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Gmail CSRF Flaw

Adrian Lane March 6, 2009 1 Comment

Yesterday morning I read the article on The Tech Herald about the demonstration of a CSRF flaw for ‘Change Password’ in Google Mail. While the vulnerability report has been known for some time, this is the first public proof of concept I am aware of. “An attacker can create a page that includes requests to the “Change Password” functionality of GMail and modify the passwords of the users who, being authenticated, visit the page of the attacker,” the ISecAuditors advisory adds. The Google response? “We’ve been aware of this report for some time, and we do not consider this case to be a significant vulnerability, since a successful exploit would require correctly guessing a user’s password within the period that the user is visiting a potential attacker’s site. We haven’t received any reports of this being exploited. Despite the very low chance of guessing a password in this way, we will explore ways to further mitigate the issue. We always encourage users to choose strong passwords, and we have an indicator to help them do this.” Uh, maybe, maybe not. Last I checked, people still visit malicious sites either willingly or by being fooled into it. Now take just a handful of the most common passwords and try them against 300 million accounts and see what happens. How does that game go? Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper, and weaponized exploit beats corporate rhetoric? I think that’s it. Share:

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Source Boston Next Week

Adrian Lane March 6, 2009 No Comments

I am going to be in Boston Tuesday through Friday at the Source Boston event that runs March 11th through the 13th. I am presenting on Encryption and Enterprise Data Security on Thursday afternoon right after Jeremiah Grossman. This is my first Source Boston event, so I am looking forward to it. Let me know if you are going to be in town! I imagine that things will be fairly quiet on the blog next week. With Riley conducting an aggressive sleep deprivation campaign against Rich, I don’t think we are going to see or hear much from him, but I will continue to post on what I hear from the conference. Share:

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More on PDF /JBIGS2Decode Issue

Adrian Lane March 6, 2009 No Comments

Via Slashdot, I just ran across Didier Stevens post on how to automate the JBIG2decode vulnerability in PDF documents. There is a video on the site where he runs through three scenarios to exercise the vulnerability – Manually starting up Reader, viewing a thumbnail PDF, and then automatic execution by simply visiting the page with the malicious document through Windows Explorer Shell Extensions, and shows you the results in the debugger. It’s worth the view. When you install Adobe Acrobat Reader, a Column Handler Shell Extension is installed. A column handler is a special program (a COM object) that will provide Windows Explorer with additional data to display (in extra columns) for the file types the column handler supports. The PDF column handler adds a few extra columns, like the Title. When a PDF document is listed in a Windows Explorer windows, the PDF column handler shell extension will be called by Windows Explorer when it needs the additional column info. The PDF column handler will read the PDF document to extract the necessary info, like the Title, Author. I also ran across another technical analysis here. As you don’t need to do anything other that drop onto an infected site, this is a pretty serious issue. There is supposed to be a patch available later this month. The more I look at this, the more I think it may be a good idea to disable Reader until there is a patch. There are some instructions on how to do this on the PC Mag site, and some additional information you might find helpful as well. Share:

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Director of National Cyber-Security Center Resigns

Adrian Lane March 6, 2009 No Comments

A couple days ago I posted some thoughts on Data Security and the US Government, how I perceive the role of Cybersecurity, and what I suspected would be a difficult challenge as the Cybersecurity team was set up at cross-purposes with the intelligence community. Today the Wall Street Journal released an article on the resignation of National Cybersecurity Chief Rod Beckstrom. In a case of “even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut”, my estimate of internal conflict appears to already be going on. In his resignation letter, Mr. Beckstrom stated that the “NSA currently dominates most national cyber efforts” and “The intelligence culture is very different than a network operations or security culture”. The WSJ focuses on privacy and separation of power issues with additional comments from Mr. Beckstrom: “the threats to our democratic process … if all top level network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization”. The resignation letter has a different feel and focus, pointing out that there was a general lack of support for the NCSC, and the specific ways Beckstrom feels his organizations was subjugated. If you have interest in this subject, you will want to read his resignation letter, as it contains more information. It also lists a couple methods by which the NSA can subtly (sneakily?) affect the effectiveness of Cybersecurity efforts that I did not mention in my post. Quite frankly I am surprised that the National Cybersecurity Center could somehow manage to only get 5 fully funded days of operation, but if true, this demonstrates the challenges faced by NCSC. This could get ugly unless both sides understand that each organization can benefit the other, and realize the goals and agendas do not necessarily need to be at the expense of each other. Concessions have to be made, otherwise this is an expensive and ugly turf war and the entire security problem- which is quickly becoming a US government security problem- continues to fester. Share:

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