Roadrunner Extreme Broadband Beta
I was having lunch with Charles Henderson from Trustwave Spider Labs the other day and he mentioned that he had just gotten signed up with the new Roadrunner Extreme Broadband Beta from Time Warner Cable. He mentioned insane download and upload speeds as well as the new DOCSIS 3.0 compliant modem. It was enough to pique my interest and get me to call Time Warner.
I have been on the older Roadrunner Turbo-charged plan since basically when it first came out and have been generally happy with the service up until recently when I've started having to reboot the modem daily. I'm also kind of an internet speed addict so the idea of moving up to 20 MB/s downloads and 5 MB/s uploads was pretty sweet to me. That's just to start with as eventually the service will have 30 MB/s downloads. I called up Time Warner and asked what it would take to move onto the Extreme Broadband Beta and they told me that it was only an extra $5/mo over my Turbo-charged plan. Even better was that they were offering free installation as part of the Beta. They were able to get the install scheduled just over a week out. Not too bad.
The service technicians came out on the designated day and time and got everything hooked up for me. They even replaced a bunch of the wiring on the box on the side of the house where the service connects to. They did some line tests and within minutes I was up and running on the new service. While not the 5 MB/s upload that was advertised to me, the download speed is quite impressive. Check it out:
The other cool thing is that while not necessarily intended, it is very easy to get into the new ubee modem's configuration interface. By default, the device comes up as 192.168.0.1 on your network and has a username and password of user/user. Get in there and it's got all of the configuration options of a wireless internet gateway. The first thing that you should do is change the username and password. After that, enable the wireless network, configure port forwarding, etc.
Not only does the new modem have built-in wireless N, but it also has four additional network ports so you can use it with multiple computers on your network. I remember the days when Time Warner used to charge you if you had more than one computer, but not anymore.
Granted, I've only had the new service for a few hours now, but I'm already pretty impressed. If you're an internet speed demon like me, and you live in the Austin area, I'd recommend that you give Time Warner a call and ask about switching over to the new Roadrunner Extreme Broadband Beta. Enjoy!
Demanding Secure Developers
Much like many other companies these days, National Instruments hires many of our developers straight out of school. Many times when engaging with these new hire developers, I will ask them what kind of security they learned at their university. In almost all cases I've found that the answer hasn't changed since I graduated back in 2002. Occassionally I'll get a developer who mentions one particular professor or class where they discussed secure coding practices, but most of the time the answer is "I didn't learn security in school". This absolutely kills me. It's like asking an architect to design a building without them knowing anything about support structures and load distribution. The end result may look awesome on the outside, but the slightest breeze will knock it over. With computers being embedded into literally every aspect of our society, do you really want code that crumbles the moment a user does something other than what was explicitly intended?
This leads me to the conclusion that security should be considered a fundamental part of code development and not an afterthought. We should be teaching security to students at a University level so that when they graduate, corporations don't spend valuable time re-training them on proper development techniques. I've heard rumors of large companies like Oracle actually being able to impact college curriculum by telling universities they simply won't hire developers without security training. Unfortunately, most companies aren't in a position to make demands like that, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to develop relationships with faculty at your local university and tell them what you'd like to see out of their students. I did some poking around on the internet and it seems like some professors are already starting to get the memo. For example, I found a great paper written by three professors at the USAF Academy Dept. of Computer Science called Incorporating Security Issues Throughout The Computer Science Curriculum where they say:
While the general public is becoming more aware of security issues, what are our universities doing to produce graduates ready to address our security needs? Computer science as a discipline has matured to the point that students are regularly in tructed in software engineering principles--they learn the importance of life cycle issues in the development and maintenance of software. Where are they receiving similar instruction on security concerns in the software life cycle? The authors propose that security should be taught throughout every computer science curriculum--that security should always be a concern and should be considered in the development of all software just as structured programming and documentation are.
Gentlemen, I couldn't agree more. Security needs to be a foundational piece of every Computer Science program in the country. Not one class. Not one professor. Secure programming techniques need to be a consideration in every CS class in every university. Universities teach students how to write functions, create object-oriented code, and do proper documentation, but when graduates don't know the basic tenets of input validation, then we have a real problem. If you agree with me, then I challenge you to write to the Dean of your local CS program and ask them what they are doing to ensure graduates are familiar with secure coding practices. I'd be very interested in hearing back from you as to what their response was.
Physical Security FAIL :-(
Notice anything wrong with this picture?
I was walking by one of the Iron Mountain Secure Shredding bins at work one day several months ago and noticed that the lock wasn't actually locked. Being the security conscious individual that I am, I tried to latch the lock again, but the lock was so rusted that it wouldn't close as hard as I tried. I can't just leave it there like that so I call the number on the bin's label and there is an automated message that tells me that they're not taking local calls anymore and gave me a different number to try. I call that number and they ask me for my company ID number which I had no idea what it was. She informed me that without that ID number I couldn't submit a support request. I informed the lady that this bin contained sensitive personal and financial information and that the issue couldn't wait for some random company ID to be found. Fortunately, she gave in and created the support ticket for me saying that I should hear back from someone within four hours.
One week later, on Friday, Iron Mountain finally calls me back and says that they will come to replace the lock the following Monday before 5 PM. When the lock hadn't been replaced yet on Monday evening, I called Iron Mountain back up. Looking at their records, they showed that a new lock had been delivered, but they had no idea where and the signature was illegible. I work on a three-building campus with 14 floors between them and almost 3,000 people. If they can't tell me where the lock is, then there's no way for me to track it down. They said that they would investigate and call me back.
After not hearing back from them again for a couple of days, I called them back. The woman I spoke with had no real update on the investigation. She said that she would send another message "downstairs" and escalate to her supervisor. At this point it had been almost three weeks with sensitive documents sitting in a bin with a malfunctioning lock. The next day they called me back and said they were never able to track down who the new lock was left with so they would bring us a new one at no charge. Finally, after a total of 24 days with a unlocked Secure Shredding bin, Iron Mountain was able to replace the lock. Iron Mountain......FAIL.
Static Application Vulnerability Testing: Binary Scanning vs Source Code Scanning
I had a meeting yesterday with a vendor who sells a SaaS solution for binary application vulnerability testing. They tell a very interesting story of a world where dynamic testing ("black box") takes place alongside static testing ("white box") to give you a full picture of your application security posture. They even combine the results with some e-Learning aspects so that developers can research the vulnerabilities in the same place they go to find them. In concept, this sounds fantastic, but I quickly turned into a skeptic and as I dug deeper into the details I'm not sure I like what I found.
I wanted to make sure I fully understood what was going on under the hood here so I started asking questions about the static testing and how it works. They've got a nice looking portal where you name your application, give it a version, assign it to a group of developers, and point it to your compiled code (WAR, EAR, JAR, etc). Once you upload your binaries, their system basically runs a disassembler on it to get it into assembly code. It's then at this level that they start looking for vulnerabilities. They said that this process takes about 3 days initially and then maybe 2 days after the first time because they are able to re-use some data about your application. Once complete, they say they are able to provide you a report detailing your vulnerabilities and how to fix them.
The thing that immediately struck me as worth noting here was the 2-3 day turnaround. This means that our developers would need to wait a fairly substantial amount of time before getting any feedback on the vulnerability status of their code. In a world full of Agile development, 2-3 days is a lifetime. Compare that to static source code testing where you get actionable results at compile time. The edge here definitely goes to source code testing as I believe most people would prefer the near-instant gratification.
The next thing worth noting was that they are taking binary files and disassembling them in order to find vulnerabilities. This lends itself to one major issue which is how can you determine with any accuracy the line number of a particular vulnerability written in let's say Java from assembly code generated by disassembling the binaries. By default, it's simply not possible. This vendor claimed that they can by adding in some debug strings at compile time, but even then I'd contend that you're not going to get much. I'm guessing they have some heuristics that are able to tell what function generated a set of assembly code, but I'm extremely skeptical that they can do anything with variable names, custom code functions, etc. I've seen some source code scanners, on the other hand, that not only tell you what line of code is affected, but are able to give you an entire list of parameters that have been consequently affected by that vulnerability. The edge here definitely goes to source code testing.
The main benefit that I can see with binary testing vs source code testing is that we can test code that we didn't write. Things like APIs, third-party applications, open source, etc are all things that we now have visibility into. The only problem here is that while we now can see the vulnerabilities in this software, they are unfortunately all things that we can't directly influence change in, unless we want to send our developers off to work on somebody else's software. I'd argue that scanning for vulnerabilities in that type of code is their responsibility, not ours. Granted, it'd be nice to have validation that there aren't vulnerabilities there that we're exposing ourselves to by uptaking it, but in all honesty are we really going to take the time to scan somebody else's work? Probably not. The edge here goes to binary testing with the caveat being that it's in something that I frankly don't care as much about.
This isn't the complete list of pros and cons by any means. It's just me voicing in writing some concerns that I had about the technology while talking to this particular vendor. In my opinion, the benefits of doing source code testing far outweigh any benefits that we could get from testing compiled binary files. What do you think about the benefits of one versus the other? I'd certainly love for someone to try to change my mind here and show me where the real value lies in binary testing.
Auditors Just Don’t Understand Security
Part of my new role as the Information Security Program Owner at NI is taking care of our regulatory compliance concerns which means I spend quite a bit of time dealing with auditors. Now auditors are nice people and I want to preface what I'll say next by saying that I think auditors do perform a great service to companies. I'm sure that most of them are hard-workers and understand compliance requirements probably better than I do, but they just don't understand security.
As a case in point, we're in the middle of our annual audit by one of those "Big Four" audit firms which I won't name here to protect the innocent. I sent an email checking in with our auditors to make sure that they had everything they needed before we went into our four-day holiday weekend. They said that they had received everything they needed except for documentation on "privileged users from the current OS and Database environments" as well as "evidence of current password settings from the application servers, OS, and Database". We go through a round of translation from Auditorese to Techie and figure out that they want exports of some specific user, profile, role, and privilege tables from the database and copies of /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, and /etc group from the servers.
So we obtain the requested documentation and I shoot them back an email message to find out their proposed method for transferring the files. Secure FTP? No. PGP encryption? Nope. Their response back was astonishing:
How large do you think they'll be? Email should be fine.
Seriously? These are the guys that we're paying to verify that we're properly protecting our systems and they're suggesting that sending our usernames and password hashes via cleartext email is an appropriate method of file transfer. I respond back:
I'm not really concerned about the size of the files, but rather, the data that they contain. Sending files containing the users, groups, and password hashes for our financial systems via cleartext is probably not a good plan considering the point of this process is protecting that data.
And they respond with:
Whatever you'd like Josh. As long as you have the files as of today, we're good.
So now I'm convinced that auditors (or at least these auditors) view security as nothing more than a checklist. The people telling me what I need to do in order to protect my systems really have no clue about the fundamentals of security. If it's not on their checklist, then it must not be of importance. In this particular situation it may be easier or more convenient to send the documents via email, but any security professional worth their salt would tell you that's not secure nor appropriate for that data. Either our auditors hold themselves to a very different standard than the rest of us security professionals or they just don't understand security unless it's on a checklist.
Simplifying On-call Through Alert Aggregation
One of the coolest things about working on the Web Systems Team at National Instruments is that the company has invested in a wide variety of tools to assist us with our jobs. Since we are responsible for the availability of ni.com, we have the standard URL and content monitors (Sitescope and Nagios). We also have the ability to do real user monitoring with a tool called Coradiant TrueSight. We are also responsible for the website's performance so we have purchased tools like Panorama to diagnose code level issues. We have Splunk for log monitoring and Gomez for a third-party performance and availability monitor. We even have a SaaS provider that does application security scanning. Having all of these tools at our disposal is quite awesome and allows us to quickly find and fix issues with the site. The problem is that every single one of those tools has it's own alerting and reporting interface.
This isn't a new problem by any means. I've seen this issue at every job that I've ever had where the responsibilities included operational support. You rely on multiple tools to tell you when things aren't going quite right, but now you end up spending some non-zero portion of your time managing those tools. For example, lets say that your company has a small release that lasts a few hours once a month. You now have to log in to the control panel (GUI) for each one of those tools and disable your alerts for that time period so that your on-call device isn't going crazy. Assume that you have only four alerting tools and it takes you approximately 5 minutes to log in to each, set the maintenance window, and log back out. You just spent 20 minutes to disable alerts! Now you're getting to the end of the release and things didn't go as planned so the release is running longer than expected. Now you have to spend another 20 minutes to extend the maintenance window. How frustrating is that?
The issue gets even more complicated when you have multiple people providing support in either an on-call rotation or follow-the-sun type of scenario. At NI, we have an operations team that handles alerts during normal business hours, an on-call admin who handles alerts from 5 PM to 2 AM, and then a super-awesome Hungarian Web Admin who takes over responding to pages after 2 AM (9 AM in Hungary). Most of the alerting configurations that these tools provide aren't even able to handle this type of scenario, but let's suppose they did. You're still stuck logging into multiple systems every time there's a holiday, somebody goes on vacation, etc. And what happens if you don't have a dedicated on-call device to pass from person to person? Then you're stuck updating the alert configurations every time the on-call person changes in your rotation.
This really got me thinking that there has to be a better way to do things. I searched the internet looking for a solution, but when I couldn't find anything to do exactly what I wanted it to do, I ended up writing my own. It's now my pleasure to share with you iAlertYou. The idea is quite simple. You take all of those different tools that send alerts and you aggregate them in the same place. In this case, it's on ialertyou.com. By doing this, you gain the ability to control everything from a single, centralized, management platform. Have a maintenance window? No problem. Just log in, set it once, and it affects all of your alerts. Same thing for both alert scheduling (who should get pages and when) and contact groups (used for on-call rotations). Plus, by having all of your alerts going through a single aggregation point, it means that we can also do reporting on all of your alerts. Ever wondered how many of your alerts come from what tools? What times of the day you get the most alerts? It's all possible through alert aggregation.
Certainly there are drawbacks to this type of scenario. Most importantly, you're introducing another dependency in what is typically a mission critical activity. While I can't eliminate this concern completely, I built the system on top of internet cloud technologies for superior scalability. I've architected the application using best-practices in availability, performance, security, and usability. Currently, the only offering is a $30/month "everything" plan, but if you spend more than 10-20 minutes a month changing alert configurations, the ROI is realized very quickly. I will also be rolling out a "free" plan (thanks to Peco) with a limited subset of the functionality. I'd like to invite you to check out http://www.ialertyou.com and see if it can help your company simplify on-call through alert aggregation.
A XSS Vulnerability in Almost Every PHP Form I’ve Ever Written
I've spent a lot of time over the past few months writing an enterprise application in PHP. Despite what some people may say, I believe that PHP is as secure or insecure as the developer who is writing the code. Anyway, I'm at the point in my development lifecycle where I decided that it was ready to run an application vulnerability scanner against it. What I found was interesting and I think it's worth sharing with you all.
Let me preface this by saying that I'm the guy who gives the training to our developers on the OWASP Top 10, writing secure code, etc. I'd like to think that I have a pretty good handle on programming best practices, input validation, and HTML encoding. I built all kinds of validation into this application and thought that the vulnerability scan would come up empty. For the most part I was right, but there was one vulnerability, one flaw in particular, that found it's way into every form in my application. In fact, I realized that I've made this exact same mistake in almost every PHP form that I've ever written. Talk about a humbling experience.
So here's what happened. I created a simple page with a form where the results of that form are submitted back to the page itself for processing. Let's assume it looks something like this:
<html> <body> <?php if (isset($_REQUEST['submitted']) && $_REQUEST['submitted'] == '1') { echo "Form submitted!"; } ?> <form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>"> <input type="hidden" name="submitted" value="1" /> <input type="submit" value="Submit!" /> </form> </body> </html>
It looks fairly straightforward, right? The problem has to do with that $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] variable. The intent here is that PHP will display the path and name of the current page so that the form knows to submit back to the same page. The problem is that $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] can actually be manipulated by the user. Let's say as the user I change the URL from http://www.webadminblog.com/example.php to http://www.webadminblog.com/example.php"><script>alert('xss');</script>. This will end the form action part of the code and inject a javascript alert into the page. This is the very definition of cross site scripting. I can't believe that with as long as I've been writing in PHP and as long as I've been studying application security, I've never realized this. Fortunately, there are a couple of different ways to fix this. First, you could use the HTML entities or HTML special character functions to sanitize the user input like this:
htmlentities($_SERVER['PHP_SELF]);
htmlspecialchars($_SERVER['PHP_SELF]);
This fix would still allow the user to manipulate the URL, and thus, what is displayed on the page, but it would render the javascript invalid. The second way to fix this is to use the script name variable instead like this:
$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'];
This fix would just echo the full path and filename of the current file. Yes, there are other ways to fix this. Yes, my code example above for the XSS exploit doesn't do anything other than display a javascript alert. I just wanted to draw attention to this issue because if it's found it's way into my code, then perhaps it's found it's way into yours as well. Happy coding!
Techniques in Attacking and Defending XML/Web Services
This presentation was by Jason Macy and Mamoon Yunus of Crosscheck Networks - Forum Systems. It wins the award (the one I just made up) for being the most vendor-oriented presentation at the conference. Not that it wasn't an interesting presentation, but their solution to defend against most of the attacks was "Use an XML Gateway" (guess what Forum Systems sells?) and the attacks were all presented using the CrossCheck SOAPSonar tool. I realize that being a vendor they probably have more knowledge than most in the field, but being an Open Source conference, you'd think they would have demonstrated using a free/open tool (SOAPUI?) and talked more about non-hardware solutions to fix the issues. My notes from the session are below:
Agenda
- Introduction to XML/Web Services Threats
- Techniques for Defending XML Threats
- XML Attack Examples and Classification
- Review sample attacks
Introduction to XML Threats
- Explicit Attacks
- Forced Disruption
- Information Theft
- Vendor Discovery
- Implicit Vulnerability
- Perimeter Breach (embeeded virus, malware)
- Infrastructure Malfunction (parser and data processing failures)
New Attack Vectors
- Protocol Firewalls are blind to XML
- Malware and virus delivered via SOAP attachments
- WSDL exposes schema and message structure
- Injection attacks exposed via XML parameters
- Data replay attacks
Security Testing - Base Requirements
- Security Framework
- Sign, ENcrypt, Decrypt, SSL
- Identity Framework
- Basic auth, SSL auth, WS-Security token auth
- Parameter Injection
- Database or file driven
- Permutations for security, identity, and SOAP/XML
- Concurrent Client Simultaneous Loading
- Denial of Service Testing
- SOAP with Attachments
- Malware and Virus testing
- Dynamic XSD Mutation
- Derive SOAP vulnerability profile from WSDL schema
The OWASP Security Spending Benchmarks Project
This presentation was by Boaz Belboard, the Executive Director of Information Security for Wireless Generation and the Project Leader for the OWASP Security Spending Benchmarks Project. My notes are below:
It does cost more to produce a secure product than an insecure product.
Most people will still shop somewhere, go to a hospital, or enroll in a university after they have had a data breach.
Why do we spend on security? How much should we be spending?
- Security imposes extra costs on organizations
- The "security tax" is relatively well knnown for network and IT security - 5 to 10% (years of Gartner, Forrester, and other studies)
- No comparable data for development or web apps
- Regualtions and contracts usually require "reasonable measures". What does that mean?
OWASP Security Spending Benchmarks Project
- 20 partner organizations, many contributors
- Open process and participation
- Raw data available to community
Reasons For Investing in Security
- Contractual and Regulatory Compliance
- Incident Prevention, Risk Mitigation
- Cost of Entry
- Competitive Advantage
Technical and Procedural Principles
- Managed and Documented Systems
- Business-need access
- Minimization of sensitive data use
- Security in Design and Development
- Auditing and Monitoring
- Defense in Depth
Specific Activities and Projects
- Security Policy and Training
- DLP-Type Systems
- Internal Configurations Management
- Credential Management
- Security in Development
- Locking down internal permissions
- Secure Data Exchange
- Network Security
- Application Security Programs