PCI DSS and wireless networks

Again, we discuss PCI DSS and wireless networks http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/137/507096

But how can we determine if this rogue AP and especially rogue wireless clients (WLAN card into a back office server) are inside CDE? By signal level? But Kismet shows this information only for APs (not for clients) :(

I’ve already answered the question on

Informzaschita web site, but let’s repeat.

>how could I know that the wireless access point with enabled encryption is a part of our local network?

Access Point location can be detected in different ways. The easiest way is by traffic “in the air”. Even if the point uses strong encryption (not WEP), enough data to indentify the segment are sent in clear text. For example, sender’s MAC address. As an access point is a link -level device, it relays all segment broadcast requests “into the air”. As there are a lot of this kind of requests in the network (ARP, NetBIOS, IPv6, etc.), comparing MAC addresses of senders who send packets through the point, and the list of known MAC addresses from your network, it’s easy to detect the access point location. Additionally, you can send a great number of broadcast packets via utilities that realize ARP-ping, such as Cain or nmap.

Triangulation… Running after every beacon with an antenna is not an easy task.

>Whre can I find information about access point search by triangulation method, and what kind of antennais the best?

Parabolic and Yagi- antenna for 2,4 diapason are rather bulky, so panel ones are more comfortable to use, in spite of worse directivity and sensitivity to reflected signal.

>But if it’s really rightly configured access point WPA2+hidden+MAC filter. It takes long time to find until there’s no activity.

Any AP connected to network, “signals” anyway: - sends beacon (even if ESSID is empty) - relays broadcasts and multicast with source MAC addresses in clear text

Its’ difficult to image a network without broadcast requests. And I wrote above how to detect access point location by these requests.

>How to detect clients that connect to external access points

Clients that are authorized to connect to “external” access points, can be detected by active security assessment mechanisms. For example, there are three mechanisms in MaxPatrol that helps to resolve the problem:

- inventory that analyzes wireless Windows clients settings,

- security assessment that analyzes insecure configurations (e.g., multihomed, no encryption, WEP usage),

- compliance management that sets black and white lists of access points which are allowed in the network.

By monitoring wireless network, but you need to list “your ” MAC addresses beforehand. It’s possible to do by active (see above) or passive (see below) mechanisms.

>How can I understand that this is my users? Something about it is written

here (Russian).

But in any case, a workstation (especially under Windows) sends a lot of interesting traffic which allows to define network membership. This is both NetBIOS Broadcast and

WPAD requests, and also DHCP requests which contain host and domain name...

But one question is still open – how to send this kind of traffic? Here

Gnivirdraw can help us.

>Active scanners don’t help us!!! Of course, sometimes to run along with laptop is useful :). But scanners can help to do the following:

- fingerprint in pentest mode of network devices (including AP).

- inventory of wireless client configuration (MAC addresses, lists of networks)

- analysis of access point configuration

- analysis of wireless device logs in order to find “bad” events

Thus some wireless problems are on the wire :)

WASC Announcement: 2008 Web Application Security Statistics Published

The Web Application Security Consortium (WASC) is pleased to announce the WASC Web Application Security Statistics Project 2008. This initiative is a collaborative industry wide effort to pool together sanitized website vulnerability data and to gain a better understanding about the web application vulnerability landscape. We ascertain which classes of attacks are the most prevalent regardless of the methodology used to identify them. Industry statistics such as those compiled by Mitre CVE project provide valuable insight into the types of vulnerabilities discovered in open source and commercial applications, this project tries to be the equivalent for custom web applications.

This article contains Web application vulnerability statistics which was collected during penetration testing, security audits and other activities made by companies which were members of WASC in 2008. The statistics includes data about 12186 sites with 97554 detected vulnerabilities.

WASC Web Application Security Statistics 2008

Download.

Some plug about Bitrix

Recently we conducted audit of new security functions of "1С-Bitrix: Site management " to assess the compliance with Web Application Firewall Evaluation Criteria requirements of Web Application Security Consortium.

The story has continued on Chaos Constructions CC9 Festival" that took place on 29-30 August 2009 in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

"More than six hundred Russian hackers have been trying to hack down a server-installed content management software in attempt to get over its sophisticated Proactive Protection system. There had been more than 25.000 attacks recorded and effectively repulsed during the software crash test competition hours. The competition was organized by the Bitrix, Inc. team and Positive Technologies IT experts"


Bitrix Real-Time Hack Competition in Russia

25.000 Russian Hack Attacks Repulsed by Bitrix in Two Days

WAF-protected, tested "by Russian Hackers", PCI Compliant site from the box. Not bad, is not it?

Add protection means add “a hole”

Funny news

New D-Link protection for Wi-Fi routers is a hole in security!

D-Link had barely announced updated firmware for wireless routers with protection from automatic registrations (CAPTCHA), when several enthusiasts found out that this new protection measures make routers more vulnerable to password theft.


http://www.securitylab.ru/news/379779.php


Details:

http://www.sourcesec.com/2009/05/12/d-link-captcha-partially-broken/


There are some comments on SecurityLab forum that say:

Is it again an attack with default password?

The situation is much more amusing, indeed. The problem is that CAPTCHA is used by D-Link to protect from Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) which (to be more precise, exploitation method for a router) was greatly named Drive-by Pharming by Symantec. But implementation error (accepting of requests with valid hash without CAPTCHA) makes this protection to be a vulnerability.

If passwords are standard then there is a method to bypass basic authentication via Javscript (see "Breaking through the perimeter" http://www.securitylab.ru/analytics/292473.php ).

But if the password (or its derivative such as hash) is sent to GET (as Basic duplicate), then the situation is more interesting – an attacker could use not only standard password hash but also conduct user password brute force attack Javascript via CSRF from which CAPTCHA should protect.

It means that the vulnerability concerns not only standard passwords but also could increase the effectiveness of user password brute force attacks via CSRF, and standard password security (timeout, temporary lockout, etc.) does not work as not brute force itself but attempts to connect with different “normal” hashes are taken, used instead of session identifier. A simple script is enough for it, that call the address

GET /post_login.xml?hash=

and check whether the action was successful. The point is to trick a user to open the site:)

In general, rather interesting design error in authentication mechanism of web application.

Tool for WINS and DNS (MS-09-008)

The utility is used to detect potentially dangerous entries in DNS and WINS services databases. The utility also allows local network scanning to detect hosts with dangerous NetBIOS names. If system administrators and security administrators use the utility regularly then it allows controlling potentially dangerous entries in name servers and availability of hosts with dangerous NetBIOS names in local network.



Detail information could be found in the article by Sergey Rublev and on SecurityLab:

http://www.securitylab.ru/news/extra/380522.php

http://www.securitylab.ru/_download/articles/wpad_weakness_en.pdf

Download here:
http://www.ptsecurity.ru/download/wpadcheck_en.zip

Positive Technologies Reasearch Lab

This year we decided to resume the publication of vulnerability details detected during researches and penetration testing.

http://en.securitylab.ru/lab/

In 2006, because of a number of reasons, we decided to shift the burden of publishing vulnerability details to software vendors and stop publishing the details about previously detected problems. However, many customers ask us to assist in vulnerability elimination in third-party vendor software. This induces us to resume the process.
The most interesting current problem (in my opinion) is a number of vulnerabilities in VMWare that allows attackers to gain access from guest to host OS. And right to the kernel.

I personally treated different methods to eliminate vulnerabilities in third-party vendor software, from Full-Disclosure extremism to selling vulnerabilities in the “white” market, for example, iDefense (http://labs.idefense.com/vcp/). Some thought are available here:
http://www.securitylab.ru/analytics/241826.php (Russian)

We’ve published a network utility to check that security updates from MS08-065, MS08-067 and MS09-001 are installed in the system. The utility does not need administration privileges and works in pentest mode.
Feedback on the previous releases was quite positive, we decided to upgrade.




Additional info:
http://www.securitylab.ru/news/extra/368760.php

Downloads:
http://www.ptsecurity.com/download/pt-check-09-001.zip

IE 8 and XSS

Here are the results of analysis of XSS filter built in current beta Internet Explorer 8. Colleagues from Microsoft have achieved rather good results – the most widespread attack vectors for the vulnerability are blocked.

If we take into account that XSS is the most widespread Web problem according to both Positive Technologies and international WASC statistics, the existence of such mechanisms in browsers is a useful initiative. I think Avir/HIPS developers should also care about this area.

There is a contracted summery below about filter efficiency against different attack vectors:

Stored version	No
DOM-Based	Partly
Reversed version
In tag	No
In Javascript	No
In HTML	Yes
In tag parameter	Yes

It is funny that the different vulnerability (HTTP Response Splitting) was detected that allows attackers to disable XSS protection. I hope the problem will be solved in the release version.