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Add Anti Exploitation to Applications You Didn’t Write

Rich October 27, 2009 1 Comment

This morning Dan Goodin over at The Register dropped me a line to get my take on a new tool from Microsoft that lets you apply anti-exploitation controls to existing applications. Here’s Dan’s article with my quote, and more information directly from Microsoft. This. Is. Awesome. Here’s why EMET is so significant. Anti-exploitation technologies are incredibly powerful because they reduce the risk that any vulnerability – even a zero day – can actually be exploited to cause harm. They include a bunch of techniques including Data Execution Protection (DEP, which is a software flag enforced at the hardware level), Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), and stack protection. As powerful as these techniques are, the software developer needs to design and build their programs to take advantage of them. Most developers don’t do this yet, which makes their software a major potential weak point for any host security. This is especially problematic with web browser plugins that are leveraged by web-based client-side exploits. EMET allows anyone to add certain anti-exploitation protections to any program without requiring recompiling. You can now apply four anti-exploitation techniques to an existing application, no matter where you got it from or who programmed it (see Microsoft’s post for the list and explanation). Since this will break some applications, it’s not for the faint of heart, but EMET has per-process granularity which can help you lock something down, while leaving open the bits that break. It’s very cool, and kudos to Microsoft. We still need to see how well it works in the real world, so hopefully we’ll get some field reports soon. Share:

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Amazon RDS Announced

Adrian Lane October 27, 2009 2 Comments

Amazon announced a Relational Database Service today: Amazon RDS gives you access to the full capabilities of a familiar MySQL database. This means the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing MySQL databases work seamlessly with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period. It was natural to choose the most popular open source database, MySQL 5.1, at least in the short term. With this introduction they have effectively filled out their cloud offering for database infrastructure services. To go along with the existing capabilities of Amazon’s Simple DB and a generic Amazon Machine Image that provide logical instances of any of the major database platforms, you have just about every option you could want as an application developer. There is a list of pricing options based upon tiers of memory and computational capacity for your web service. Storage is equally flexible, with the ability to select from 5GB to 1TB of storage capacity. Snapshotting, rollbacks, resource monitoring, automated backup, and pretty much everything needed for basic database setup and maintenance. What Amazon is doing is very cool, but this is a security blog so I need to make a few comments on security and not just act like an RDS fanboi. Which I sometimes hate because I feel like the guy who’s yelling “Hey kid, stop running around with that sharp stick! You’ll poke your eye out!” With the AMI variants, as Amazon takes care of patching and configuration, and the user takes care of access control and identity management. While the instances most likely have security patches applied on a consistent basis, there is a lot more to security than patching IDM. I have no evidence that these database instances are insecure, but no one gets the benefit of the doubt in this case. For most relational database platforms I look at about 125 different database settings in an assessment sweep, most of these are to ensure the factory defaults have been changed. There is no reason to believe that Amazon is doing the same, so protection against SQL injection falls on the shoulders of client developers. With MySQL databases for RDS, the situation appears to be a little different, as the user has some configuration options. The RDS Developer Guide shows that we can alter port settings and enforce SSL connections. But the API is limited and far more focused on programming than administration. The security guides don’t offer any details on usage of service accounts, default passwords, stored procedure access, networking agents, or other features that are not necessarily masked by the Amazon APIs. Many important security topics are simply not addressed. And odds are, if someone is going after your data, they are going to use SQL injection, default account access, or external stored procedures – all of which are your responsibility to secure. I would have a tough time putting any sensitive data out there until you can verify the security setup. Use caution or you might… oh, never mind. Share:

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