Research

Since Friday is usually “trash” day (when you dump articles you don’t expect anyone to read) I don’t usually post anything major. But thanks to some unexpected work that hit yesterday, I wasn’t able to get part 2 of this series out when I wanted to. If you can tear yourself away from those LOLCatz long enough, we’re going to talk about web browsers, WAFs, and web application gateways. These are the first two components of Application and Database Monitoring and Protection (ADMP), which I define as: Products that monitor all activity in a business application and database, identify and audit users and content, and, based on central policies, protect data based on content, context, and/or activity. Browser Troubles As we discussed in part 1, one of the biggest problems in web application security is that the very model of the web browsers and the World Wide Web is not conducive to current security needs. Browsers are the ultimate mashup tool- designed to take different bits from different places and seamlessly render them into a coherent whole. The first time I started serious web application programming (around 1995/96) this blew my mind. I was able to embed disparate systems in ways never before possible. And not only can we embed content within a browser, we can embed browsers within other content/applications. The main reason, as a developer, I converted from Netscape to IE was that Microsoft allowed IE to be embedded in other programs, which allowed us to drop it into our thick VR application. Netscape was stand alone only; seriously limiting its deployment potential. This also makes life a royal pain on the security front where we often need some level of isolation. Sure, we have the same-origin policy, but browsers and web programming have bloated well beyond what little security that provides. Same-origin isn’t worthless, and is still an important tool, but there are just too many ways around it. Especially now that we all use tabbed browsers with a dozen windows open all the time. Browsers are also stateless by nature, no matter what AJAX trickery we use. XSS and CSRF, never mind some more sophisticated attacks, take full advantage of the weak browser/server trust models that result from these fundamental design issues. In short, we can’t trust the browser, the browser can’t trust the server, and individual windows/tabs/sessions in the browser can’t trust each other. Fun stuff! WAF Troubles I’ve talked about WAFs before, and their very model is also fundamentally flawed. At least how we use WAFs today. The goal of a WAF is, like a firewall, to drop known bad traffic or only allow known good traffic. We’re trying to shield our web applications from known vulnerabilities, just like we use a regular firewall to block ports, protocols, sources, and destinations. Actually, a WAF is closer to IPS than it is to a stateful packet inspection firewall. But web apps are complex beasts; every single one a custom application, with custom vulnerabilities. There’s no way a WAF can know all the ins and outs of the application behind it, even after it’s well tuned. WAFs also only protect against certain categories of attacks- mostly some XSS and SQL injection. They don’t handle logic flaws, CSRF, or even all XSS. I was talking with a reference yesterday of one of the major WAFs, and he had no trouble slicing through it during their eval phase using some standard techniques. To combat this, we’re seeing some new approaches. F5 and WhiteHat have partnered to feed the WAF specific vulnerability information from the application vulnerability assessment. Imperva just announced a similar approach, with a bunch of different partners. These advances are great to see, but I think WAFs will also need to evolve in some different ways. I just don’t think the model of managing all this from the outside will work effectively enough. Enter ADMP The idea of ADMP is that we build a stack of interconnected security controls from the browser to the database. At all levels we both monitor activity and include enforcement controls. The goal is to start with browser session virtualization connected to a web application gateway/WAF. Then traffic hits the web server and web application server, both with internal instrumentation and anti-exploitation. Finally, transactions drop to the database, where they are again monitored and protected. All of the components for this model exist today, so it’s not science fiction. We have browser session virtualization, WAFs, SSL-VPNs (that will make sense in a minute), application security services and application activity monitoring, and database activity monitoring. In addition to the pure defensive elements, we’ll also tie in to the applications at the design and code level through security services for adaptive authentication, transaction authentication, and other shared services (happy Dre? 🙂 ). The key is that this will all be managed through a central console via consistent policies. In my mind, this is the only thing that makes sense. We need to understand the applications and the databases that back them. We have to do something at the browser level since even proper parameterization and server side validation can’t meet all our needs. We have to start looking at transactions, business context, and content, rather than just packets and individual requests. Point solutions at any particular layer have limited effectiveness. But if we stop looking at our web applications as pieces, and rather design security that addresses them as a whole, we’ll be in much better shape. Not that anything is perfect, but we’re looking at risk reduction, not risk elimination. A web application isn’t just a web server, just some J2EE code, or just a DB- it’s a collection of many elements working together to perform business transactions, and that’s how we need to look at them for effective security. The Browser and Web Application Gateway A little while back I wrote about the concept of browser session virtualization. To plagiarize myself and save a little writing time so I can get

Just a quick note- if you used chmod to change the permissions of ARDAgent to block the privilege escalation vulnerability being used by the new trojans you should still go compress or remove it. Repairing permissions restores ARDAgent and opens the vulnerability again. I suppose you could also make sure you don’t repair permissions, but it’s easiest to just remove it. I removed the chmod recommendation from the TidBITS article. Share:

‘Last week Jeremiah “Purple Belt” Grossman posted the following question: “You’re hired on at a new company placed in charge of securing their online business (websites). You know next to nothing about the technical details of the infrastructure other than they have no existing web/software security program and a significant portion of the organizations revenues are generated through their websites. What is the very first thing do on day 1?” Day one is going to be a long day, that’s for certain. Like several commentators on the original post, I’d start with talking with the people who own the application both at a business and technology level. Basically, this is a prime opportunity to not only understand what the goals of the business are but also get everyone’s perceptions of their needs, and equally important their perceptions of the cost of their systems being unavailable. The next few weeks would be used to determine where reality diverged from perception. But day one is when I get to make my first impression and if I can successfully convince people that I really am on their side, it will make the rest of my tenure much easier. I’ve found that I can do so by demonstrating that my prime concern is enabling the business to accomplish its goals with a minimum of hassle from me. One of the key ways of doing this is spending my time listening, and limiting my talking to asking questions that lead my interviewee to the necessary logical conclusions rather than being a dictator…. …not that I don’t reserve the right to hit things with a hammer later to protect the business, but day 1 sets the tone for the future, and that’s far more important than putting in X fix or blocking Y vulnerability. Share:

I’ve been spending the past few weeks wandering around the country for various shows, speaking to some of the best and brightest in the world of application and database security. Heck, I even hired one of them. During some of my presentations I laid out my vision for where I believe application (especially web application) and database security are headed. I’ve hinted at it here on the blog, discussing the concepts of ADMP, the information-centric security lifecycle, and DAM, but it’s long past time I detailed the big picture. I’m not going to mess around and write these posts so they are accessible to the non-geeks out there. If you don’t know what secure SDLC, DAM, SSL-VPN, WAF, and connection pooling mean, this isn’t the series for you. That’s not an insult, it’s just that this would drag out to 20+ pages if I didn’t assume a technical audience. Will all of this play out exactly as I describe? No way in hell. If everything I predict is 100% correct I’m just predicting common knowledge. I’m shooting for a base level of 80% accuracy, with hopes I’m closer to 90%. But rather than issuing some proclamation from the mount, I’ll detail why I think things are going where they are. You can make your own decisions as to my assumptions and the accuracy of the predictions that stem from them. Also, apologies to Dre’s friends and family. I know this will make his head explode, but that’s a cost I’m willing to pay. Special thanks to Chris Hoff and the work we’ve been doing on disruptive innovation, since that model drives most of what I’m about to describe. Finally, this is just my personal opinion as to where things will go. Adrian is also doing some research on the concept of ADMP, and may not agree with everything I say. Yes, we’re both Securosis, but when you’re predicting uncertain futures no one can speak with absolute authority. (And, as Hoff says, no one can tell you you’re wrong today). Forces and Assumptions Based on the work I’ve been doing with Hoff, I’ve started to model future predictions by analyzing current trends and disruptive innovations. Those innovations that force change, rather than ones that merely nudge us to steer slightly around some new curves. In the security world, these forces (disruptions) come from three angles- business innovation, threat innovation, and efficiency innovation. The businesses we support are innovating for competitive advantage, as are the bad guys. For both of them, it’s all about increasing the top line. The last category is more internal- efficiency innovation to increase the bottom line. Here’s how I see the forces we’re dealing with today, in no particular order: Web browsers are inherently insecure. The very model of the world wide web is to pull different bits from different places, and render them all in a single view through the browser. Images from over here, text from over here, and, using iframes, entire sites from yet someplace else. It’s a powerful tool, and I’m not criticizing this model; it just is what it is. From a security standpoint, this makes our life more than a little difficult. Even with a strictly enforced same origin policy, it’s impossible to completely prevent cross-site issues, especially when people keep multiple sessions to multiple sites open all at the same time. That’s why we have XSS, CSRF, and related attacks. We are trying to build a trust model where one end can never be fully trusted. We have a massive repository of insecure code that grows daily. I’m not placing the blame on bad programmers; many of the current vulnerabilities weren’t well understood when much of this code was written. Even today, some of these issues are complex and not always easy to remediate. We are also discovering new vulnerability classes on a regular basis, requiring review and remediation on any existing code. We’re talking millions of applications, never mind many millions of lines of code. Even the coding frameworks and tools themselves have vulnerabilities, as we just saw with the latest Ruby issues. The volume of sensitive data that’s accessible online grows daily. The Internet and web applications are powerful business tools. It only makes sense that we connect more of our business operations online, and thus more of our sensitive data and business operations are Internet accessible. The bad guys know technology. Just as it took time for us to learn and adopt new technologies, the bad guys had to get up to speed. That window is closed, and we have knowledgeable attackers. The bad guys have an economic infrastructure. Not only can they steal things, but they have a market to convert the bits to bucks. Pure economics give them viable business models that depend on generating losses for us. Bad guys attack us to steal or assets (information) or hijack them to use against others (e.g., to launch a big XSS attack). They also sometimes attack us just to destroy our assets, but not often (less economic incentive, even for DoS blackmail). Current security tools are not oriented to the right attack vectors. Even WAFs offer limited effectiveness since they are more tied to our network security models than our data/information-centric models. We do not have the resources to clean up all existing code, and we can’t guarantee future code, even using a secure SDLC, won’t be vulnerable. This is probably my most contentious assumption, but most of the clients I work with just don’t have the resources to completely clean what they do have, and even the best programmers will still make mistakes that slip through to production. Code scanning tools and vulnerability analysis tools can’t catch everything, and can’t eliminate all false positives. They’ll never catch logic flaws, and even if we had a perfect tool, the second a new vulnerability appeared we’d have to go back and fix everything we’d built up to that point. We’re relying on more and more code and

This week, Martin and I are joined by Adam Shostack, bandleader of the Emergent Chaos Jazz Combo of the Blogosphere and co-author of The New School of Information Security. (And he sorta works for a big software company, but that’s not important right now). You can get the show notes and episode over at netsecpodcast.com. We spend a lot of time talking about statistics and the New School concepts. I’m a big fan of the book, and Adam and I share a lot of positions on where we are as an industry, and where we need to go. Share:

There’s been a bunch of news on the Mac security front in the past couple of weeks. From the Safari carpet bombing attack, to a couple trojans popping up. Over the weekend I submitted an email response to a press interview where I outlined my recommended improvements to OS X to keep Macs safer than Windows. On the technical side they included elements like completing implementation of library randomization (ASLR), adding more stack protection to applications, enhancing and extending sandboxing to most major OS X applications, running fewer processes as root/system, and more extensive use of DEP. I’m not bothering to lay this out in any more depth, because Dino Dai Zovi did a much better job of describing them over on his blog. Dino’s one of the top Mac security researchers out there, so I highly suggest you read his post if you’re interested in OS X security. There are a few additional things I’d like to see, outside of the OS level changes: A more-deeply staffed Apple Security Response Center, with public facing side to better communicate security issues and engage the research community. Apple absolutely sucks at working with researchers and communicating on security issues. Improvements here will go a way to increase confidence, manage security issues, and avoid many of the kinds of flareups we’ve seen in the past few years. Better policies on updating open source software included with OS X. In some cases, we’ve seen vulnerabilities in OS X due to included open source software, like Samba and Apache, that are unpatched for MONTHS after they are publicly known. These are fully exploitable on Macs and other Apple products until Apple issues an update. I realize this is a very tough issue, because Apple needs to run through extensive evaluation and testing before releasing updates, but they can mitigate this timeline by engaging deeply with those various open source teams to reduce the windows where users are exposed to the vulnerabilities. An Apple CSO- someone who is both the internal leader and external face of Apple security. They need an evangelist with credibility in the security world (no, I’m not trolling for a job; I don’t want to move to California, even for that). A secure development lifecycle for Apple products. The programmers there are amazing, but even great programmers need to follow secure coding practices that are enforced with tools and process. I have suspicions we might see some of these technical issues fixed in Snow Leopard, but the process issues are just as important for building and maintaining a sustainable, secure platform. Share:

I’m still in New York for the FISD conference, listening to Team Cymru talk about the state of cybercrime as I wait for my turn at the podium (to talk about information-centric security and DLP). One problem with travel is keeping up with the news, so I pretty much missed the Applescript vulnerability and now have to write it up for TidBITS on the plane before Monday. I was reading Thomas Ptacek’s post on the vulnerability, and I think it’s time I joined Tom and came out of the closet. I run as admin on my Mac. All the time. And I’m not ashamed. Why? As Ptacek said, even without root/admin there’s a ton of nasty things you can do on my system. In fact, you can pretty much get anything I really worry about. I even once wrote some very basic Applescript malware that ran on boot (after jailbreaking an improperly configured virtual machine). It didn’t need admin to work. There. I feel better now. Glad to get that out there. (If you’re going to criticize this, go read Tom’s post and talk to him first. He’s smarter than me, and not on an airplane.) Share:

I’ve been absolutely flattered by some of the positive comments on our posts this week, especially the database posts. But as much as I enjoy the credit for someone else’s work, I’d like to remind everyone that I’m not the only blogger here at Securosis anymore. Adrian Lane, our new Senior Security Strategist, has been putting up all the meat this week. Once I get back from this conference I’ll increase the font size on the writer tagline for the blog so it’s more obvious. We also occasionally have contributions from David Mortman and Chris Pepper, both of whom wrote posts I got the credit for. These are all brilliant guys, and I’m honored they contribute here. They’re probably smarter than I am… … oh. Never mind. I write it all. Share:

Your Web application connects to a database. You supply the user name and password, establish the connection, and run your query. A very simple, easy to use, and essential component to web applications. The database itself has very little awareness of where the application that made the connection is located. It does not necessarily know the purpose of the application. It may or may not know the real user who is using that connection. It’s not that it cannot, it is just typically not programmed to do so. It is at the beck and call of the application and will do whatever the application asks it to do. One of the great reasons to use Database Activity Monitoring is to de-mystify that connection. These monitoring tools pay close attention to where the connection is coming from, what application is making the connection, what time of day it is, how much data is being moved, what queries are being run, what fails to execute, and on and on. This provides a very real benefit in detecting attacks and other types of misuse. There is a strong market for this type of tool because application developers rarely develop this capability within the context of the service they are providing. Can this be done from within the database? Yep. Do people do this? Rarely to never. Should it be done? I contend that to some degree it should always be there. Much in the same way we provide range checking on database values, we should also have some degree of business consistency checking. But we don’t because it is typically not part of the scope of the application project to program the database to perform additional checking and verifications. Usually it is only scoped out to store data and provide some reports, just a basic repository for storage of data and application state. We have gotten to the point where we use Hibernate <http://www.hibernate.org/> to abstract the concept of a database altogether and further remove any native database visibility. Give the database user name and password and it will give you everything you have permissions to do … and then some. It is set up to trust you. And why not, you gave it the right credentials! And the converse of that is the application developer views the database as some abstract object. Security of that object is someone else’s problem. The loss of visibility does not mean that the functionality is not there, or that it is not important, or that the application developer can ignore it. What I am trying to say is the database is set up to trust the application connection and it should not be. Whatever you gave the user who connects permission to do, it will do, whenever asked. But should you be accepting local connections? Remote connections? Ad-hoc queries? What stored procedure execution is appropriate? If the database is used in an SOA environment, or the omnipresent ‘hub-and-spoke’ model, how do those rules change per application connection? And unless you instruct the database to do more, to question the authenticity of the connection over and above access rights, it will not provide you any additional value in terms of security, data consistency, or data privacy. Why is it that application security, and quite specifically web application security, is so often viewed soley as a web application security problem? The application has a strong relationship with the database but typically does not have bi-directional trust enforcement or security. For example, in production database environments we had a requirement that there would be no ad-hoc access under normal usage of the system. We would implement login triggers similar to NoToad.sql to prohibit this access via an ad-hoc administration tool. We had stored procedures built into our packages that recorded an audit event whenever a user was selecting more than some predetermined number of customer rows. But I think this was atypical, and these types of security constraints are not systemic, meaning they are often left out of the back end design. The application is designed to serve a business function and we buy security products to monitor, assess and audit the business function externally. Do you see where I am going with this? We can build security in systemically if we choose, and reduce the dependency on external security. We can and should do more to verify that the application that is connecting to the database not only has appropriate credentials, but appropriate usage. A database is an application platform, and an application in and of itself. This becomes even more important in a virtualized environment where some of the underlying network assumptions are thrown out the window. Hackers spend a lot of time determining how best to access and utilize the database not only because it typically contains the information they are after, but also it is an extraordinarily complex, feature rich platform. That means a fertile field of opportunity for misused trust relationships and insecure functions … unless you program the database to perform these verifications. Share:

How do we know our code is bug free? What makes us believe that our application is always going to work? Ultimately, we don’t. We test as best we can. Software vendors spend a significant percentage of their development budget on Quality Assurance. Over the years we have gotten better at it. We test more, we test earlier, and we test at module, component, and system levels. We write scripts, we buy tools, we help mentor our peers on better approaches. We do white box testing, we do black box testing. We have developers write some tests. We have QA write and run tests. We have 3rd party testing assistance. We perform auto-builds and automated tests. We may even have partners, beta customers, and resellers test so that our code is as high quality as possible. We have learned that the earlier in the process we find issues, the less money we spend fixing them (see Deming, Kaizen, Six Sigma, etc.). We have even altered the basic development processes from waterfall to things like extreme and agile methodologies to better assist with quality efforts. We have taken better advantage of object oriented programming to reuse trusted code, as well as distill and simplify code to ease maintenance issues. This did not happen overnight, but has been a gradual process every year I have been part of the industry. We continually strive to get a little better every release, and we have generally gotten better, and done so with fewer resources. None of these strategies were typical 20 years ago when developers were still testing their own code. We have come a very long way. So what, you say? I say software security is no different. We are on the cusp of several large changes in the security industry and this is one of them. Security will come to the “common man” programmer. I was discussing this with Andre Gironda from ts/sci at the SunSec gathering a couple of weeks ago, and how process has positively affected quality as well as how it is starting to positively affect security, along with some of the challenges in setting up suitable security test cases at the component and module levels. Andre put up a nice post on “What Web Application Security Really Is” the other day and he touches on several of these points. Better security needs to come from wholesale and systemic changes. Hackers spend most of their time thinking about how to abuse systems, and your programming team should too. Do we do this well today? Obviously the answer is ‘no’. Will we get better in 10 years, or even 2 years from now? I am certain we will. Mapping security issues into the QA processes, as a sub-component of quality if you will, would certainly help. The infrastructure and process is already present in the development organization to account for it. The set of reports and statistics that we gather to ‘measure’ software quality would be similar in type to those for security … meaning they would both suck, but we’ll use them anyway because we do not have anything better. We are seriously shy on education and training. It has taken a long time for security problems, security education, and security awareness to even percolate into the developer community at large. This has been getting a lot of attention in the last couple of years with the mind-boggling number of data breaches that have been going on, and the huge amount of buzz lately with security practitioners with PCI 6.6 requiring code reviews. There is a spotlight on the problem and the net result will be a slow trend toward considering security in the software design and implementation phases. It will work its way into the process, the tools, the educational programs, and the minds of typical programmers. Not overnight. Like with quality in general, in slow evolutionary steps. Share: