Misc

Today I feel like Stansfield

… the corrupt DEA agent in Luc Besson’s great movie “Léon (The Professional)”. I’m sure quite some of you, dear readers, know the plot…
Just before the final shootout, when sending the first men of the NYPD ESU team into Léon’s apartment, he tells them to “Be careful!”. After learning those men got killed he just comments: “I told you”.
[btw: before yelling to bring “EEEEEEEVERYONE!!!!”, as those familiar with the piece will certainly remember ;-)].

I’m fully aware that I risk playing “the arrogant scumbag card” today and that it’s generally not very nice to refer to one’s own earlier statements with an “I told you” attitude (especially if harm was caused to some party), but this is exactly how I feel when reading these news. And – pls believe me – it’s an expression of utmost despair.

How often do organizations have to be told that running Adobe Flash might not be the greatest idea in the world, security-wise? How many statistics like this one (see section “Vulnerabilities” in the bottom part of it) have to see the light of the world until people realize that (quoting from this blogpost) “running Flash on corporate desktops is simply asking for trouble. Asking for trouble loudly. Very loudly.”?

When we wrote this document on configuring IE8 securely we pointed out that using Adobe Flash required a risk acceptance, from our perspective. Man, how I was attacked! for this very statement afterwards in the customer environment that document was initially developed for. I’ve since mentioned Flash in this blog here, here and here.
Furthermore we’ll include a talk on Flash in next year’s Troopers line-up, I promise. And be it only to avoid this post sounding like a crusade of a bitter old man… (yes, this was a wordplay referring to some character from the movie ;-).

yours sincerely

Stansfield

 

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Misc

Appstore security: 5 lines of defence against malware

A few days ago the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) published this quite interesting document with the exact title. Here’s what it covers:

“The booming smartphone industry has a special way of delivering software to end-users: appstores. Popular appstores have hundreds of thousands of apps for anything from online banking to mosquito repellent, and the most popular stores (Apple Appstore, Google Android market) claim billions of app downloads. But appstores have not escaped the attention of cyber attackers. Over the course of 2011 numerous malicious apps were found, across a variety of smartphone models. Using malicious apps, attackers can easily tap into the vast amount of private data processed on smartphones such as confidential business emails, location data, phone calls, SMS messages and so on. Starting from a threat model for appstores, this paper identifies five lines of defence that must be in place to address malware in appstores: app review, reputation, kill-switches, device security and jails.”

Just read through it and while I’ve never been a big fan of STRIDE (mainly due the application centric approach which simply is not my cup of tea) I have to say it’s applied elegantly to the “app ecosystem” described in the paper.

The doc somewhat accompanies this one titled “Smartphones: Information security risks, opportunities and recommendations for users” (released by ENISA in late 2010), which is a valuable resource in itself.

Overall excellent work from those guys in Heraklion, providing good insight from and for practitioners in the field.

Have a great weekend everybody

Enno

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Breaking

tsakwaf 0.9.1 released

A few weeks ago, I released version 0.9 of a web application testing tool called tsakwaf (The Swiss Army Knife for Web Application Firewalls) together with an ERNW Newsletter about web application firewalls. tsakwaf is based on perl and supports fingerprinting of some supported WAFs and code generation methods to circumvent filter rules. Today, version 0.9.1 will be released, which adds SSL support for the WAF fingerprinting function (Big thanks to Simon Rich!) and a bug fix regarding the detection of WAF reactions which may lead to false positives. Additionally, I’m happy to announce that at least one talk at next year’s Troopers will cover attacks against WAFs (like this one from the 2009 edition) . So mark your calendar – Troopers12 will happen on 21st and 22nd March 2012, with the usual workshops before the conference and the round table sessions the day after – and enjoy playing with tsakwaf!

Download here.

thanks

Frank

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