nov 3-4 are the conference days. I’m doing my Lean Security talk I did at RSA last fall on Friday, and James is speaking on Serverless on Thursday. $299 for the two conference days.

Loads of great stuff for all this month!

 

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by | October 29, 2013 · 11:26 am

LASCON Interview: Jason Chan

 IMG_1513Jason Chan (@chanjbs) is an Engineering Director of the Cloud Security team at Netflix.

Tell me about your current gig!

I work on the Cloud Security team at Netflix, we’re responsible for the security of the streaming service at Netflix.  We work with some other teams on platform and mobile security.

What are the biggest threats/challenges you face there?

Protecting the personal data of our members of course.  Also we have content we want to protect – on the client side via DRM, but mainly the pipeline of how we receive the content from our studio partners. Also, due to the size of the infrastructure, its integrity – we don’t want to be a botnet or have things injected to our content that can our clients.

How does your team’s approach differ from other security teams out there?

We embody the corporate culture more, perhaps, than other security teams do. Our culture is a big differentiator between us and different companies.  So it’s very important that people we hire match the culture. Some folks are more comfortable with strong processes and policies with black and white decisions, but here we can’t just say now, we have to help the business get things done safely.

You build a security team and you have certain expertise on it.  It’s up to the company how you use that expertise. They don’t necessarily know where all the risk is, so we have to provide objective guidance and then mutually come to the right decision of what to do in a given situation.

Tell us about how you foster your focus on creating tools over process mandates?

We start with recruiting, to understand that policy and process isn’t the solution.  Adrian [Cockroft] says process is usually organizational scar tissue. By doing it with tools and automation makes it more objective and less threatening to people. Turning things into metrics makes it less of an argument. There’s a weird dynamic in the culture that’s a form of peer pressure, where everyone’s trying to do the right thing and no one wants to be the one to negatively impact that.  As a result people are willing to say “Yes we will” – like, you can opt out of Chaos Monkey, but people don’t because they don’t want to be “that guy.”

We’re starting to look at availability in a much  more refined way.  It’s not just “how long were you down.”  We’re establishing metrics over real impact – how many streams did we miss?  How many start clicks went unfulfilled.  We can then assign rough values to each operation (it’s not perfect, but based on shared understanding) and then we can establish real impact and make tradeoffs. (It’s more story point-ish instead of hard ROI). But you can get what you need to do now vs what can wait.

Your work  – how much is reactive versus roadmapped tool development?

It’s probably 50/50 on our team.  We have some big work going on now that’s complex and has been roadmapped for a while.  We need to have bandwidth as things pop up though, so we can’t commit everyone 100%. We have a roadmap we’ve committed to that we need to build, and we keep some resource free so that we can use our agile board to manage it. I try to build the culture of “let’s solve a problem once,” and share knowledge, so when it recurs we can handle it faster/better.  I feel like we can be pretty responsive with the agile model, our two week sprints and quarterly planning give us flexibility. We get more cross-training too, when we do the mid-sprint statuses and sprint meetings. We use our JIRA board to manage our work and it’s been very successful for us.

What’s it like working at Netflix?

It’s great, I love it.  It’s different because you’re given freedom to do the right thing, use your expertise, and be responsible for your decisions. Each individual engineer gets to have a lot of impact on a pretty large company.  You get to work on challenging problems and work with good colleagues.

How do you conduct collaboration within your team and with other teams?

Inside the team, we instituted once a week or every other week “deep dives” lunch and learn presentation of what you’re working on for other team members. Cross-team collaboration is a challenge; we have so many tools internally no one knows what they all are!

You are blazing trails with your approach – where do you think the rest of the security field is going?

I don’t know if our approach will catch on, but I’ve spent a lot of my last year recruiting, and I see that the professionalization of the industry in general is improving.  It’s being taught in school, there’s greater awareness of it. It’s going to be seen as less black magic, “I must be a hacker in my basement first” kind of job.

Development skills are mandatory for security here, and I see a move away from pure operators to people with CS degrees and developers and an acceleration in innovation. We’ve filed three patents on the things we’ve built. Security isn’t’ a solved problem and there’s a lot left to be done!

We’re working right now on a distributed scanning system that’s very AWS friendly, code named Monterey. We hope to be open sourcing it next year.  How do you inventory and assess an environment that’s always changing? It’s a very asynchronous problem. We thought about it for a while and we’re very happy with the result – it’s really not much code, once you think the problem through properly your solution can be elegant.

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by | October 28, 2013 · 10:54 am

LASCON Interview: Nick Galbreath

IMG_1509Nick Galbreath (@ngalbreath) is VP of Engineering with client9, LLC.

What are you doing nowadays since leaving Etsy?

I am managing a small DevOps team for a company whose engineering team is based in Moscow, from Tokyo, Japan. Some other executives and our biggest customer is from there. And, I love Japan!

I know you from Velocity and the other DevOps conferences. Why are you here at a security conference?

I’ve been active at Black Hat, DEFCON, etc. as well as DevOps conferences. I’ve found that if your company is in operational chaos you don’t need security.  Once you have a good operational component and it’s not in chaos – standardized infrastructure, automation – you get up to the level where you can be effective at security.  I used the same approach at Etsy – I started there working on security, stopped, worked in infrastructure until that was basically squared away, and only then started working on security again. You have to work your way up Maslow’s hierarchy.

It’s the same with development. My background is originally development and when you’re programming in C/C++ your main effort is stability, but all those NPEs and other bugs are also security issues.  I don’t know any company doing well at security and not well at development, I’m not sure you can do it. Nail the basics and then the advanced topics are achievable.

What’s your opinion on how much the security space has left developers behind?

Look at the real core issues behind security. Dev teams have trouble with writing secure code, ops folks have problems with patching – at security conferences you don’t see anything for solving those problems.  Working on offense/breaking and blocking tools is lucrative but inhibits us from going after the root causes.

For many security pros, working in a team instead of solo is a different skill set. “We don’t want to bother the developers with this” – siloed approaches are killing us.

What do you see as the most interesting thing going on in the security landscape right now?

What has happened in the last 3-4 months, as much as I hate to say it, with all the leaking of documents – we’ve been lazy about encryption and privacy and other foundational elements and we assumed it worked, now we’re doing some healthy review to do a next generation of those. It brought that discussion to the forefront. The certificate authority problems, and the NSA stuff – we need to spend some time and think about this.  The next generation of SSL and certificate transparency are very interesting.

In terms of pure language work… Improvement of cryptography. Also, we’re making more business level APIs for common problems like PHP5’d password hashing APIs.  If your’e building a Web app and need auth you’re starting from zero most of the time and now you’re starting to see things put into the languages that solve these problems.

Out in the larger DevOpsey world, what are the things to watch, what is your team excited about?

Stuff that we’re excited about is traditional devops stuff like really treating our infrastructure like code.  No button clicking, infrastructure completely specified in config files in source control, code reviews, and then the file pushed to production to allocate/deallocate hardware and deploy software.  That’s a big change.

How do we disseminate best practices/prevent worst practices through those who aren’t the technical “1%?”

Well, best practices are harder

People went into server programming because they don’t like doing user interface stuff. But the joke’s on us, there is still a user interface, it’s configuration files, installers, etc. which are nontrivial. We should either be bundling audit software or server-side config healthchecks to provide warnings. “Why do you have SSL v2 enabled?” “Why are your .htaccess files visible by default?” [Ed: Where the hell did apache chkconfig go?]

People in ops can write these but retroactively folks won’t use them… But the future can have them.  If you at least get warned that your Apache config is using suboptimal security configs it’s your deliberate negligence to not do it right.

Maybe take the module approach (Apache wouldn’t want it in their core I’m sure) – if you want to work on it give me a call!

What message do you want to send to other security folks?

For security people, the message is, “It’s really important you start bringing your  non-security friends to these security conferences.” Devs and ops and business and QA. They’ll find it interesting and get involved. It’s really important.

Last year, we had a dozen people from my company come out to AppSec. But except for me and our security team, they’re not back this year. There just wasn’t enough content to hold the interest of the devs. What can we do about that?

Really!  Interesting.  Maybe we need more of a proper dev track, with more things like Karthik’s talk.

A project I’ve wanted to do for a very long time – most people in business and development don’t have  real idea of how much damage can be done, it’s why we have Red Teams. If someone’s really good at SQLi, etc. do a talk showing how much damage can be done.

Also – if you work at any company, you depend on an immense set of open source software and they don’t have a security person or anything.  Get involved in their process, try to help them and make it better and it’ll improve quality of everyone’s systems. We could do a hackathon during the convention to improve some existing projects.

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by | October 26, 2013 · 11:02 am

LASCON 2013 Report – Second Afternoon

I’m afraid I only got to one session in the afternoon, but I have some good interviews coming your way in exchange!

User Authentication For Winners!

I didn’t get to attend but I know that Karthik’s talk on writing a user auth system was good, here are the slides. When we were at NI he had to write the login/password/reset system for our product and we were aghast that there was no project out there to use, you just had to roll your own in an area where there are so many lurking security flaws.  He talks about his journey and you should read it!

AWS CloudHSM And Why It Can Revolutionize Cloud

Oleg Gryb (@oleggryb), security architect at Intuit, and Todd Cignettei, Sr. Product Manager with AWS Security.

Oleg says: There are commonly held concerns about cloud security – key management, legal liability, data sovereignty and access, unknown security policies and processes…

CloudHSM makes objects in partitions not accessible by the cloud provider. It provides multiple layers of security.

[Ed. What is HSM?  I didn’t know and he didn’t say.  Here’s what Wikipedia says.]

Luckily, Todd gets up and tells us about the HSM, or Hardware Security Module. It’s a purpose built appliance designed to protect key material and perform secure cryptographic operations. The SafeNet Luna SA HSM has different roles – appliance administrator, security officer. It’s all super certified and if tampered with blows up the keys.

AWS is providing dedicated access to SafeNet Luna SA HSM appliances. They are physically in AWS datacenters and in your VPC. You control the keys; they manage the hardware but they can’t see your goodies. And you do your crypto operations there. Here’s the AWS page on CloudHSM.

They are already integrated with various software and APIs like Java JCA/JCE.

It’s being used to encrypt digital content, DRM, securing financial transactions (root of trust for PKI), db encryption, digital signatures for real estate transactions, mobile payments.

Back to Oleg. With the HSM, there’s some manual steps you need to do, Initialize the HSM, configure a server and generate server side certs, generate a client cert on each client, scp the public portion to the server to register it.

Normal client cert generation requires an IP, which in the cloud is lame. You can isntead use a generic client name and use the same one on all systems.

You put their LunaProvider,jar in your Java CLASSPATH and add the provider to java/security and you’re good to go.

Making a Luna HA array is very important of course. If you get two you can group them up.

Suggested architecture – they ahve to run in a VPC. “You want to put on Internet? Is crazy idea! Never!”

Crypto doesn’t solve your problem, it just moves it to another place. How do you get the secrets onto your instances? When your instance starts, you don’t want those creds in S3 or the AMI…

So at instance bootstrap, send a request to a server in an internal DC with IP, instance ID, public and local hostanmes, reservation ID, instance type… Validate using the API including instance start time, validate role, etc. and then pass it back. Check for dupes.  This isn’t perfect but what are ya gonna do?  You can assign a policy to a role and have an instance profile it uses.

He has written a Python tool to help automate this, you can get it at http://sf.net/p/lunamech.

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by | October 25, 2013 · 10:52 am

LASCON 2013 Report – Second Morning

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.

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by | October 24, 2013 · 3:53 pm

LASCON 2013 Report – First Afternoon

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

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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!

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by | October 24, 2013 · 11:45 am

LASCON 2013 Report – First Morning

IMG_1475Arriving at #LASCON 2013, hosted as usual at the Norris Conference Center, the first thing you see is the vintage video games throughout the lobby! As usual it’s well run and you get your metal badge and other doodads without any folderol; volunteers packed the venue ready to help folks with anything. I got a lovely media badge since I’m on the hook to blog/tweet it up while I’m there! It’s in a nice central location on Anderson Lane so getting there took a lot less time than my normal commute to work did.

IMG_1481The MCs, James Wickett and David Hughes, got us kicked off. Thanks went out to many the LASCON sponsors!

  • White Hat
  • Qualys
  • Gemalto
  • Trustwave/Spider Labs
  • Critical Start
  • Sourcefire
  • SOS Security

IMG_1482Then everyone stood and raised their right hand to say the “LASCON pledge,” which consists of “I will not hack the Wi-fi,” “I will not social engineer other attendees and the nice Norris Conference Center staff who are hosting us,” and similar.

Then, the keynote!

Keynote- Nick Galbreath, The Origins of Insecurity

IMG_1488Nick Galbreath (@ngalbreath), VP of Engineering at Iponweb. He used to work for Etsy, now he works in Tokyo for a Russia-based ad infrastructure company.  Suck that, Edward Snowden.

Slides at speakerdeck.com/ngalbreath!

If you’re in security, you should be bringing someone else from dev or ops or something here! We can’t get much done by ourselves.

Crypto

There’s a lot of consternation about crypto and SSL and PKI lately. The math is sound!  See FP’s “The NSA’s New Code Breakers” – it’s way easier to get access other ways. I don’t know of any examples of brute forcing SSL keys – it’s attacking data at rest or bypassing it altogether.

But what about the android/bitcoin break and alleged fix re: Java SecureRandom PRNG? I can’t find the fix checked in anywhere.  Let’s look at SHA1PRNG. Where’s the spec? You’re forced to use it, where’s the open implementation, tests…

Basically everything went wrong in specification, implementation, testing, review, postmortem… Then the NIST’s Dual-EC-DRBG spec – slow and with a potential backdoor – but at least it’s not required by FIPS!  It’s broken but not mandatory and we know it’s broken, so fair enough. It’s a “standard turd.” Standards aren’t a replacement for common sense. Known turdy in 2007.  Why are you just removing it now? TLS 1.2 was approved in 2008, why don’t all browsers support it and no browsers support GCM mode? Old standards need augmentation and updates.

Fixing the CA system – four great ways, certificate pinning, pruning, HTTPS Strict-Transport-Security, certificate-transparency.org.

Everything Else

  • Network Security – stuff you didn’t write
  • App Security – stuff you did write
  • Endpoint Security – stuff you run

IT internal tech is mostly Windows/Mac CM and patching, 99% C-based stuff.

Tech Ops – Routers, Linux, Core server (all C too)

Dev:

  • Input validation – not hard
  • Configuration problems
  • Logical problems – more interesting
  • Language platform problems (most patches here also in C!)

Reactive work is patching, CM, fixing apps, patching infrastructure. You can focus your patching though – Win7 at current patches, Flash, Adobe, Java will get 99% of your problems, focus there – but it’s hard to do. But either you can do it trivially or it’s really hard.

Learn from the hardest apps to deploy.  The Chrome model of self updating gets 97% of people within a version in 4-6 weeks. Android, not so good- driven more by throwing out phones than any ability to upgrade. They’re chipping stuff away from the OS and making more into apps to speed it up. Apple/iOS just figured out app auto-update. Desktop lags though. WordPress is starting background updates. BSD is automatically installing security updates at first boot.

Releasing faster and safely is a competitive advantage AND makes you more secure.

For desktop upgrades, can’t we do something with containers? Why only one version installed? How can we find out about problems from users faster? How do we make patching and deployment easy for the dumbest users?

Even info on “How do I configure Apache securely” is wide and random on the Web. Silently breaks all the time, and it’s simple compared to firewalls, ssh, VPN, DNS… Rat’s nests full of crap, while it gets easier and easier to put servers on the internet. How can we make it safe to configure a server and keep it secure?

Can we do this for application development? Ruby BrakeMan is great, it does static analysis on commit and sends you email about rookie mistakes. Why not for apache config? (Where did chkconfig go?)

PHP Crypt – great for legacy passwords and horrible for new ones. Approximately 0% chance of a dev getting its configuration right.

See @manicode’s best practices – have a business level API for that.

By default, every language has a non-crypto, insecure PRNG. So people use them. They are used for some science stuff, but seriously if you’re doing physics you’re going to link something else in. Being slightly slower for toy apps that don’t care about security isn’t a big deal. Make the default PRNG secure! And, there’s 100x more people interested in making things fast than making them secure, so make the default language PRNG secure and people will make it faster.

libinjection.client9.com to try to eliminate SQL injection! It’s C, fast, low false positives, plug in anywhere.

Products focus on blocking and offense/intrusion, but leave these areas (actual fixing) uncovered.  Think globally, act locally. Even if you’re not a dev, most open source doesn’t have a security anything – join in!
Write fuzzers, compile with different flags, etc.

So think big, get involved, bring your friends!

Malware Automation

IMG_1490By Christopher Elisan from RSA, aka @tophs.

Total discovered malware is growing geometrically year over year. There are a lot of “DIY malware creation kits” nowadays; SpyEye, Zeus… These are more oriented around online crime; the kits of yesteryear were more about pissing contests about “mine is better than yours” (VCL, PS-MPC). The variation they can create is larger as well.

Armoring tools exist now – PFE CX for example, claims to encrypt, compress, etc. your executable – but all the functions don’t always work and buyers don’t check.  Indetecitbles.net is online and will do it! It was free but now it’s “hidden.”

Use a tool like ExeBundle to bundle up your malware and then share it out via whatever route (file sharing, google play, whatever). Or hacking and overwriting good wares – even those that bother publishing a hash to verify their software often keep it on the same Web site that is already getting hacked to change the executable, so the hash just gets changed too.

So you make your malware with a kit, put it through a crypter a realtime packer, an EXE binder, other armoring tools, then run through QA in terms of on premise and cloud AV, then you’re ready to go.

Targeted vs opportunistic attacks… Delivery is a lot easier when you can target.

Anyway, many of those new malware samples are really just the same core malware run through a different variety of armoring tools. They’re counted as different malware but should get grouped into families; he’s working on that at RSA now.

Besides the variation in malware, domains serving malware can rotate in minutes. Since the malware can be created so quickly it effectively defeats AV by generating too many unique signatures. Reversing has to be done but it takes weeks/months.

Demo: Creating Malware in 2 Minutes!

ZeuS Builder – bang, bot.exe, one every couple seconds. Unique but not hash-unique at this point. They look different on disk and in memory. Then runs Saw Crypter, in seconds it creates multiple samples from one ZeuS sample. Bang, automated generation of billlllllyuns of armored samples.

There’s really just a handful of kits behind all the malware, need new solutions that go after the tools and do signature-less detection.

From Gates to Guardians: Alternate Approaches to Product Security

IMG_1493Jason Chan, Director of Engineering from Netflix, in charge of security for the streaming product. Here are his slides on Slideshare!

Agile, cloud, continuous delivery, DevOps – traditional security doesn’t adapt well to these. We want to move fast and stay safe at Netflix.

The challenges are speed (rapid change) and scale. To address these…

  • Culture – If your culture has moved towards rapid delivery, it’s innovation first. Don’t be “Doctor No” and go against your company culture, you won’t be successful.  Adapt.
  • Visibility – you need to be able to see whats going on in a big distributed system.
  • Automation – no checklists and spreadsheets

At Netflix we do ~200+ pushes to production a day, 40M subscribers, 1000+ devices supported.

Culture

We have a lot of stuff on our site about this, it’s a big differentiator.  “Freedom and responsibility” is the summary. No buck passing. Responsible disclosure program externally.

We’re moving towards “full stack engineers” that know some about appsec, online operations, monitoring and response, infrastructure/systems/cloud – that can write some kind of code. The security industry seems to be moving towards superspecialists, we don’t see that as successful.

2 week sprint model, JIRA Scrum workflow (CLDSEC project!). No standups, weekly midsprint meeting. Bullpen shared-space model.

Visibility

Use their internal security dashboard (VPC, crypto, other services plug in and display their security metrics). Alerts send emails with descriptive subjects, the alert config, instructions/links as to where to check/what to do. Chat integration.

NSA asks, how do you verify software integrity in production?  How do you know you’re not backdoored?

They have their Mimir dashboard that is a CI/CD dashboard, that tracks source code to build to deploy to JIRA ticket. Traceability!

Canary testing because code reviews don’t catch much.  Deploy a new version and test it (regression, perf, security) and see if it’s OK. Automatic Canary Analyzer gets a confidence level – “99% GO!”

Simian Army does ongoing testing. Go to prod… Then the monkeys test it.

Security Monkey shows config change timestamps of security groups and stuff.

So they have Babou (the ocelot from Archer) that does file integrity monitoring. They use the immutable server pattern so checking is kinda easy, but you still can be running multiple canary versions at the same time so there’s not one “golden master.” This allows multiple baselines.

Q: How long did it take to make this change and implement? What were the triggers?
A: This push started when he started in 2011; previously IT security handled product security. He hired his first person last year and now they’re up to 10.

Q: What do you do earlier on in the lifecycle in arch and design (threat modeling etc.)?
A: Can’t be automated, the model here is optionally come engage us (with more aggressiveness for stuff that’s clearly sensitive/SOXey).

Q: So this finds problems but how do people know what to do in the first place, share mistakes cross teams?
A: As things happen, added libraries with training and documentation. But think of it as “libraries.”

Q: Competing with Amazon while renting their hardware? (Laaaaaame, the CEO has talked about this in multiple venues.)
A: AWS is the only real choice. Our CEOs talked.

Next – Lunch!  No liveblog of lunch, you foodie voyeurs!

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by | November 3, 2010 · 12:46 pm

LASCON 2010: Why The Cloud Is More Secure Than Your Existing Systems

Why The Cloud Is More Secure Than Your Existing Systems

Saving the best of LASCON 2010 for last, my final session was the one I gave!  It was on cloud security, and is called “Why The Cloud Is More Secure Than Your Existing Systems.”  A daring title, I know.

You can read the slides (sadly, the animations don’t come through so some bits may not make sense…).  In general my premise is that people that worry about cloud security need to compare it to what they can actually do themselves.  Mocking a cloud provider’s data center for not being ISO 27001 compliant or having a two hour outage only makes sense if YOUR data center IS compliant and if your IT systems’ uptime is actually higher than that.  Too much of the discussion is about the FUD and not the reality.  Security guys have this picture in their mind of a super whizbang secure system and judge the cloud against that, even though the real security in the actual organization they work at is much less.  I illustrate this with ways in which our cloud systems are beating our IT systems in terms of availablity, DR, etc.

The cloud can give small to medium businesses – you know, the guys that form 99% of the business landscape – security features that heretofore were reserved for people with huge money and lots of staff.  Used to be, if you couldn’t pay $100k for Fortify, for instance, you just couldn’t do source code security scanning.  “Proper security” therefore has an about $1M entry fee, which of course means it’s only for billion dollar companies.  But now, given the cloud providers’ features, and new security as a service offerings, more vigorous security is within reach of more people.  And that’s great -building on the messages in previous sessions from Matt’s keynote and Homeland Security’s talk, we need pervasive security for ALL, not just for the biggest.

There’s more great stuff in there, so go check it out.

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