[14:41] <@rkl> shit.
  [14:41] <@rkl> whoever broke into blackops.org
  [14:41] <@rkl> when we caught them
  [14:41] <@rkl> they began rm filesystems
  [14:41] <@rkl> and removed my only copy of some photos i had of me and my
          fiance'
  [14:42] <@rkl> that i had up there for like 2 days while i reinstalled my OS
  [14:42] <@rkl> she's going to be sad about that
  [14:44] <@nobody> ur shitting me
  [14:44] <@nobody> who broke in?
  [14:44] <@rkl> we know.
  [14:44] <@rkl> luckily they were incompetent
  [14:44] <@rkl> however
  [14:44] <@nobody> bunch of savages in this town
  [14:44] <@rkl> because they tried to use blackops as a platform to launch
          attacks against a few corporations
  [14:44] <@rkl> now the FBI is involved
  [14:45] <@nobody> wonderful
  [14:45] <@rkl> me and murray couldnt' give a rat's ass
  [14:45] <@rkl> we back up blackops 1 time a month
  [14:45] <@rkl> to cd, now dvd
  [14:45] <@rkl> they got in through a weak user passwd
  [14:45] <@rkl> cause there were near 100 users
  [14:45] <@rkl> just normal users, so they didn't practice good security with their passwds
  [14:45] <@nobody> typical
  [14:46] <@rkl> we've had to turn over everything to the FBI
  [14:46] <@nobody> a system is only as secure as its users

In my previous post, my first item stated unequivocally that passwords are crap and first against the wall when the revolution comes? That revolution starts today.

Everyone’s New Year resolution has to be to change their crappy password (or in the rare case, passwords) for their computer to a passphrase (20 characters or more), install a password manager, and change all those crappy passwords into long (20 characters or more) random passwords for every single service. If your service doesn’t let you use > 20 character passwords, STOP USING IT. There’s something very dumb, wrong and insecure with that service.

I do not have a single password that is the same for any service on the Internet. Changing a password to me is extremely simple because I DO NOT CARE about any of them. I do not type them, I do not remember them. They are all at least 20 characters long, and occasionally way more if I care about the system in question.

Additionally, I have no truthful answers for the weak Q&A security backdoor on any system I use. What is your first pet’s name? Just try to crack fazEha*u@eJAM#!#6DafRatrAm6Q before the universe ends. p.s. I generated that one just for this blog entry. Don’t waste your time trying it out anywhere.

Passwords are insecure, always have been, always will be, and that goes double for the horrifically insecure Q&A backdoor that many sites insist upon who should (and most likely do) know better. Passwords are unsuitable even for this blog. Folks who say passwords are free or worse – “the norm” – are idiots and should be ignored whilst the rest of us get on with getting rid of them as Priority #1.

CALL TO ACTION!

If you are responsible for passwords on your site or service, the very first thing you must do when you get back to work is to call an urgent meeting with all stakeholders. The very first agenda item must be “We’re getting rid of passwords as of right now. How do we do that?” Don’t stop until you succeed. Your users will love you.

If you are a victim of passwords, you should ask “Why are we still using passwords? When will you get rid of them?”

Just Do it. Do It Now. I’m deadly serious.

A few weeks back, one of the panelists revealed that there are two fundamental ways to sell things – fear, as in:

Late 1980\’s Anti-AIDS advert 

and hope, as in:

Durex condom ad

The panellist’s comments are revealing – fear sells well for a short while and then stops working. This is true of the AIDS campaign. The campaign reduced HIV / AIDS infection rates to a low that hasn’t been repeated anywhere else on the planet since that time. Then the ad stopped, and there’s been no replacement campaign for nigh on 25 years. You can guess that the HIV / AIDS infection rates are back up.

We need to change the security industry from selling fear to selling (and delivering) hope. The results will last longer, and have better long term outcomes.

These devices have known MITM issues, but folks still used them because there was so little information out there to say that a better choice is required. RSA liked it that way.

RSA chose not to discuss the details of the attack, using the old furphy that disclosure will damage their customers (reality: it would damage RSA’s brand). RSA’s silence allowed

Advanced

Persistent

Threats

to execute the boldest cryptographic information warfare attack since Enigma.

RSA’s (IMHO) cowardly silence has actually damaged their customers in highly spectacular fashion. RSA told us nothing, so we couldn’t ask our clients to change vendors in a staged way, or to disable access, or put in other controls. We could guess, but business decisions are not made that way.

Now the brand damage to RSA will truly begin. This is the end of the simple RSA fob. Even if a better algoritm or fob is used, RSA are toast as no one will trust them any more, particularly in the sort of organizations that buy fobs by the palette.

APT boosters have said vociferously – “see, it was APT!”. Yep, I agree. It’s one of the few times that truly worthy attacks are out in the open enough for us to get a small glimpse into what’s really going on.

Unfortunately, due to widespread abuse of the term, APT is the laughing stock of the information security world. The folks who routinely use it with knowledge can’t discuss why APT is any different to the other threats out there today. Everyone else has no clue.

I’ve seen CSOs give up, thinking that since these attackers are so advanced, surely we can’t protect against them, or they buy stuff marked “Solves APT TODAY!1!” when in fact, hard work is required. Nothing very hard, just simple stuff like input validating every field and not tolerating insecure software any more.

But for your average CSO, finding out if an application was developed in a secure fashion and that every parameter is validated is impossible. It shouldn’t be. But that’s not the main point of today’s post.

It’s moderately clear in the fog of active disinformation that the weaknesses used in the RSA, Sony, and PBS hacks are well known and easily exploitable. The solution is like losing weight. There is a simple solution that works – albeit slowly. It’s called eating the right amounts of good food for a year or two and exercising hard every day. Anyone who has tried to lose weight, including myself, knows that we really just want an APT strength diet pill.

I think most of us in our industry will acknowledge that penetration testing has become “different” over the last few years, from literally shooting fish in a barell with the most rudimentary or no tools, to requiring a fair bit of work, and moving up the value chain to find interesting and exploitable issues the business cares about.

In terms of results, I think we’re still finding 10-20 things wrong in every app. Attackers need one. This is the attacker’s advantage. The number of weaknesses, the type of weaknesses, and the severity of the weaknesses are NOT “advanced” in any way shape or form in 95%+ of the code reviews and penetration tests I perform. The other 5% have been working with me for a while, are mature risk managers, and they’re hard to attack as a result.

But because of the hard core mystique surrounding the use of the term “APT”, we’re seeing completely inappropriate uses of the term everywhere from anti-virus scanners through to security appliances that promise data loss protection but forget that the information security triangle is people-process-technology. Putting one in place doesn’t solve the other two, nor negate your responsiblities to put in appropriate controls that PEOPLE can live with to do their JOBS and make the business MONEY.

My twitter icon is the famous drive around control image:

Access controls are only for those with easy access

This is where folks promoting APT fail. I am not denying that the attackers who have found a end run around a widely known security control are

Advanced

Persistent

Threats

Anyone who targeted a particular firm, and utterly broke a long standing crypto system, and everything else required to obviate hardened controls of at least two military industrial giants are worthy of the term APT.

Unfortunately, APT as a term is so brand damaged in the info sec community (try saying it at a public event without being openly laughed at), that we have to choose a better one, one that marketers would never dream of using inappropriately. I don’t know what it is, but surely

Enemy Combatent

or

Soon To Be A Small Pile Of Glowing Ash (STBASPOGA, or the more friendly sounding Strasbourg)

are right up there.

Worse still, the fact that these Strasbourgs really are APTs doesn’t mean that we should forget to do the hard work, but instead demonstrates the paucity of protective information security research. Some of you might remember me saying a year or two ago that too much attention is paid to those who hack, and not enough on those who defend. Strasbourgs should mean more dollars in pro-active research. We need to make it difficult to develop insecure software. We should make easy to determine if Acme’s latest release of their widgets are insecure. We should have metrics that easily demonstrate insecure software costs more. We should make it legally untenable to ship insecure software, and give redress to consumers when their investments, privacy and intellectual property are violated due to stupid, simple weaknesses that we knew about in 1965.

My services at Pure Hacking are no longer required, and so I need to get on with the job of getting on with the next phase of my life – and that means finding a great job that allows everyone to win.

There are a couple of options on the table as I write this. But the most intriguing to me right now is to be the advanced gun for hire for consultancies with schedule overload. If you think your consultancy could use me in that fashion even a few times a year, I definitely want to hear from you. If I can make alliances with even a few of you, this could work for us all. This would allow me to work for anyone in the world from my lab here, and would allow consultancies all over the world to plug their scheduling nightmare with one of the best web app sec minds* out there period.

• My Linked In Profile
• My resume

I have a strong preference for remote telecommuting jobs as I live in a regional city. This doesn’t mean that a full time job in Melbourne is out of the question, but I will be upfront about my need for flexibility (i.e. allow me to work on the train and a day a week at home), or full time remote working from Geelong. Being 2011, full time or partial telecommuting should not be a difficult decision today.

I know I have a small but loyal readership in this blog, so if you know someone who knows someone, I’m available. I only have a short window before I have to make a decision, so if you’re able to pick me up, I definitely want to hear from you – vanderaj @ greebo . net.

* Just in case you didn’t know, I was the Project Leader and primary author of the OWASP Developer Guide 2.0, OWASP Top 10 2007 (the one in PCI DSS), and ESAPI for PHP, and I helped set the exam for the SANS GSSP (Java).

AusCERT

I am giving a two day Secure Coding tutorial using OWASP’s Application Security Verification Standard.

This course is different to most security training courses you’ll ever take. It teaches architects, lead developers and developers how to design and code in a positive fashion. You’ll learn of about 80 controls over the two days, and complete four hands on labs and a bunch of demos. Of course, you’ll see me demonstrate ninja levels of breaking crappy applications, but my primary goal is for you to build secure software.

Now that you want to come, you should bring your laptop with the ability to run a 64 bit VMware VM. As the VM is Linux, it could be converted to KVM, Xen, Parallels, or Virtual Box. You can take the VM home along with the slides and learn even more later.

This is the cheapest method of getting instructor led training by me. Registration here. There’s about 10 spots left as far as I’m aware.

itSMF

Later in the year, I am giving my well received talk at itSMF, an ITIL aligned operations conference, on how to make your security dollars work harder for you. This talk is aimed at CIO, CISO’s, and those who are tasked at securing their stuff with ever less budget, or ever more capability (or both).

But…. the problem starts when he goes through attribution for the OWASP Top 10, starting around the 17 minute mark. Dave says “Jeff Williams and I basically wrote it” (17:10 onwards), and had various people in OWASP review it such as Dinis Cruz and myself. This is exactly what happened for the 2004 version. But the way it was said implies that the OWASP Top 10 2007 was Dave and Jeff’s and I reviewed that too. I’m sure Dave didn’t mean to miss out on appropriate attributions (he’s a straight up and down sort of guy), but just in case anyone thinks like I did when listening to the podcast, I’d like to set the story straight:

The OWASP Top 10 2004 was Jeff and Dave’s. Absolutely agree with this. I’m pretty sure I reviewed it as I was working on the Developer Guide 2.0 at the time.

The OWASP Top 2010 is primarily Jeff and Dave’s efforts. No problems. I gave up leadership in the project sometime in 2008 when I had to concentrate on personal matters. At that time, I had no draft or made any effort to update the text. Dave’s effort to restart the project didn’t start until after I’d left Aspect. After the draft PPTX was complete, I reviewed drafts of the release candidates, along with about another 30 or so folks.

The OWASP Top 10 2007 is primarily mine in methodology (strict adherence to MITRE statistics in 2006), research and development, authorship, editing and leadership. For example, I sat down with Raoul Endres in a pho restaurant in a wintery day Melbourne, Australia well before I moved to the USA and worked out the methodology. I delivered a draft to about 30 folks in early January of 2007. Jeff Williams and Dave re-wrote and included a few items that I disagreed with (effectively two crypto sections that were not representative in the statistics), and dropped important issues that I felt strongly about. You don’t win them all, but I would have loved for these findings to have made it.

Some of the sections I wrote up in the draft that missed out in the final version:

• A7 – Malformed input (dropped – a bad call in my opinion as nearly all flaws are due to insufficient input validation and output encoding)
• A8 – Broken authorization (dropped – a bad call in my opinion, as most of the easily discovered business logic flaws are authorization related)
• A9 – Insecure cryptography and communications (became A8 – A9 in the final version)
• A10 – Privilege escalation (dropped – a bad call in my opinion, as attackers try to do this all the time)

You can see an early draft here. DO NOT USE THIS VERSION – IT’S NOT OFFICIAL!

I strongly disagreed with the dropping of RFI as it’s one of the biggest reasons that PHP sites are taken over, and PHP is by far the most prevalent server platform. RFI belongs in the OWASP Top 10 probably as the #1 item in the Security Configuration section. There are still millions of sites with this particular flaw.

Call me hypersensitive to the way Dave phrased just one sentence in 45 minutes, but I want folks to realize that I didn’t dedicate many nights and weekends to the OWASP Top 10 2007 to have that taken away from me in glossing over of efforts. I also want to make sure that folks understand that I consider Jeff and Dave friends and utterly respect their long time efforts with OWASP.

* Full disclosure – I worked for Aspect Security between December 2006 and January 2009. Dave and Jeff are founders of Aspect Security and thus my employer during the latter stages of Top 10 2007 gestation. I had a great time at Aspect, worked with amazing customers on cool projects, and have very fond memories of the USA.

We have open slots in our schedule for secure code reviews starting from mid March 2011.

We perform our code reviews against the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard

• Level 2B – Automated Review using Fortify 360 coupled with a manual verification of 83 items (Architecture, Authentication, Authorization, Session Management, Data Protection, Cryptography, etc)
• Level 3 – Includes all of the above, but 110 inspection points. The sweet spot of our reviews in my personal opinion.
• Level 4 – Includes all of the above, plus manual inspection for trojans, backdoors, etc.

These reviews help folks wishing to comply with PCI DSS or PCI PA DSS, or just wish to know that their websites are safe and secure.

If you’d like to discuss things further, please e-mail avanderstock (at) purehacking.com.

Epic fail.

Looking back at it, attacking the attackers is not a winning strategy. It’s a fact of human nature that it’s better to be a hot firefighter putting out a fire that costs a million bucks to put right than to be the materials engineer who designs cheap fireproof cladding. I’m burying the hatchet as I burnt a fair bit of goodwill in my original announcement, which not my intention at all. We still need folks to break stuff and disprove snake oil, so there’s a place for the dark side whether I agree with the focus on the dark side or not.

Just two nominations made Andrew sad despite the worthiness of the submissions.

1. Rob Lewis nominated Trustifier http://trustifier.com/ryu/features.html
2. I nominated Josh Zlatin, a colleague for the work he has done on PureWAF, extensions for the OWASP Core Rule Set + Mod Security. You can see the results of PureWAF on Pure Hacking’s website, which is behind our WAF in the cloud service. That’s not an invitation to attack us, just sayin’

Please discuss or vote in the comments section for who you think should get the non-existant gong.

The Sorta Inaugural 2011 Pure Hacking Top Web App Sec Defenses Competition

There’s a couple of changes. Pure Hacking will be sponsoring the competition in 2011. There will be categories, such as Life Time Achievement, Best Security Architecture, Best Left Field Idea, Best Secure Business Idea, Best Quick and Dirty Defense, Best Educator, and of course Best Defense. I will detail more about the categories as time goes on. I will be getting inappropriate statuettes made with engraving and everything. If you feel like you can donate something to boost the booty, contact me.

As for nominations, I will keep a running tally of awesomeness from my RSS feeds and other sources. You can nominate your favorite folks and defenses by e-mailing me – vanderaj ( at ) owasp.org. Come December 1, 2011, I’ll put them up for voting at which time I will disclose the prizes.

So far -

1. OWASP’s XSS roundtable at the OWASP Summit in Portugal is a worthy nominee. Let’s stamp out XSS.

2. I think Gunnar Peterson should get a Lifetime Prize just for being Gunnar. If more of us thought like Gunnar, the world would be a safer place and folks would be making a LOT more money than they do today.

Please keep this competition in mind throughout 2011.

Terminology and Basics

Force.com is Sales Force’s SAAS API for ISVs and customers to write custom CRM apps atop the Sales Force platform. To provide some serious platform lock in, they use a new strongly typed language called Apex. Apex is sort of Java based. Java programmers will be somewhat familiar with its capabilities, but it has some surprising differences. As a reviewer, there’s nothing really head hurty when reading the code, but it’s important to realize it’s not grandpa’s Java you’re looking at.

Some things you’ll come across:

Meta data. You’ll see code with associated XML files. This XML data has a lot of stuff going on that describes it and allows Force.com to correctly handle it, particularly static resources. You can’t just ignore meta data – you need to inspect it.

Visual Force is a MVC based framework. It appears to act like a tag library with the <apex:… prefix, used inside files with a .page extension. These mimic the traditional type 1 JSP model. I think most of you will be familiar with this model and will not have too many difficulties in reviewing it. However, there are some asynchronous AJAX helpers (timers, future events, etc) that you will need to be aware of, particularly in relation to race conditions.

Objects. Sales Force have defined an object interface over their CRM data model. This has some interesting gotchyas, in particular, queries across these objects is called SOQL, and is pretty much a semi-injection proof sub-dialect of SQL 99. There will be an entire blog post for those issues primarily as there’s several ways code can be written to be unsafe.

Triggers. Triggers are executed after users undertake actions within the public site / sand box application. I need to learn more about them before I write about them, but they are the start of the flow of execution after the user does things within the application. If you have custom classes, they are generally called by triggers.

Bulk importer and Batch Apex. ETL support. I need to learn more about this functionality before I comment.

Flash and Flex support. Just in case some of the options weren’t scary enough, you can implement your presentation and business logic in a client side language. Sweet. I will not document Flash / Flex support as a) I hate Flash and have it disabled b) I have yet to see such code in action and I hate slamming or praising things I’ve not used. c) I don’t have any Flash or Flex tools to build test cases, so it’s going to be hard to nail this one down. Feel free to steal my thunder here if you so desire.

Web Services. These are traditional SOAP web services. Instead of using WS-Security, Sales Force have implemented their own session manager. Probably a good idea since no one besides Gunnar Petersen understands WS-Security. However, we all know that web services can be a mine field, so I will experiment with them and see how things work in a much later article.

Ajax. The Ajax API is one of the newest, and allows Javascript to make pretty much any call to the web services back end that a traditional SOAP web service can. Without WS-Security. Awesome. I’ll be looking into this issue a bit later as I learn more.

Some things they did right

Please don’t take my tone for disparagement, for it is not. There are some cool things Sales Force did right:

• Everything is escaped by default. You have to add code or an attribute to get this wrong.
• CSRF protection in every form. You have to do the wrong thing to be CSRFable.
• The easiest way to do SOQL is sorta magically injection proof. There are injectable ways, but again, you have to work at it.
• Many defaults chosen by Sales Force are good – SSL by default. Yay. SAML by default for SSO. Yay. GET and POST only. Yay. UTF-8 only. Yay. UCS-2 only. Yay. Illegally encoded Unicode characters are replaced. Yay. Content Type is safe unless you do the wrong thing. Yay.
• Sending cookies or headers are escaped. I’m not sure they’re properly escaped yet, but they are escaped.
• There are encoders for not just HTML and URL, but for JavaScript and others. Yay
• To promote code into production out the sand pit requires at least 75% test coverage. O.M.G. YAY! Tests are also not counted towards billing. There’s exactly zero reasons not to test your code.

This is but a part of the overall list of goodness. But that doesn’t help you figure out how to secure code review things yet.

The trouble for secure code reviews is several fold:

• There are no static code review tools to review Apex code. This is a serious deficiency that will only get worse if others try to emulate Sales Force’s success in crafting an entirely new language and API for their SAAS offerings.
• The security documentation is relatively sparse, and only gives hints as to how to shoot yourself with XSS, CSRF, SOQL, fine grained access control and other issues. This series is an effort to break through that and provide more documentation.
• There is a tight coupling between the code in your IDE and the sand box / public site. If you break this nexus, you do not have configuration data. With Sales Force’s “No code” logo, they hide some code and configuration from you. So expect to ask for the login and hope it’s not production.
• Sales Force have given a lot of thought to security, and many common Java issues are “fixed” or safe by default. But as Apex is a serious systems language, it allows you to shoot yourself in the foot. I don’t know yet as to the extent of it, but I will find out with some luck.

If you’re from Sales Force, please don’t worry. I’m not about to give away 0days – I am not a weak minded moron who delights in creating grief with no solutions. This series will be primarily about how to review Force.com code, followed by advice on recommendations for “fixing” it. Which is most likely to be “Do it how Force.com told you to do it in the manuals”.