This video, while “amusing”, is quite interesting :

Though not many details are given, I am quite skeptical about the possibility of such a massive attack.

However, it shows well that security is not just a technical matter. It has many implications in law, politics, economics, and a whole information system must be prepared to that, starting with our leaders.

That would be a HUGE effort for our politicians here in France – if they ever care…

JC :: Feb.18.2010 :: Defense, Hacking, Security :: No Comments »

waf00f is another nice fingerprinting tool.
It is a good complement to a tool like httprint. It is able to detect Web Application Firewalls.
Its output can help you to determine the trust you can have in what httprint or any other web server fingerprinting tool found out.
Check it there.

JC :: Dec.16.2009 :: Hacking, Scanning / fingerprinting, Security, Web :: No Comments »

I finished reading the ModSecurity 2.5 book, written by Magnus Mischell and published by Packt Publishing.

I found a lot of interest reading it as I was already using ModSecurity – and I think anyone exposing an Apache web server should.
I was actually using it partially. It is not trivial to secure a web application, and the rule engine of ModSecurity is very powerful but it is also quite complex.

So this book was a good opportunity for me to dig into it further.

The book covers all topics : from the set-up to a real use-case.
The author explains how to write rules, how to deal with the performance impact, logging and gives us a range of various core rules to implement to get a good security basis.

The difficulty goes up progressively and the author doesn’t forget the beginners.
The set-up of the module is precisely described. All requirements are also explained and there are some good recalls about regular expressions, common attacks on systems, server and client sides, and other stuff like that.

After reading the book, I could harden my rules, reorganize and optimize them for better performance – something I hadn’t cared about before.

So I have nothing else to say but to recommend this book.
It is definitely a great handbook about ModSecurity that’s worth having next to you. The variety of configuration patterns makes it a reference.

Check it there. I also appreciated the availability of PDF version, so that I can carry it everywhere with my laptop and index it with Beagle.

JC :: Dec.10.2009 :: Defense, Firewalling, Hacking, IDS / IPS, Linux, Security, System, Web, openSUSE :: No Comments »

Yet another post in the series of compilation failures due to unexpected libraries paths.

This time, it is about Yersinia and the ncurses library. I made the following yersinia-opensuse11.1 patch which should work for openSUSE 11.1 and maybe other versions or distros.

JC :: Jun.14.2009 :: Hacking, Linux, Scripts, Programs, Security, openSUSE :: 3 Comments »

PackETH is a nice gkt tool to play with Ethernet packet.

I encountered some path issues with the Makefile and openSUSE 11.1 64 bits to compile it, so here is the packETH-opensuse patch to compile correctly.

If you are on a 32 bits system, all you will have to do is editing the CPPFLAGS line and replace all lib64 occurences with lib.

I hope one will find it useful.

JC :: Jun.14.2009 :: Hacking, Linux, Scripts, Programs, Security, openSUSE :: No Comments »

Edward Bjarte Fjellskål contacted me to let me know about a new program he, Kacper Wysocki and Jan Henning Thorsen made, called Prads.

Prads is a fingerprinting scanner, coded in Perl. I am fond of this kind of tool, so I enjoyed checking it out.

Prads operates differently from Nmap or SinFP that I already introduced on this blog. It works passively, meaning that it aims to scan systems without sending out a single packet. It does this by capturing the traffic silently though an interface in promiscuous mode.
The advantage, of course, is that it is much more stealth than a classic scanner, which leaves usually a lot of log entries in firewalls or IDS.
It works on several layers and is based on all the common protocols, that should make it efficient and fast : TCP, UDP, ICMP, ARP.

Using Prads is very simple, just look at prads –help for more info.

There is a sample output, after running it a few seconds on my network :

% sudo perl prads.pl -d eth0 --os --service
Starting prads.pl...
Using eth0
DBD::SQLite::db prepare failed: table asset already exists(1) at dbdimp.c line 271 at prads.pl line 320.
 1243801518 [SYN       ] ip:  192.168.222.23 - Linux - 2.6 (newer, 7) [S4:64:1:60:M1460,S,T,N,W7:.] distance:0 link:"ethernet/modem"
 1243801518 [SYNACK    ] ip: 192.168.222.254 - Linux - 2.6 (newer, 0) [5792:64:1:60:M1460,S,T,N,W0:ZA] distance:0 link:"ethernet/modem"
; 3.0.10-1.1.1 Firefox [192.168.222.23:44555] distance:1 link:SERVICE
 1243801518 [SERVICE   ] ip: 192.168.222.254 - Unknown HTTP - HTTP;  [192.168.222.254:80] distance:1 link:SERVICE
; 3.0.10-1.1.1 Firefox [192.168.222.23:44556] distance:1 link:SERVICE
; 3.0.10-1.1.1 Firefox [192.168.222.23:44557] distance:1 link:SERVICE
; 3.0.10-1.1.1 Firefox [192.168.222.23:44558] distance:1 link:SERVICE
; 3.0.10-1.1.1 Firefox [192.168.222.23:44559] distance:1 link:SERVICE
 1243801536 [SYNACK    ] ip:    91.121.56.96 - Linux - 2.6 (newer, 5) [5792:64:1:60:M1380,S,T,N,W5:ZA] distance:7 link:"GPRS, T1, FreeS/WAN"
 1243801536 [SERVICE   ] ip:    91.121.56.96 - Generic TLS 1.0 SSL - ;  [91.121.56.96:443] distance:1 link:SERVICE
 1243801438 [UDP       ] ip:  192.168.222.23 - @Linux - 2.6 [20:64:1:.:2:0] distance:0 link:ethernet [OLD]
 1243801438 [UDP       ] ip:        89.2.0.1 - @Linux - 2.6 [20:64:1:.:2:0] distance:2 link:ethernet [OLD]
 1243801544 [SERVICE   ] ip:        89.2.0.1 - - - DNS; - [89.2.0.1:53] distance:1 link:SERVICE
 1243801549 [SYNACK    ] ip:   192.168.222.1 - Cisco - 7200, Catalyst 3500, etc [4096:255:0:44:M1460:A] distance:0 link:"ethernet/modem"
 1243801549 [SERVICE   ] ip:   192.168.222.1 - Cisco SSH - Protocol 1.5; 1.25 [192.168.222.1:22] distance:1 link:SERVICE
 1243801549 [SERVICE   ] ip:  192.168.222.23 - OpenSSH - Protocol 1.5; 5.1 [192.168.222.23:42208] distance:1 link:SERVICE
 1243801600 [SYN       ] ip:  192.168.222.23 - Linux - 2.6 (newer, 7) [S4:64:1:60:M1460,S,T,N,W7:.] distance:0 link:"ethernet/modem"  [OLD]
 1243802459 [SYNACK    ] ip:   192.168.222.2 - UNKNOWN - UNKNOWN [8192:128:1:60:M1460,N,W8,S,T:A] distance:0 link:"ethernet/modem"
 1243802459 [SERVICE   ] ip:  192.168.222.23 - Windows SMB - ;  [192.168.222.23:37748] distance:1 link:SERVICE
 1243802459 [SERVICE   ] ip:   192.168.222.2 - Windows SMB - ;  [192.168.222.2:445] distance:1 link:SERVICE
 1243801596 [SYNACK    ] ip:    91.121.56.96 - Linux - 2.6 (newer, 5) [5792:64:1:60:M1380,S,T,N,W5:ZA] distance:7 link:"GPRS, T1, FreeS/WAN"  [OLD]
 1243801596 [SERVICE   ] ip:    91.121.56.96 - Generic TLS 1.0 SSL - ;  [91.121.56.96:443] distance:1 link:SERVICE [OLD]
 1243801367 [UDP       ] ip:   192.168.222.2 - @Windows - MS [20:128:0:.:0:0] distance:0 link:ethernet [OLD]

As you can see, there is already some interesting output.
It detected quite well my Linux laptop running Firefox (UPDATE : according to the author, it is a bug as client detection has not been implemented yet) and surfing a few website, the provider’s DNS servers, another Linux machine and a Windows desktop. Concerning the last two, I guess that a more completed signature database would have allowed a more precise fingerprinting. The Linux box is a wifi Linksys router and the Windows one runs Vista.
Also, the gateway curiously did not show up itself, but the presence of a SSH connection helped to find it.
Finally, there is a little incoherence between the distance shown for the DNS server (=2, correct) and for the service (=1).

To be honnest, so far, I had never found interest in the existing passive scanners. There were POf but it is now pretty outdated and seems not to be developped anymore. Ettercap could fingerprint the system seen while sniffing (profiles), but it was definitely too limited and not really furtive. Moreover, Nmap with the right options, or SinFP itself can be quite stealth.

But now Prads has a place among the tools I use. It is efficient, straight forward and provide some useful info, beyond the OS detection : service and client info, distance, etc. It is nice because, once again, all these data are obtained withou sending out any request at all.

As it is in its early stage, it is very promising and I am looking forward to Prads and its signature database improving. Please keep up the good job !

That’s all for today. This tour was short but I will write again about this tool, as I will be using it. The next post will probably introduce the way the signature database is built and how it can be extended. So keep wired and don’t forget to check the Prads homepage.

JC :: May.31.2009 :: Hacking, Scanning / fingerprinting, Security :: No Comments »

Video of a dummy vulnerability on Windows 7 . More info there.

It is incredible that Microsoft invests so much money in its security and that there are still such a bad security design for programs that in no way should be granted any administrator access (calc.exe or notepad.exe).

Also, I can’t imagine that no one could detect it in their teams during the quality process and security audit.

What the hell are they doing ?

JC :: May.15.2009 :: Hacking, Security, System, Windows :: No Comments »

MD5 was found vulnerable a few years ago. Recently, a team succeeded in producing a fake CA SSL certificate.

MD5 or SHA-1 is the algorithm used to authenticate the peer in SSL messages. If it gets compromised, and using various combined technics, it becomes possible to do a MiM attack.

But too much noise has been made about it. There is a nice reaction.

Indeed, it still requires a lot of efforts and conditions for the attack to be possible. And the CPU power is still huge : the researchers used not less than a cluster of 200 PS3 to drive the attack. Even with that hardware and engineering, it took until 3 days of intensive computation.

Not everyone can afford it, nor would have much motivation to attack a single user like this.

Security has always been a compromise between usuability and risk. Today, the risk concerning MD5 is still low enough to stop this wind of panic.

Let’s begin the migration to SHA-1 quietly.

JC :: Jan.02.2009 :: Cryptography, Hacking, Security :: No Comments »