Even though there have already been some great posts (Rafal Los, Gunter Ollmann, RSnake, John Steven…and again John Steven) I felt like I wanted to offer my commentary and hopefully convince some of you to attend the next OWASP event close to you. Quick disclaimer: I helped Doug, Rex, Mark, Kate and the rest of the volunteers at the conference, so I might be a little bias.
First – if you’re going to host a conference in DC, there’s really no better venue than the DC Convention Center. This is really a top notch venue in the center of DC that is built for conferences. It’s metro accessible and the conference services (food, beverages, A/V, wireless, etc) are top notch. I’m not saying the venue makes or breaks the con, but it helps.
The speakers, technical content of the presentations, and variety of topics exceeded that of much more expensive conferences I’ve attended. Joe Jarzombek kicked things off with the keynote, David Byrne and Charles Henderson can’t filter the stupid, Jon Rose and Tom Leavey brought the drinking game with a chance of 0-day, Jeff Williams tackled the insider threat, Kevin Johnson and Tom Eston think our friends want to eat our brains, Josh Abraham brought synergy to our pen-testing tools, RSnake gave security experts happy hour chatter for the next year with the 10 least-likely and most dangerous people on the web, John Steven condensed 6 hrs of Threat Modeling training into a 45 minute talk (good thing we had him scheduled at the end of the day), and Chris Weber dazzled with unicode. Not to be outdone, the OWASP projects were equally represented with Pravir Chandra on OpenSAMM, Jeff Williams on ESAPI followed by Arshan Dabirsiaghi on the ESAPI WAF, Sebastien Deleersnyder and Fabio Cerullo brought the OWASP tools together to deploy web applications, Matt Tesauro did his thing with the Live CD, Dr. Boaz Gelbord touched on security spending, and of course, who could forget Dave Wichers at the OWASP Top 10 2010 RC1! The conference also features 2 panels, the Federal CISO panel with Ray Letteer (USMC), Timothy Ruland (US Census), Richard Smith (TSA), and lead by Matt Fisher. The SDLC Panel features Michael Craigue (Dell), Dan Cornell (Denim), Dennis Hurst (HP), Joey Peloquin (FishNet), David Rook (Realex), Keith Turpin (Boeing), and lead by Pravir Chandra. The conference also featured a CTF running the new OWASP CTF project and hosted by Martin Knobloch.
For those of us who have been in the security industry for a few years, these conferences are a great chance to catch up with old friends and make new acquaintances. It was great to see familiar faces like Tom Brennan, @grecs, Ken Van Wyk, Matt Fisher, Dinis Cruz, Jon Rose, John Steven, Lee Anne Hart, Gracie Daniel, Jon McCarty, Jeremy Long, Rob Fuller, Jack Mannino, Rex Booth, Mark Bristow, Doug Wilson and others. At the same time, it was great to make new contacts like Josh Feinblum, Pravir Chandra, Robert Hansen, Matt Tesauro, Arshan Dabirsiaghi, Rafal Los, Jeff Williams, and hell, even the great Dan Kaminski made an appearance!
Just like any good conference, the awards and closing remarks held on the last day were full of thanks, toys, flying vendor squishy balls, foam rockets (courtesy of Tom Brennan), cheers, and clapping. It was truely a great way to wrap up a top notch con!
Finally, and although it’s been done many times already, I want to take a second to recognize all those OWASPers and DCers that came together to make this event what it was. I’m really copying this list verbatim from the last page of the conference booklet:
Rex Booth, Mark Bristow, Doug Wilson, and Kate Hartmann who provided the leadership without which this conference wouldn’t have come together.
The OWASP Board – Jeff Williams, Dinis Cruz, Dave Wichers, Tom Brennan, and Sebastien Deleersnyder who gave us “carte blanche” and trusted us to get this conference done.
The lead volunteers Barry Austin, Angel Contreras, Josh Feinblum, Lee Anne Hart, Martin Knobloch, Jeremy Long, Jon Rose, David Sachdev, Mike Smith, and myself.
The red shirt people of which there are way too many to name…THANK YOU!
And all those who spoke at or attended the conference!
So if you get the chance to attend a future OWASP event, or if you haven’t checked out your local chapter, hopefully this blog post and the others I mentioned in the first paragraph will shed the spotlight on the OWASP organization and how WE work to improve application security worldwide.
Disclosure standards and why they’re important (…and ReportSecurityFlaws.com) from HolisticInfoSec
I’m certainly a huge proponent of responsible disclosure, but I feel like I’m an even bigger proponent of good, no, SUPERIOR customer service. The moment you put a product out there that you’re charging people money for, you’re not only responsible for support requests stemming from this product, but you’re also responsible for ensuring that this product does not introduce adverse functionality for those who use it. That being said, the meat of this article lies in the announcement of ReportSecurityFlaws.com! While it seems like Ira and Russ are just getting this project off the ground, it certainly seems like this project can easily gain some legs.
PCI, Compliance, and Security from UncommonSenseSecurity
This is one of my favorite blog posts ever. I’m going to print it out and hand it to every single person who works with or around PCI. If you’re on Twitter, you’ve witnessed the back and forth(s), sometimes at nauseam. The reality of the situation is that both sides are right! Using standards, of any sorts, as the high stick for your security posture is bad. For the simple reason that each and every system, application, and infrastructure is different – simply applying a blanket set of requirements will inevitably leave some holes exposed. Security professionals should be able to take these standards and use them a crutch to convince executives and build an effective security program. Shouldn’t be hard, Mr. Carr thought that checkboxes made his customers’ data secure.
Yahoo!, Paypal, Google, Equifax, AOL, Verisign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo, Wave Systems Pilot Open Identity for Open Government from InformationCard.net
In case you missed the announcement this week, the U.S. Center for Information Technology (CIT), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) partnered with the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) to add support for OpenID and Information Card technologies. This partnership follows President Obama’s memorandum instructing Government websites to allow citizens to participate in said websites without having to create additional usernames and passwords. I would specifically like to highlight AOL’s participation in this initiative which has been spearheaded by my colleague George Fletcher (http://practicalid.blogspot.com/). Congrats George, all that hard work and meetings has paid off big!
Good vs. Good Enough from PreachSecurity
This is a really interesting (and simple) approach to scoping. Lets say your site is a mildly interactive blog, like a generic Honda Civic with the bare bones accessory package and a stick shift. Setting your club and locking your doors is really all you need to do, unless you’re one of those really paranoid people. On the other hand, if you drive a Ferrari with every luxury option and a laptop with $20k in cash on the passenger seat, you’re not only going to set your club and lock your doors, you’re also going to install an alarm, lo-jack, and possibly post a very large and menacing looking man to stand guard. Not only that, but if the laptop and the 20k in the passenger belong to me and you’re responsible for keeping them safe, I expect you to post 2 very large and menacing men outside your car. Here’s another great post from @rybolov with a similar tone, but focusing more on motives and opportunities – http://www.guerilla-ciso.com/archives/1312
Interview about AppSec DC with OWASPs Doug Wilson from NoVAInfoSecPortal
GREAT interview by my DC area peers @grecs and @dallendoug…but, I might be a little biased as I volunteer with Doug on the AppSec DC planning committee. The interview covers questions and answers ranging from a preview of the conference training and speaking engagements, the need for volunteers (REALLY, WE NEED VOLUNTEERS, INQUIRE WITHIN!), and who would benefit from attending the conference (spoiler alert! – EVERYONE can benefit from this conference, it’s going to be the best WebAppSec con the DC area has ever seen). Once you’ve read the interview, cruise on over to http://appsecdc.org/ and checkout the training courses and conference speaker lineup, I promise you won’t be disappointed.
National Retail Federation Poll: Small Retailers Struggling To Understand PCI from DarkReading.
While the topic of small business information security is one that I’m very interested in, this article made me laugh. While the article is well written and informative, I can’t help but to think that if a large payment processor like Heartland couldn’t get it right, what in the world makes you think that small to medium size businesses with no dedicated security staff will be able to implement the appropriate controls?! The response from the PCI Council is verging on comical: “the PCI Council also offers a priority approach framework, self-assessment questionnaires, and other PCI other resources” (that’s copied straight from the article, nice proof reading DarkReading!). This sentence seems to be suggesting that the PCI Council has a list of prioritized security controls with associated tools that will fix the problem. Fiddle sticks! My advice to the small and medium businesses out there: find yourself a consultant, preferably from smaller security company (more flexibility and willingness to work within your budget), that will help you assess your current infrastructure, develop a plan with cost constraints in mind, and implement true security solutions that will not only give you PCI compliance, but also actually protect your customers’ data. Did I mention provide security consulting services?
SMBs Opening Wallets for New Security from ChannelInsider.
As a perfect follow up to my previous commentary, this article provides analysis of the Spiceworks report on SMB (Small and Medium Businesses) IT spending. This article actually makes a great point in the middle of reporting that 32% of respondents plan on spending money on “add[ing] protective measures” – “What the Spiceworks survey indicates is that solution providers must impress upon SMBs the importance of comprehensive security measures that are tailored to their risk exposure and operational threats.” I do some consulting for a solutions provider (ZZServers.com) who offers dedicated and shared PCI environments to SMBs and online merchants. These services are aimed at alleviating the burden of maintaining a secure environment for payment processing vendors which in turn allows the SMBs to focus on their core business. OK, this might have sounded a bit like a sales pitch, but SMBs who cannot afford to secure their own environments might do well with outsourcing those functions to their hosting/solutions providers.
Pwning Opera Unite with Inferno’s Eleven from SecureThoughts.com.
This was one of my favorite reads this week. Opera Unite is likely going to be a pretty widely used service – after all, doesn’t everyone want pictures of their cats, fun quips, and documents posted online with the added benefit of choosing who can access them without having to worry about some social network’s terms of service and god like ability to erase all the content you’ve worked so hard to amass? (*cough*Facebook*cough) In any event, Inferno tore up Opera Unite finding CSRF vulnerabilities, XSS vulnerabilities, CSRF, insecure communication path for authentication, ability to host phish pages, and Clickjacking. One item that he didn’t touch on was the potential for using this service to host and distribute child pornography. Wonder if Opera has followed suit with Google, AOL, and Yahoo! to join forces with NCMEC.
Cross-protocol XSS with non-standard service ports from omg.wtf.bbq.
File this under “yet another awesome use for XSS”! Seriously, Arshan’s managed to leverage an XSS vulnerability to log into an FTP server (*provided the FTP server is hosted on a non-standard port)! Let’s consider another service that uses plain text to enable client/server communications: SMTP. Now lets consider that quite often, internal SMTP servers don’t (always) enforce authentication and authorization when relaying emails. Finally, consider that most modern business communications happen via email. This really spells disaster above and beyond the usual “Email from the CEO” pranks. What about account brute forcing? I’m glad you asked! Think of the POP3 service that might be exposed on your internal networks to support all those non-Windows folks. Seems like this approach could be used to perform password brute forcing on any service that uses text for client/server interactions.
Like Stealing Candy from a Baby from Digital Soapbox Identity Thefts Use Dead Cardholders’ Data to Open Accounts from HostExploit.com
I can’t believe we haven’t solved this problem yet. For as far back as I can remember (and even before the proliferation of computers into our every day lives) there have been accounts of identity theft against the deceased. Whether it be to pad the vote count in elections, or simply assume a new identity in efforts to subvert the law, creditors, or a crazy ex-wife. What makes things worse is that the Federal Government could easily impose some basic regulations around proper care and protection of PII in this industry. Are we really making any headway in data privacy, or are we falling further behind due to new data systems being stood up quicker than we can secure them?
The Trials And Tribulations Of Public Sector CISOs from The Forrester Blog
I’m not sure why the author decided to go specifically with public sector CISOs, each of the 6 challenges laid out apply in the private sector as well!
Governor and Administration changes every four years. I know of companies where the leadership changes every 1 to 2 years. It’s not uncommon for the board of Directors to get frustrated with slow moving leadership and making swift moves to oust them. Furthermore, employee turnover happens almost yearly, it’s very difficult to lay out and execute a comprehensive strategy for information security with this kind of turmoil.
You are competing for budgets against pretty important priorities. Lets not forget that in the private sector, security is still viewed as a necessary cost center. Regulations such as PCI and SOX have given security departments some additional leverage for funds, but as we all know, “being XXX compliant” does not translate to a comprehensive security strategy roll out.
The IT environment consists of several dozen smaller agencies working independently. Unfortunately, this also applies in medium to large private companies as well. There are several silos with different roles and responsibilities who typically do not share many of the same processes and procedures.
No room for error. A mistake in the public sector might result in news headlines and leaders loosing their jobs. A mistake in the private sector could result in the company going out of business and hundreds (if not thousands) of employees loosing their jobs. You tell me which is worse.
Procurement processes are cumbersome. At least there’s money to procure. With the economic downturn, we in the private sector just feel fortunate to still have our jobs. We’re not even thinking of being able to purchase anything!
Public sector is subject to additional regulations. Well, I can’t disagree with you there, those FISMA checkboxes are hard to fill in.
I’m starting a new feature on the blog this week: “News and Commentary :: by WadeW and You“. Yes, it’s another news of the week post, but I wanted to make it something more than a collection of articles that I enjoyed or found interesting. So I decided that I would take each of the news items and provide my commentary on the article or topic in question. I’ve also made a couple upgrades to the blog, including adding DISQUS as the comment platform in hopes that YOU will also provide your commentary/insight/throw Shmoo balls/etc. and voice your opinion. So here’s to a new venture that will hopefully spur some great conversations.
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20090824/google-safe-browsing-and-chrome-privacy-leak/
One thing that Robert doesn’t really touch on is the ethical responsibility of product and software companies. While I concede that a machine ID and a user ID isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s yet another data element that Google has tied to our identities. Since I’m an avid Google Reader user, I decided to take a peak at the ever expanding social functionality in the app to connect with a few contacts. Google kept telling me I should customize my profile, so I did. In the portion where you provide your favorite URLs, there was a list of my accounts on various other sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc). I was a little surprised to see all that information listed right there, even though I’ve searched for my name numerous times before and have seen them returned in results. Still, I can’t help wonder why they need to track that information? And more importantly at what point is aggregating that much public information a privacy issue? Think about it, Google AdSense is on the vast majority of webpages.
http://www.cio.com/article/499829/8_Dirty_Secrets_of_the_IT_Security_Industry
Dirty little secrets? Not so much, mostly just common sense. Companies that spend money on compliance tools end up sending out mass notices to their customers to inform them that their financial information has been stolen – soon enough, that knowledge will be as common as needing a network firewall. I’m not insinuating that compliance with industry guidelines and tools don’t have their place in the picture, but they need to be part of a comprehensive, planned, and human operated solution, not just a hodge podge of red/yellow/green status lights and checkboxes. The same money that is spend on the all ‘fix it fast’ and ‘compliance me’ (TM) solutions that really give you nothing except avoiding a fine can be re-invested into security staff that can plan and execute true solutions that will not only help you avoid fines, but will also give you true enterprise security.
http://danielmiessler.com/blog/from-password-reset-mechanisms-to-openid-a-brief-discussion-of-online-password-security / http://danielmiessler.com/blog/password-reset-mechanisms-the-online-security-threat-nobodys-talking-about
I’m really glad this topic is getting some press. I wrote about ASQs a few months ago and have since been noticing some changes in the options available for password reset functionality. Google allows you to select between secondary email reset, SMS, and ASQ. Additionally, there’s a 24hrs waiting period after the email notification is sent out to the secondary email address before you can leverage the other 2 methods. Very nice. MyOpenID (my OpenID provider) offers password, certificate based authentication, and telephone based authentication – pretty awesome options! Alas, the recover password functionality simply sends an email with a 11 character variable that you click to recover your account. Not too happy about that. There you have it, Google has given some serious thought to security in password recovery, MyOpenID, not so much.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid14_gci1366077,00.html#
Paper – http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2009/workshops/wosn/papers/p7.pdf
I applaud this kind of research. I think it’s critical that those of us who understand the importance of unique identifiers, data aggregation, cookies, URLs, and data privacy need to keep an eye out to the kind of data these sites are forcing our browsers to transmit without our knowledge. That being said, hopefully the majority of you are using AdBlock, RequestPolicy, NoScript and have your browser destroying cookies periodically. I will say that my curiosity got the best of me, and I spent some time running around the social networks with my local web proxy recording traffic and subsequently analyzing a lot of HTTP headers. Yes, there are unique identifiers, yes there are referrers, but at no point did I see any of the beacons even being provided any sort of PII. Do certain applications put PII in URLs? Sure, but I’m a little skeptical about just how much PII could be harvested. None the less, good study.
http://www.briansolis.com/2009/08/why-authenticity-matters/
This is a very interesting post, especially for those of us in the security community that are largely known by our screen name of choice. When I started blogging and joining up to the various social networks, I was compelled to use my own name…or the wadew variation – Woolwine is sometimes a lot for people to consume. I was determined for folks who read and follow my work online to be able to make the immediate connection should they ever meet me in person. But back to the article at hand, how do YOU know that I’m really Wade Woolwine? Honestly, you don’t. Even though I’ve executed on most of the items in the list (at least the personal blogging part) and have ClaimID, domain registrar, and OpenID, you still “trust” that I’m not John Smith who renamed himself Wade Woolwine to appear at the top of Google search results.
http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/200935/4323/Criminals-sending-malicious-CDs-to-credit-unions
Social engineering is a required pillar in a number of different attacks. From XSS to SQLi, malware proliferation to CSRF all of these attacks (often) require that the attacker trick the user into visiting a URL crafted for disaster. So what are we (security professionals) doing about it? Security awareness training of course! But ask anyone around your company to give you 3 words to describe that training and you’ll likely hear terms like “boring”, “mandatory”, “pointless”, “waste of time”. How do we change this? How do we become more effective at socializing basic security practices like not clicking on random links without investigating them?
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.
Even though there have already been some great posts (Rafal Los, Gunter Ollmann, RSnake, John Steven…and again John Steven) I felt like I wanted to offer my commentary and hopefully convince some of you to attend the next OWASP event close to you. Quick disclaimer: I helped Doug, Rex, Mark, Kate and the rest of the volunteers at the conference, so I might be a little bias.
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