Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Spliced feed for Security Bloggers Network

Spliced feed for Security Bloggers Network

ohrwurm - RTP Fuzzing Tool (SIP Phones) [Darknet - The Darkside]

Posted: 23 Sep 2008 04:26 AM CDT

ohrwurm is a small and simple RTP fuzzer, it has been tested it on a small number of SIP phones, none of them withstood the fuzzing. Features: reads SIP messages to get information of the RTP port numbers reading SIP can be omitted by providing the RTP port numbers, so that any RTP traffic can be fuzzed RTCP traffic [...]

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

Lies and Unbiased Product Testing [Episteme: Belief. Knowledge. Wisdom]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 07:43 PM CDT

The third party product testing space performs an important mission within the industry - they keep the vendors honest. That mission is why I was so fired up when I took a job at Neohapsis in 2007 running their product testing lab. And, while I left Neohapsis a few months ago, I’m still fired up about product testing and the important role that a truly independent third party can bring to this industry.

The flip-side of that emotional intensity is that I get rather upset whenever I hear rumors about someone abusing their stance as an unbiased third party. And I recently heard something that made me ill.

I had a source approach me about a product testing firm who he suggested I blog about. This “independent testing firm” apparently does the most blatantly unethical thing I’ve ever heard in that industry:

They write the results that their testing will discover IN THE CONTRACT with the vendor who is requesting the testing.

It’s one thing to have a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” sort of relationship with a vendor. It’s another to tilt the test criteria slightly, or even to accept the vendor’s claims as solid assumptions during your testing. Both of those annoy me, but they’re the kinds of things that go on in most organizations (though they did not happen under my watch at Neo… I’m too much of an idealist and a pain in the ass).

But when you have the outcome written in to the contract? In my mind, that’s fraud if you’re going around pretending to be an unbiased third party.

I couldn’t believe that anyone would truly stoop to this level. And, since my source had left the company where he had worked with the testing lab, he couldn’t get me a copy of the contract.

So, before I went on-record and wrote this one out, I wanted a bit more proof. I asked my amazing team of Indian VAs to check it out for me and provide me confirmation - not the information, just confirmation. Just get one of the contracts and tell me if the results are in there. Search, investigate, and interview customers of the lab to attempt to prove it one way or another.

The response to that investigation?

A cease and desist letter to my VAs from the test lab. (Which is why I’m not posting the lab’s name… if I’m too busy to blog, I’m way too busy to bother with lawyers).

So, I’ll say it this way - if you’re reading a report about a product from a third-party lab that claims to be unbiased, take it with a grain of salt. Especially if the report came to you from the product vendor’s sales/marketing team.

Or you can just ask to see the vendor’s contract with the testing lab, and see if you get handed a cease and desist letter.

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US government rolling out largest DNSSEC deployment [Voice of VOIPSA]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 03:40 PM CDT

It’s not “VoIP security”-related, but this piece in NetworkWorld today is worth a read: “Feds tighten security on .gov“. Here’s the intro:

When you file your taxes online, you want to be sure that the Web site you visit — www.irs.gov — is operated by the Internal Revenue Service and not a scam artist. By the end of next year, you can be confident that every U.S. government Web page is being served up by the appropriate agency.

That's because the feds have launched the largest-ever rollout of a new authentication mechanism for the Internet's DNS. All federal agencies are deploying DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on the .gov top-level domain, and some expect that once that rollout is complete, banks and other businesses might be encouraged to follow suit for their sites.

The article goes on at some length into what the US government is doing, the issues involved and why it all matters. From a larger “Internet infrastructure” point-of-view, actions such as securing the DNS infrastructure will only help in securing services such as VoIP. There’s still a long way to go to getting DNSSEC widely available, but I applaud the US government for helping push efforts along.

FYI, the article references the obsolete RFC 2065 for DNSSEC. For those wishing the read the standard itself, DNSSEC is now defined in RFC’s 4033, 4034 and 4035 with a bit of an update in RFC 4470.

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VOIPSA blog upgraded to WordPress 2.6.2… [Voice of VOIPSA]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 03:30 PM CDT

We’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 2.6.2… there shouldn’t be any issues with the site, but please let us know if any pages act strange. Thanks, Dan

The night the lights went out on Broadway [StillSecure, After All These Years]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 02:22 PM CDT

Logo commemorating Yankee Stadium's final season 

I could not let the occasion pass without comment.  Last night one of the longest running and most successful "hits" in sports, the NY Yankees played their last game in old Yankee Stadium. I for one always felt the the baseball spirits lived at the "house that Ruth built".  The magic could pop out at any time, but come October and playoff times, was there any better place to watch a baseball game (OK maybe it was cold in October).

Last nights ceremonies before and during the game reminded me of just how many great players have played on that field and how many of baseballs greatest moments happened there.  Forget for a moment the most recent Yankee dynasty and the Red Sox rivalry, but Don Larsen's perfect game, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford.  From Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe Dimaggio, all the way down to Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter - the Yankees have a tradition second to none.  But so much of that is tied up in the stadium. 

Babe Ruth hit the first home run there and the Yankees won that game.  Jose Molina hit the last home run there last night and the Yankees won that game too.  Lets hope that tradition of winning is transferred to the shiny new Yankee Stadium they built across the street!

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Interesting Information Security Bits for 09/22/2008 [Infosec Ramblings]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 01:59 PM CDT


Good afternoon everybody! I hope your day is going well. Here are today’s Interesting Information Security Bits from around the web.

  1. Modern Exploits - Do You Still Need To Learn Assembly Language (ASM) | Darknet - The Darkside
    Yup. I agree with Darknet.org.uk’s stance. A little Assembly never hurt anybody and can be very helpful. Granted, many areas of InfoSec may not need it, but it sure doesn’t hurt.
  2. Initech, Inc. Risktical Ramblings
    From the Post:
    “As part of my goal of wanting to post some risk scenarios and accompanying assessments on the blog, I went ahead and posted a profile of a company (and one of its subsidiaries) over on the “Initech, Inc” page. Instead of having to write background and “given” information for each and every risk scenario - doing it once will save a lot of time.”
    This is a really neat idea. I look forward to seeing what Chris will bring us in the future.
  3. KU: Technology Documentation:
    Vi @jfug on twitter, a link to a good set of resources published by the security department at Kansas University. Some good stuff there.
  4. HiR Information Report: Make your own lock picks - Part 1
    Ax0n has a series of articles that show you how to make you own set of lock picks. Nifty.
  5. DecaffeinatID: A Very Simple IDS / Log Watching App / ARPWatch For Windows
    DecaffeinatID has been updated. Go take a gander.
  6. Neopwn, the World’s First Pentesting Mobile Phone
    ** Posted using Viigo: Mobile RSS, Sports, Current Events and more ** thefanboy writes “What do you get when you cross BackTrack Linux apps with a mobile phone? This is the first ever publicly available mobile phone running a full custom Linux network auditing distribution, and it runs it surprisingly well. One can literally go from phone to pwn in 2 seconds. Based off of the Openmoko Neo Freerunner, many steps have been taken to compensate from the lack of a QWERTY keyboard with automation scripts, dialogs, and a point-and-pwn menu. It runs applications such as Metasploit and the Aircrack suite quite well, especially given the fact that it supports a wide array of USB WLAN cards.”

    Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  7. McAfee offers $465 million for Secure Computing | News - Security - CNET News
    More consolidation in the information security vendor space.
  8. IT Security Expert: Eugene Kaspersky on the Latest Malware Trends
    Dave Whitelegg had the opportunity to talk with Eugene Kaspersky recently.
  9. VMWare issues “critical” ESXi security advisory - Zero Day - ZDNet.com
    Ryan Naraine points out on the Zero Day blog that VMWare has issued a critical ESXi security advisory. Time to patch folks.
  10. 1 Raindrop: Mark Curphey On Builders and Breakers
    Gunnar writes about builders vs. breakers. He references Security Buddha’s excellent article on the same subject. Both are worth reading.

That’s it for today.

Have fun!

Kevin

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OPC UA: Part 4 - SDK Vulnerabilities [Digital Bond]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 01:22 PM CDT

In the OPC UA SDK assessment, Digital Bond analyzed the OPC UA source code and binaries from the SDK. It should be noted that the source code will be unavailable to most OPC Foundation members.

As mentioned in Part 1 the overall code quality was quite good, but there were a small number of important findings including heap and stack overflows. Some of these overflows were in orphaned code, that should nevertheless be removed, and would not have affected an OPC UA application. Details on all of the identified vulnerabilities in the code have been provided to the OPC Foundation, and we anticipate they will be fixed in the next revision of code.

Perhaps the most serious finding came from black box testing using the Server Test Application provided with the SDK. In this case, the team used the provided Server Test Application as a 'fuzzer' caused the OPC UA server to crash, typically after three to ten connections. It is common for attackers to use and enhance test tools as attack tools, so this must be considered a likely attack.

We also analyzed, to the degree possible, the security component of the development teams’ software development lifecycle. Recommendations for improvement included automated source code testing, using compiler security options (such as memory randomization at load time, stack canaries and C# microcode obfuscation) and implementing security checklists.

WARNING
The OPC UA SDK evaluated in this assessment should be viewed as a library that OPC UA client and server applications will call. Very simple sample applications are included in the SDK, but they do not fully exercise the SDK. This leads to two warnings:

1. OPC UA client and server applications will have significant vendor specific application code, some of which will call this SDK. Some vendors will have a secure development process with minimal, or at least minimal easily exploitable, vulnerabilities. If history is a guide, most will not have significant security in the development process and introduce vulnerabilities. This is similar to what we saw from Mora’s and Langner’s 2007 S4 papers on OPC vulnerabilities. Same OPC protocol implementations, even interoperable, but very different quality of implementations from a security perspective.

2. More extensive black box testing could and should be done when more representative OPC UA client and server applications are available.

See the rest of the OPC UA blog series:

tcp/32709 solved? [Kees Leune]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 09:52 AM CDT

About a week ago, I put up a quick post asking if anyone knew what kind of traffic is directed at tcp/32709. Since there did not seem to be much known about this port, I did some snooping around myself. I fired up a simple netcat port listener on port 32709 and waited for incoming connections:

$ nc -vvlp 32709 |tee 32709.log
listening on [any] 32709 ...
Warning: forward host lookup failed for hn.kd.dhcp:Unknown host
connect to [72.249.83.37] from hn.kd.dhcp [61.53.152.179] 1976
�@u)�o�=5��[CHN][VeryCD]yourname<�B4���ff��Y�T�
sent 0, rcvd 106 : Connection reset by peer

While mostly binary, there are some clues in here. Specifically [CHN] and [VeryCD]. Given the fact that all the scans that I detected originated from Chinese IP ranges, I suspect that [CHN] stands for "Chinese". Not sure if it is Chinese encoding, Chinese language, or something else.

The second hint is [VeryCD]. A quick Google for VeryCD turns up that this is an "eMule based Chinese P2P media directory". Some more Googling reveals that VeryCD clients are insanely aggressive in probing for new file-sharing servers. I suspect that this is exactly the behavior that hit my machine.

For now, I'll keep the following networks blocked; it took away just about any and all portscanning that was hitting me (that is; that I detected ;)

59.62.0.0/15
60.0.0.0/8
116.252.0.0/15
121.0.0.0/8
122.0.0.0/8
123.0.0.0/8
125.64.0.0/13
125.65.112.0/24
218.0.0.0/8
221.0.0.0/8
222.0.0.0/8

And yes, that does represent an aweful lot of hosts that can longer read my blog. I'll live with that; there are plenty legitmate sources as well as illegitimate sources that carry my content.

For the time being: case closed.

Mark Collier and SecureLogix release new VoIP security tools [Voice of VOIPSA]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 09:30 AM CDT

In a message to the VOIPSEC mailing list over the weekend, Mark Collier announced the release of a new suite of VoIP security test tools. Mark, as you may recall, is the co-author with (VOIPSA Chair) David Endler of the book “Hacking Exposed: VoIP” and as part of the book publication he and Dave made available a series of voip security tools through their hackingvoip.com website.

Now, Mark’s back with a second version of those VoIP security tools. He describes the new tools in one blog post on his VoIP security blog and announces their availability in a second blog post. Here’s his description of new tools:

We also built several new tools:

- Several new flood-based DoS tools, which generate floods using different SIP requests, including byeflood, optionsflood, regflood, and subflood. The regflood tool is certainly the most potent of the group.

- dirsniff and dirsortmerge – a passive scanner that builds a directory of valid SIP phone addresses. By using the dirsortmerge tool, you can manage results from this tool, as well as output from the dirscan active scanner.

- Call Monitor and sipsniffer – this tool provides a GUI that shows active SIP calls. The tool allows you to select a call and terminate it (via teardown) or insert/mix in audio (via rtpinsertsound or rtpmixsound). The tool allows you to define up to 10 sound files, that can be inserted/mixed in on command. The tool also streams the call audio to the XMMS player, so you can listen in and "time" when you affect the call.

The Call Monitor tool is particularly interesting. It makes using the rtpinsertsound/rtpmixsound tools a lot easier and more effective. It makes real audio manipulation possible.

Interestingly, the tools are not being made available through Hackingvoip.com but rather directly from SecureLogix’s web site, where you have to register first to download the tools.

Mark also provides a PowerPoint presentation about the “Call Monitor” tool he mentions here. He’d mentioned this tool to me once before when we met at one of the conferences…. basically it provides a “point-and-click” interface to allow you to inject or mix in new audio into existing audio streams. Making it this easy is definitely a scary prospect (and another good argument for why you should be using SRTP to encrypt audio streams).

Anyway, the new tools are now out there if you want to try them out. (Joining the long list of existing VoIP security tools.)

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Winamp NowPlaying Unspecified Vulnerability: The Details [IBM Rational Application Security Insider]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 09:23 AM CDT

Hey,

Since no information has yet been published about a vulnerability I recently discovered in Winamp, and the issue has raised some interest, here are the details.

Recently, while listening to some music via Winamp (my favorite media player), I recalled an old Winamp Buffer-Overflow vulnerability found by Leon Juranic in 2005.
Leon found that since Winamp didn't expect long inputs in mp3 id3 tags, a buffer-overflow attack was possible by playing specially crafted mp3 files with lengthy tags.

Knowing that Winamp uses an embedded browser in various places, I decided to take a closer look at it and see what could be done... ;)
My aim was to inject JavaScript into the context of the embedded browser, and examine the ramifications. I suspected that the mp3 id3 tags might be a good place to start, and therefore concentrated on the "Now Playing" feature.

Winamp's "Now Playing" feature uses an embedded browser to present information about the currently played media file. When the user plays a media file, some of the file's metadata is embedded into the HTML that the embedded-browser displays.

It turned out that if the metadata (id3 tags) of the mp3 file contained a JavaScript payload, Winamp failed to sanitize it and therefore injected it intact into the embedded browser – a feasible XSS exploitation scenario.

Songs Dir
A (seemingly) normal mp3 file.

InWinamp1
Adding "A song.mp3" to Winamp's playlist

InWinampXSS
Playing the poisoned mp3 file...
Attacker-controlled JavaScript code is executed.

Furthermore, due to the integration between the embedded browser and the Winamp application, this script injection vulnerability has some unique characteristics.

In many cases, Desktop applications that utilize IE embedded browsers render the HTML content in a highly privileged zone called "My Computer Zone". This zone allows the programmer to perform a wide range of actions on the computer and thereby to "interact" with the hosting application. The downside of this (fairly common) approach is that if the application is susceptible to XSS, a malicious attacker might be able to exploit it and gain full system control over the victim's system. (Aviv Raff did some great work in this field, "Skype cross-zone scripting vulnerability" being a well-known example.)

Winamp's programmers were probably aware to this security threat and therefore chose a different approach. Instead of creating and loading a local file that contains all the relevant data (e.g. data about the song retrieved from the Internet and data originated from the id3 tags of the mp3 file) in a privileged security zone, Winamp loads the embedded browser with a page located in http://client.winamp.com (Internet URL - non-privileged zone).

At first glance, this seems to make an XSS attack innoxious, because of Same Origin policy. However, in order to implement the required interaction between the Winamp application and its embedded browser, a bridge from the browser to Winamp was created in the form of window.external. That means that JavaScript code (which is attacker-controlled due to the XSS vulnerability I found) could trigger various internal functionalities of Winamp which were not intended to be invoked by a remote attacker.

The attack could then be taken one step ahead, by trying to identify functions that are susceptible to memory-based attacks or logical attacks (Reading/Writing of information from/to the victim's host and even gaining full system control in the form of executing commands).

Since the attack is almost undetectable (the malicious JavaScript within the id3 tags can be padded with white spaces and therefore rendered invisible to the Winamp user when the malicious mp3 file is played), such a poisoned file could be easily distributed via P2P networks, resulting in a large-scale (and possibly silent) attack against Winamp users.

ID3Tags
The id3 tags editor of Winamp doesn't give indication for the attack (due to white spaces padding)...

Id3TagsEnd
Going to the end of the Artist text box reveals the (potentially malicious) JavaScript code

Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank Winamp's team for their quick responses and the efficient way in which they handled this security issue.

McAfee takes Secure Computing out [StillSecure, After All These Years]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 08:09 AM CDT

McAfee wants to make sure it remains the biggest "pure play" security vendor.  One of the larger public pure play's in security, Secure Computing is the latest competitor that McAfee is taking off the board.  They have agreed to buy Secure for $5.75 a share.  This is quite a premium over the 3.50 to 4.50 range that Secure has been trading in prior to the deal.  For me though the Secure stock price was not indicative of Secure's true value.  I think it was much less. 

I think Secure Computing never really recovered from its acquisition of CyberGuard.  It never really hit its stride and made the expected for progress after that deal.  Yes it continued to acquire businesses, but mostly these were bottom feeding type of deals and didn't add a lot of quality to the mix.  Secure's most recent acquisition of Securify was a perfect example.  They bought a stagnant growth company doing about 12 million for 15 million, but what to do with it?  It seemed that they were just looking to pile up revenue with no real thought to how these all fit together. 

In any event, now it is McAfee's problem.  I like Secure's firewall product line and I think that is something McAfee does not have.  As for the rest of the portfolio, it remains to be seen what if any value McAfee will find in it.  In the meantime, security consolidation marches on.

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Modern Exploits - Do You Still Need To Learn Assembly Language (ASM) [Darknet - The Darkside]

Posted: 22 Sep 2008 06:33 AM CDT

This is a fairly interesting subject I think as a lot of people still ask me if they are entering the security field if they still need to learn Assembly Language or not? For those that aren’t what it is, it’s pretty much the lowest level programming languages computers understand without resorting to simply 1’s and [...]

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

Security News Links for 9/14 [Nicholson Security]

Posted: 21 Sep 2008 07:00 AM CDT

What impact will the financial industry meltdown have on the security industry? VMWorld 2008: “Introducing Cisco’s Virtual Switch for VMware ESX”… VMWorld 2008: Forecast For VMware? Cloudy…Weep For Security? Virtually excited about virtual IPS SQL injection taints BusinessWeek.com (Cancelled) / Clickjacking - OWASP AppSec Talk "You can't get the toothpaste back in the tube, so deal." The Fallacy of Complete and [...]

OPC UA Part 3 Follow Up [Digital Bond]

Posted: 20 Sep 2008 10:33 AM CDT

As discussed in Part 3, mandating that an OPC UA server validate X.509 certificates prior to using them to create secure channels is essential. It is the foundation that all OPC UA security measures are built upon. Of course whenever you mention certificates and public key infrastructure [PKI] it makes people nervous. Understandably because PKI can be quite complex - - but it doesn’t have to be.

A very simple and secure approach would be:

  • OPC UA server has a trusted certificate list
  • New OPC UA self-signed certificates are not added to this list until approved by an administrator
  • Administrators have a process where they verify through an offline mechanism that the certificate in the pending list belongs to an authorized user

Done

So what is the problem with this? Well any new OPC UA client would not be able to immediately be able to connect to an OPC UA server. Is that a bad thing?

Another approach would be to:

  • Create a Certificate Authority [CA]
  • Put the CA’s public key in a trusted CA list in the OPC UA server
  • Issue certificates to all new OPC UA clients and servers, that are signed by the CA
  • The server then trusts all certificates signed by a trusted CA

Of course this requires the OPC UA server vendor add some features to the application, and it still requires the asset owner/operator to take action prior to using a new OPC UA client. The CA is more interesting as an option if an asset owner has multiple OPC UA servers.

Interesting Information Security Bits for 09/19/2008 [Infosec Ramblings]

Posted: 19 Sep 2008 05:29 PM CDT


Good afternoon everybody! I hope your day is going well.
Here are today’s Interesting Information Security Bits from around the web.

  1. 4 things you can do in your code now to make it more scalable later
    Lori helps us with some information we can use to help prepare our applications to be highly scalable. Don’t forget that availability is one of the legs the CIA triad that InfoSec is based on.
  2. Jeremiah Grossman: I used to know what you watched, on YouTube
    Jeremiah has a nice post up talking about some interesting things that you used to be able to do with YouTube.
  3. CERT: Home Network Security | Roer.Com Information Security Blog
    Via Kai Roer, a pointer to a handy resource to share with those that want more information on how to better secure their home systems and networks. Good education information too. http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/home_networks.html
  4. SANS Computer Forensics, Investigation, and Response
    Interesting article about Gmail artifacts and forensics on such.
  5. TippingPoint | DVLabs | MindshaRE: Live Analysis Markup
    In a continuing series that delves into reverse engineering, Cody at DVLabs provides more tools for use to ease our efforts in malware analysis.
  6. Obtaining Support and Funding from Senior Management�-�Realtime IT Compliance
    Rebecca participated in a workgroup earlier this year that created a valuable resource for InfoSec practioners that helps them learn how to obtain funding and sponsorship for traning and aware ness programs.
  7. Liquidmatrix Security Digest � Policy: TSA Screeners Can Bypass Screening
  8. Rootsecure.net
  9. [shell-fu:home]$
    Neat site for those of us who love to live by the command line.

That’s it for today. Have fun!
Kevin

Posted in Interesting Bits      

Friday News and Notes [Digital Bond]

Posted: 19 Sep 2008 04:20 PM CDT

I’m not an economist, but… [Episteme: Belief. Knowledge. Wisdom]

Posted: 19 Sep 2008 01:22 PM CDT

I just read the info on the new US mortgage bailout.

I’m bothered.

I can’t figure out how this works. I mean, I get the idea - the federal government purchases (and later attempts to sell) “hundreds of billions of dollars” of bad paper.

But, if the paper is no good, it means there’s no resale value.

So, that hundreds of billions of dollars gets piled on top of the federal debt.

It seems to me that, in the medium term, that extra debt exerts further downward pressure on the US dollar against other international currencies. (What’s interesting is that, up to now, most of the US borrowing has been for international and discretionary purposes like war and trade - now we’re borrowing large-scale for domestic purposes. It seems to me that it’s like the difference between borrowing on a credit card to eat at restaurants and borrowing to buy groceries…)

As the dollar declines further, the US has a harder and harder time remaining solvent and inflation increases. At that point, more bad paper will emerge (i.e. more mortgage defaults as gas hits $10/gal and a loaf of bread costs $5), making this all get a whole lot worse.

This doesn’t seem to be the right way out.

USA Today made a fantastic point today - the USA is not following its own counsel. From the article:

Throughout more than a decade of recurrent crises in nations such as Mexico, Russia and Thailand, the United States offered the same advice: Let the market solve the problem and get the government out of the way……

…. In the 1990s, officials of the U.S. Treasury and the U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund urged the leaders of crisis-hit countries to embrace market-oriented policies designed to put their economies on sounder, long-term footing. But the recommendations — to slash government spending and privatize bloated state companies — meant genuine pain for millions and thus real political costs for leaders.

It seems to me that we’re taking massive short term action to avoid the long term consequences of our actions. It’s like someone who is writing bad checks: you write one, then you write another to cover that one (plus a little more), then another, and another, until, eventually, you can’t write a $1M check to cover everything you’ve done.

Unfortunately, as anyone who has piled lie on top of lie to avoid getting caught knows, if you come clean and pay the piper early, the pain isn’t so bad. It’s only by putting it off over and over again that we create a situation that ends up as a disaster.

It seems to me that this is just another way of putting off the inevitable. Anyone who has read the story of Japan’s collapse in the 90s knows what eventually happens - you eventually can’t cut the interest rate any further, and can’t borrow any more.

At that point, everything comes back in to line with a snap. And putting it off another six months only makes it hurt that much worse.

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An Information Security Place Podcast - Episode 5 [An Information Security Place]

Posted: 19 Sep 2008 12:06 PM CDT

OK folks.  Here’s the long awaited episode 5 of the the podcast.  Sorry for the delay in getting this one out.  Hurricane Ike put a big damper on our plans since I was without electricity for a few days.  Internet has been spotty as well, but it held up for Jim and I to record last night.

Link to MP3

Show notes:

  • Geek Toys - Personal Raid Devices - aka Drobo Review
  • Consultants Corner - Dealing with clients that are bound by compliancy requirements.

Music:

  • Intro/Outro - Digital Breaks - “Therapy”
  • Segway 1 - Climax - “OnTheEdge”
  • Segway 2 - Climax - “Eternity”

Vet

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

OPC UA: Part 3 - Specification Vulnerabilities [Digital Bond]

Posted: 19 Sep 2008 12:05 PM CDT

OPC UA is a complex, interleaved 12-part specification. To understand OPC UA security one has to read multiple parts of the specification, but we have provided an overview in an OPC UA SCADApedia page that continues to be developed.

The specification analysis portion of our assessment report had many findings at the Exposure, Concern and Observation level. This is not unusual given the complexity of the specification, and the effort required to maintain consistency across many different parts of the specification. Also, we want to reiterate that the OPC Foundation is addressing many of these findings, and we will provide the resolution or mitigation when available in Part 7 of this series.

So here are the highlights:

The biggest issue we found in numerous parts of the OPC UA specification was the security features can provide a high level security, but an OPC UA user could easily have a false sense of security even with a compliant product with security measures turned on. Even worse, the default, out-of-box configuration could be compromised even in an OPC UA server that is billed by a vendor as secure because it is encrypted and signed.

X.509 Certificate Infrastructure
The specification requires OPC UA client and server applications create self-signed certificates at application installation. Any entity or attacker can create a self-signed certificate. This is similar to verifying a person's identity by asking the person if he is who he claims to be. No trust should be placed on a self-signed certificate without some sort of out-of-band process.

The specification allows OPC UA client and server applications to accept self-signed and other certificates without any automated or manual process to determine if a certificate should be trusted. It is likely that many vendors, and subsequently many users, will want to avoid the difficulties of deploying a public key infrastructure (PKI) or forcing a manual process to approve new certificates as they arrive at the OPC UA client or server.

The result is an OPC UA server, even one requiring encryption and signatures, could be compromised by anyone who is able to gain access to OPC UA client software. The attacker would just have an encrypted and authenticated Secure Channel to pass attacks through to the server. The OPC UA specification should be modified and be very clear that all certificates must be explicitly trusted through a PKI or other process prior to use. This is true for both the OPC UA client and server receiving an unknown application instance certificate.

The specification also is unclear and conflicting in places on the requirement to sign and encrypt security critical service messages, most importantly, OpenSecureChannel and CloseSecureChannel messages. It appears at one time the intention was to make security mandatory on these messages even when the Message Security Mode is set to NONE, which would provide a useful minimal level of security prior to any communication, but the specification has not accomplished this due to conflicting information in different specification parts.

If Secure Channels are allowed to be created and closed without security the OPC Foundation should modify the specifications to indicate there are Secure Channels and Channels. Again this is a false sense of security issue with someone thinking they are getting security from a Secure Channel even though sign and encrypt are set to none.

Other Issues

  • The Secure Channel used to register an OPC UA Server with a Discovery Server could have sign and encrypt set to NONE and be considered compliant with the specification. An attacker could use this to fool users with OPC UA clients into connecting to a spoofed OPC UA server.
  • There were no requirements for the random number generation used in the crypto. This is a recurring area of vulnerabilities in other protocol implementations.
  • There were many areas in the specification that provided the vendor with implementation choices that would have a dramatic impact on the security of the OPC UA server. We will cover these in Part 5 of the series. These are not necessarily deficiencies in the specification, but a yellow flag for potential OPC UA users that all OPC UA security is not equal.

    See the rest of the OPC UA blog series:

    • Part 1: Intro
    • Part 2: Positive Findings
    • Part 3: Specification Vulnerabilities
    • Part 4: SDK Vulnerabilities
    • Part 5: OPC UA Vendor Implementation Vulnerabilities
    • Part 6: Asset Owner Tip Sheet to Analyzing The Security of Competitive OPC UA Servers
    • Part 7: Specification and SDK Improvements

    Surf Jack - Cookie Session Stealing Tool [Darknet - The Darkside]

    Posted: 19 Sep 2008 05:46 AM CDT

    A tool which allows one to hijack HTTP connections to steal cookies - even ones on HTTPS sites! Works on both Wifi (monitor mode) and Ethernet. Features: Does Wireless injection when the NIC is in monitor mode Supports Ethernet Support for WEP (when the NIC is in monitor mode) Known issues: Sometimes the victim is not redirected correctly...

    Read the full post at darknet.org.uk

    Links for 2008-09-18 [del.icio.us] [Sicurezza Informatica Made in Italy]

    Posted: 19 Sep 2008 12:00 AM CDT

    The mother of all bailouts [StillSecure, After All These Years]

    Posted: 18 Sep 2008 08:54 PM CDT

    stocks Well just when we thought we had seen it all comes word that the Secretary of the Treasury and the Fed Reserve Chairman are huddled with our Congressional leadership working out a bail out for the entire banking system in regard to bad mortgages. This one could put taxpayers on the line for upwards of a trillion dollars.  That is right Trillion with a T.  Jeez, is their a friggin' mortgage out there that is not in default? 

    Similar to what we did with the Resolution Trust Company back in the Savings and Loan crisis (Does anyone remember the Keating 5?  Extra points for naming who was the number one of the Keating 5), we will set up a company that banks can sell or transfer all of their bad mortgages too.  This way they get all of the bad stuff off of their books and can get back to pillaging the little guys in this country.

    Speaking of the little guys, where is their bailout?  Where is the government to help the people being put out of their homes everyday.  It is OK to give trillions of dollars to Wall Street fat cats and bank presidents, but the families being tossed out of their homes get nothing.  It just doesn't add up for me. If the banks and Wall Street need relief, so do the individual people who are already suffering from the greed and excess of the last years.  I am waiting to see what comes next.  In the meantime I am thinking of starting a bank to get my share of the bailout money.

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    NAC Interoperability - Man or Myth? [StillSecure, After All These Years]

    Posted: 18 Sep 2008 08:02 PM CDT

    charlton heston Sean Michael Kerner at Internetnews.com is the latest in a long line of journalists to ask if NAC interoperability is a myth and ask when, if ever will it be achieved.  Lately, whenever I hear this I am reminded of one of my favorite movies when I was a child.  In my house during Easter/Passover time, a highlight for me was when when our family would gather around the TV and watch Charlton Heston in The 10 Commandments.  They just don't make movies like that anymore.  Anyway, there is a line when Sethi, Pharaoh of Eygpt tells Yul Brenner, who is Ramses, the future Pharaoh to find out the truth about the prophesied deliverer of the Hebrews. Sethi tells Ramses that if the deliverer is a myth bring him the myth in a bottle, but if he is a man bring him in chains.  Of course Ramses returns with an empty bottle, for the Hebrew deliverer is no myth. Instead he has Charlton Heston as Moses in chains.

    Well here is my empty bottle about the myth of interoperability of NAC.  The bottle is empty because NAC interoperability is no myth and is very much real.  The problem is that most people are waiting for that golden moment when the Sun aligns, the angels sing and interoperability is proclaimed throughout the land.  What does interoperability really mean?  Does it mean one NAC solution is going to work with another and are interchangeable?  I don't think so.  Interoperability means to me that all of the moving parts involved in NAC work together across different vendors.  My friends we have that now.  Call off the hunt for the myth, the reality is here.  What NAC interoperability means is can your NAC controller work with switches from different vendors to test and enforce for access control.  What NAC interoperability means, is can NAC systems use a soon to be ubiquitous agent, such as the Microsoft NAP agent? If so, we have that today with any TCG compliant NAC.  Can NAC systems use just about any DHCP or Radius server? Yes.  SNMP or 802.1x? Check. Default supplicants? Yes again.  Guys the systems and tools used to install NAC, the switches, VLANs, ACLs, Radius, AD, DHCP servers all work together today.  Cisco works with NAP, TCG works with NAP, NAP works with everything else.  Stop waiting for the mythical deliverer, the NAC promised land is right here before your eyes.  It is just not a StillSecure thing either.  Take a look at any of the leading NAC solutions with the exception of Cisco and you will see a high level of interoperability with the network infrastructure components that NAC needs to function.

    Cisco is another story. My personal belief is that they give lip service to wanting to be interoperable, but frankly they would rather see hell freeze over.  With their dominant position in the network market, they want their stuff to work best on their own gear.  They want to use that as a reason to use only their equipment and lock you into the Cisco mono-culture. Every other NAC vendor will work with a wide range of network switches and gear.  So it is in Cisco's interests to sow myths and misconceptions.  To drag their feet in working with other solutions.  But other NAC solutions work just fine on Cisco gear. Make no mistake about it. NAC is interoperable right now!

    Noscript vs SurfJacking [Hackers Center Blogs]

    Posted: 18 Sep 2008 06:00 PM CDT

    Giorgio has added a new special feature to popular Noscript. With new version 1.8.13 is now possible to force HTTPS on a (wildcard) list of websites and many other features regarding safety of the...

    Read the rest of the story here

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