We’ve all seen them, we’ve all used them…”What is your father’s middle name?”, “What is the name of your favorite pet?”, “Where did you go to high school?”. These questions are typically used in web applications when a user needs to reset their password or change their account email address. The intent is to provide a “secure” means through which a user’s identity can be asserted without email confirmation. The problem is that the answers to most security questions can easily be obtained with a little research.
One of the primary destinations on the internet in 2008 was for social networking applications…also known as places where you put all your information to share it with your friends. Whether it’s a Facebook profile, a Twitter post history, a blog, MySpace page, or Google most people have published all the information required for the target account to me stolen. Need more proof?
One of my motivations behind this post comes from when I checked my access logs and found that someone searching for “Wade Woolwine” birthday on Google and had ended up on my blog. Luckily, I don’t use my birthday for answers to security questions…but I now know that one of my accounts is being targeted.
It’s not likely that people will stop choosing bad security questions or publishing too much information about them on the internet. So how do we make this account management safeguard safer?
Better Security Questions
Enter a 6-10 digit code.
Enter a backup password.
Enter the last 4 digits of your drivers license.
Photo security questions
Allow the user to provide the security question by selecting an image or providing their own.
Confirmation code sent over SMS
For sites who use SMS for other purposes, a verification code can be sent to the registered mobile number.
Delay email address change requests
Impose a 24 hour delay for email address change requests. During that time, issue an email to both current and future email address explaining the email change request. The email to the current email address should include instructions on how to block the request should it be unauthorized.
Identity certificates
If the provider is able to issue client certificates for their visitors, these certificates can be used as a form of 2nd factor authentication.
2nd factor authentication service
For banks and other financial institutions, leveraging a service such as Verisign VIP should be implemented. There would be an additional cost for the tokens to cover, but the added security becomes a marketing tool for the service.
I’m not sure if any of these options are truly viable as robust solutions for enhancements or replacements for security questions, but they would make targeting users’ accounts through social engineering more difficult.
The majority of companies out there have implemented some sort of Windows Active Directory system that they use to connect and manage desktop systems, servers, printers, and other networked assets in a “secure” way. I use secure in quotes because the security largely depends on individual implementations. In any event, the Open Source community builds some pretty cool web apps on top of Apache that would be very useful for collaborating, code management, etc. One of the pain points for companies choosing Open Source web solutions has been the custom authentication and authorization implemented in the applications.
mod_auth_kerb extends Apache’s Basic Auth functionality to authenticate enterprise users against Windows Active Directory using Kerberos tickets supported by Windows. mod_authnz_ldap can use the Active Directory LDAP server to evaluate any available LDAP field against administrator defined ACL. For example, Company X decides to use an Open Source web application but want to restrict access to those in the Active Directory Administrators group; mod_authnz_ldap can use the LDAP server to pull the Active Directory group for the user it’s authenticating and determine whether they are part of the Administrators group.
Here’s a quick summary of how to get it working:
Ensure that your Apache is build with –enable-ldap –enable-authnz-ldap –with-ldap.
Configure Apache to use mod_authnz_ldap to authorize access based on LDAP data: Global Apache configurations:
LDAPTrustedMode SSL (optional) LDAPTrustedGlobalCert CA_DER /etc/apache2/ssl/AOL_Member_CA.der # If the SSL certificate on ldaps is not recognized
LDAPVerifyServerCert off
Directory Apache configurations:
RequireSSL # because you don’t want Active Directory credentials in the clear
AuthLDAPURL ldaps://directoryserver:port/dc=somewhere,dc=com?cn SSL # where CN is the unique username
AuthLDAPRemoteUserIsDN off
AuthLDAPBindDN DNUsername
AuthLDAPBindPassword DNPassword
require ldap-attribute ldapfieldname = “ldapfieldvalue”
require ldap-attribute ldapfieldname = “ldapfieldvalue”
Set Apache’s LogLevel to debug and start troubleshooting. Having an LDAP browser available to test will help you determine where the issues are when troubleshooting.
I ran into a small problem while getting this setup. I found that mod_auth_kerb was modifying the Apache Basic Auth “user” field from the username provided at login to username@realm. This might not be a problem in most cases, but for my implementation, username@realm was no where to be found in the Active Directory LDAP data. So, I did the following quick hacks to the mod_auth_kerb source code and recompiled:
Comment out user = apr_pstrcat(r->pool, user, “@”, realm, NULL);
This small change makes mod_auth_kerb return the username instead of username@realm. I’ve emailed the maintainers of mod_auth_kerb to see if they would consider adding an configuration flag to enable the stripping of @realm.
mod_auth_kerb supports SPNEGO (Windows Integrated Authentication support in IE and Firefox) which can provide Single Sign On for Windows users authenticated to the Active Directory.
Firefox: In about:config, change the value in network.negotiate-auth.trusted-uris to https://the.url.for.your.app
Since mod_auth_kerb and mod_authnz_ldap simply hook the Apache Basic Auth functionality, applications can leverage the Apache server to provide a username to the underlying web application.
Here are a couple apps you might want to test your new authentication with:
While I think that Jeremiah Grossman is absolutely on to something with his theories of alignment of interests in Web Security, I would argue that attaining the goal would go against human nature. Since the dawn of time, human have been in competition with one another and the only thing that’s really changed is the prize for being “best”. In pre-historic times, it was food, fire, and a safe place to sleep. In the middle ages it was land, crops, and livestock. In modern economies, it’s all about the money. For those actively participating in society, money virtually defines who you are in society. Actors, sports professionals, and CEOs of fortune 500 companies rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars and their quality of life shows it with nice cars and lavish housing. While middle class and below are barely making ends meat and most are working very hard for every dollar they spend.
Things aren’t much different in the business world. Companies who perform well go public and have millions of investors, companies who perform poorly go out of business, and once again, the measure of success is money. The examples cited by Jeremiah (SSL for web traffic, data encryption, and getting rid of IFrames) just further illustrate my point. While these practices would do a great deal for protecting their customers, they cost money and affect the bottom line profits, and therefore are not implemented. Yes, I know that security incidents end up costing the company more money in damage control than it would have cost for the safeguards to be implemented in the first place. This is the line security professionals have been giving senior executives for years. Has it worked? It doesn’t seem like it: Ask any of the 60% of the top 100 most popular websites who’ve hosted malware in the first half of 2008. (Websense security Labs™ (State of internet security -Q1 – Q2, 2008)
At this moment, the greatest asset that has been given to security professionals are regulations. Whether they be industry (PCI-DSS, SOX, etc) or Government (FISMA, NIST standards, etc) these regulations on IT Security have proposed to fine/hold legally responsible companies who do not attempt to enforce a minimum level of safeguards to protect their customers. By no means am I saying that these standards are perfect, there is far too little enforcement, the rules are not always described clearly and there are many cases where auditors are coerced into giving a passing grade to infrastructures which do not meet the requirements. What I am saying is that the idea of fining companies for failing to protect consumer data is the right way to go when you’re dealing with executives who’s primary driver is making money for the company.
I propose the following to answer Jeremiah’s question “How do we get the owners of 187 million websites, 17 million developers, browser vendors, universities, governments, ISPs, compliance auditors, and security researchers all to pull in the same direction towards a more secure Web?”:
Establish more laws and industry regulations defining how companies should conduct themselves.
Admittedly, this is a double edged sword. More checkboxes != more security, but it does give the professionals in the field some solid backing when presenting security concerns to executives.
Academics and researchers must collaborate to change the education system.
Remember the old saying “work to make the world better for your children”? We have an army of little tech savvy kids coming through the education system. Lets teach them about information security and privacy issues so that as they move into consumerism, they will instinctively demand security from the products they consume.
Figure out a better way to demonstrate the value of IT Security services.
This seems to be the Achilles heel of the IT Security world. How do you demonstrate the value of preventative counter measures? Yes, I know, another question VS. an answer.
Offer better security solutions and products.
As stated in Jeremiah’s article, “Security vendors love strongly enforced compliance standards as it frees up budget for their solutions, which may not reduce risk, but have to be purchased to satisfy a checkbox”. We don’t need more checkbox solutions, we need tools that actually empower companies with the right information so that they can easily get a snap shot of the current security posture. White Hat Security has a great tool/service hybrid where vulnerability data collected during automated assessment is pre-vetted by WhiteHatSec security engineers before being presented to the customer. As a quick disclaimer, I don’t work for WhiteHatSec, but have had the opportunity to see their product in action.
Greater focus on outreach and communications.
As the final, and perhaps most important solution, I propose a greater focus on outreach and communication. Security is still a field where only those who have the history and passion for computers truely understand what’s going on. This needs to change. The average web consumer must be educated to understand the personal ramifications of the “laiser faire” attitude that plagues the web application security world.
Please feel free to share you thoughts in the comments, I’m very interested to hear what my peers have to say on this subject.
In order to effectively implement my plan for tracking enterprise vulnerability metrics and their associated data points, it was clear that a custom application for data entry and report viewing would be required. As such, I wrote a PHP/MySQL web application with the following features and functionality.
Data Model – In order to structure the collected data in the database in a manner which facilitates data extraction from reports, I had to define the reporting needs early in the development process. By doing so, I was able to create a relational data model which makes reporting fast, accurate, and reliable.
Data Input – I’ve provided a series of HTML forms which provide the user with all the data points from my previous article. These forms have been designed with a heavy focus on ease of use and rapid data entry. To provide these features, the input for the required data points have been grouped logically and implement a feature for quick input where the user can select from a list of recent entries for the given data points (eg: recent contacts, recent CVE numbers, etc).
Reporting – I’m a big fan of keeping reporting as open as possible: it makes life much easier down the road. As such, I created a reporting framework which is capable of outputting a list of vulnerabilities based on a query for any data point stored in the database. For example, if you want to know which reports are associated with a given manager, business unit, vulnerability class, or keyword just select your preferences on the search page, and view the results.
Statistics – A data collection tool is worthless unless you have a way to quickly determine the characteristics of the data stored in the database. As such, I created a statistics page which provides the viewer with a snapshot of the vulnerability metrics based on similar characteristics. The following details the statistics and their intended purpose:
Vulnerabilities Created and Resolved
Simple count of vulnerabilities created and resolved (separate counts) in the system for the given time period.
Vulnerabilities Created and Resolved per Category
Simple count of vulnerabilities created and resolved (separate counts) in the system for the given time period per vulnerability category.
Vulnerabilities Created and Resolved per System Type
Simple count of vulnerabilities created and resolved (separate counts) in the system for the given time period per system type.
Vulnerabilities Created and Resolved per Source
Simple count of vulnerabilities created and resolved (separate counts) in the system for the given time period per vulnerability source.
Vulnerabilities Created and Resolved per Impact Rating
Simple count of vulnerabilities created and resolved (separate counts) in the system for the given time period per impact rating category and value.
Vulnerabilities Created and Resolved per Risk, Severity, and Probability
Simple count of vulnerabilities created and resolved (seperate counts) in the system for the given time period per risk, severity, and probability rating.
Vulnerabilities Created and Resolved per Domain
Simple count of vulnerabilities created and resolved (seperate counts) in the system for the given time period per domain name.
Top Report Owners
Simple count of vulnerabilites created and resolved with average time to resolve in the given time period per report owner (the security engineer assigned to the vulnerability).
Top Business Units
Simple count of vulnerabilites created and resolved in the given time period per business unit listed in the contact field.
Top Managers
Simple count of vulnerabilities created and resolved in the given time period manager listed in the contact field.
The tool also contains several usability features such as mass actioning of vulnerabilities (eg: resolve multiple reports at once), a data authorization model defined by report owner (owner can edit and view, others can only view), and a “my” page which displays reports relevant to the user.
In the future I hope to seperate the parts of the tool which are specific to my environment and open source the project so that others can gain visibility into their vulnerability posture.
Some time back I posted about designing and implementing the processes and tools which would enable me to track vulnerabilities affecting the enterprise throughout their security life cycle (identification to mitigation validation). In addition to providing a central repository for all enterprise vulnerabilities, I also wanted to make sure that we could use the metrics derived from this data to support investments in other areas of IT Security. My target was to have everything ready to start tracking vulnerabilities on the first day of business in 2009.
The data points I decided to track were primarily aimed at providing visibility into how vulnerabilities were identified, who was responsible for them, establishing an enterprise risk profile, and categorizing vulnerabilities according to risk factors. The following is a more detailed list of the metrics I’m tracking and their intended purpose.
The Data Points
Report Source – Tracking where the vulnerability reports are originating from. As options, I decided on direct report, findings from automated scanning, and all relevant existing security processes (security assurance, incident response investigation, etc) as sources.
System Type – Tracking the type of system affected by the vulnerability. As options, web applications, desktop applications, hosts/networks/operating systems, and web platforms seem to encompass all major system types.
Vulnerability Class – Being able to abstract individual vulnerabilities into something that is digestible by a non-technical audience is critical in this field. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) has adopted a cross section of the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) hierarchy that is broad enough for the diversity of vulnerabilities most enterprises would encounter. For more information, checkout the CWE page on the NVD website, http://nvd.nist.gov/cwe.cfm.
Impact Ratings - Giving us a smart way to answer the “how bad is it?” question. The NVD has developed a framework (Common Vulnerability Scoring System – CVSS) where the characteristics of the vulnerability are supplied and the high, medium, low ratings for risk, severity, and impact are derived mathematically based on the supplied characteristics. The mathematical formula for the computation is available in the CVSS documentation, but I had a different idea for computing the h/m/l ratings. First, here are a few of the characteristics, their ratings, and descriptions:
Access Vector (AV)
Local - vulnerability can only be exploited from the local system. LAN - vulnerability can only be exploited from the local area network. Network - vulnerability can be exploited from the internet.
Authentication (AU)
User - User level authentication is required to exploit the vulnerability. Admin/Root – Administrator/root level authentication is required to exploit the vulnerability. None - No authentication is required to exploit the vulnerability.
Remediation Level (R)
Official Fix – The vulnerability has been fully remidiated and tested according to guidance given by security staff. Temporary Fix – The vulnerability has been mitigated temporarily while a permanent solution is devised. Workaround – A workaround exists to circumvent the vulnerability. Unavailable – No remidiation is available for the vulnerability.
Not Defined – Remediation for the vulnerability is unknown.
Additional impact ratings include Access Complexity (AC), Confidentiality Impact (C), Integrity Impact (I), Availability Impact (A), Exploitability (E), and Report Confidence (RC). Each of the values associated with the impact ratings is assigned a whole integer from 1 – 3. For impact ratings where there are more then 3 options, I found that in each case, 2 of the options were close enough to be assigned the same value. For determining which value I would assign to each impact rating, I assumed the greater the value of the impact rating, the more serious the vulnerability for the given impact. For example, for Authentication, User is assigned a value of 2, Admin/Root a value of 1, and None a value of 3. I then weighted each impact rating based on the importance attributed to the impact. For example Access Vector (weight of 2) is much more of a factor when determning risk than Report Confidence (weight of 1). To further clarify the impact of a vulnerability, I wanted to produce ratings for risk, severity and probability which are determined with the following equations:
Risk: (2*(av) + 2*(ac) + 2*(au) + c + i + a + 2*(e) + 4*(r) + rc)/15. Severity: (c + i + a + 2*(e) + rc)/6. Probability: (2*(av) + 2*(ac) + 2*(au) + 4*(r))/10.
Once the risk, severity and probability have been determined, I use the following ranges to assign high, medium, and low:
High: >= 2.00. Medium: >= 1.00 and <= 1.99. Low: >= 0 and <= .99.
Contact Information – Tracking who is reporting the issues, and who is responsible for fixing them. For each contact entered into the system, I wanted to capture their name, contact information, business unit (only for enterprise contacts), and their manager (again, only for enterprise contacts). The purpose of the contact information data points is to be able to determine which group within the enterprise we can target for education regarding specific topics in security. For example if we find that product team X has an abnormally high number of input validation vulnerabilities, we could justify investing in some XSS and SQLi training and know that it will be beneficial.
URL – I wanted to be able to present the data by fully qualified domain name (FQDN) to easily present the data to site owners.
Other - In addition to the data points mentioned above, I’ve also provided inputs for tracking of CVE numbers and internal ticket tracking system numbers. While this isn’t particularly relevant to vulnerability tracking, it will give my management a tie in to existing processes.
Provided that the data entered into the vulnerability tracking system is reliable and up to date, answering the “What’s wrong?“, “How widespread?“, “Who’s responsible“, “What’s the exposure?“, “What if we don’t fix it?“, “Where should we invest resources?“, and “How’s the security?” questions should be no problem from here on out.
We’ve all seen them, we’ve all used them…”What is your father’s middle name?”, “What is the name of your favorite pet?”, “Where did you go to high school?”. These questions are typically used in web applications when a user needs to reset their password or change their account email address. The intent is to provide a “secure” means through which a user’s identity can be asserted without email confirmation. The problem is that the answers to most security questions can easily be obtained with a little research.
The majority of companies out there have implemented some sort of Windows Active Directory system that they use to connect and manage desktop systems, servers, printers, and other networked assets in a “secure” way. I use secure in quotes because the security largely depends on individual implementations. In any event, the Open Source community builds some pretty cool web apps on top of Apache that would be very useful for collaborating, code management, etc. One of the pain points for companies choosing Open Source web solutions has been the custom authentication and authorization implemented in the applications.
In order to effectively implement my 
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