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20 years of CGISecurity: What appsec looked like in the year 2000
Just realized that 20 years have passed since I started this site to learn more about web security threats. What 'appsec' looked like in 2000 OWASP didn't exist yet, nor did WASC Vulnerability disclosure was the wild west. Rain forest puppy (RFP) (that guy who discovered sqli) had just created the first attempt at…
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My experience coleading purple team
I've been fortunate enough to manage a red team program for several years and since it's inception it has gone through many changes. What started out as adhoc engagements trying to see how far we could get/what problems we could find, turned into a mechanism to work more closely, and regularly with operations/it teams. More…
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Google’s intentions are good, but implementation leave MORE users vulnerable to hacking than before
In 2010 I wrote an article about a flaw Google discovered, and published working exploit code when no fix or mitigation existed. This allowed attackers to immediately start using the flaw to hack Google's own users (in this case, the world). Since then Google has announced a new program 'Project Zero' which from the project…
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My experience with developer security training
I've been busy this past year which has resulted in almost no updates to this site. Consider this one of many rants/posts of my experience/s in the industry during this time. This post covers a topic I think many people implement poorly, which is security training targeting developers. How most people implement developer focused…
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Malicious CA’s continue to cause headaches
Google published today that yet another CA has been caught generating certs for Google's domains. This problem is likely occuring on a much larger scale and seems to be detected by chance. Some have suggested crawling the internet and starting a DB, and while this may detect some issues it's limited for the following reasons…
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Five pieces of advice for those new to the infosec industry
I've worked in the security field in various roles (script kiddie, security researcher, incident response, application security engineer, security consultant, strategy, etc..) and thought I'd share a few points to those of you starting out in the security industry. Things are worse than you expect The reality is that companies, even large ones, are…
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Security Industry Plagiarism: Finding 3 examples in 5 minutes with Google
UPDATE: One of the authors has posted two responses including an apology (accepted). I was taught in grade school that if you plan on writing something, never plagiarize. If you want to republish portions of existing content ensure you properly quote/reference them, and never represent this content as your own original work. Unfortunately it seems…
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NIST publishes 50kish vulnerable code samples in Java/C/C++, is officially krad
NIST has published a fantastic project (its been out since late December, but I only just became aware of it) where they've created vulnerable code test cases for much of MITRE's CWE project in Java and c/c++. From the README "This archive contains test cases intended for use by organizations and individuals that wish to…
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CGISecurity.com Turns 10!: A short appsec history of the last decade
Ten years ago today I started cgisecurity.com to fill a void in the application security space. At the time no other dedicated site existed, neither OWASP nor WASC had been created, and the www-mobile list was effectively the only place to discuss web related vulns and attacks . When I first started this site I…
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A reminder that CSRF affects more than websites
Maksymilian Arciemowicz has published an advisory outlining how one can perform CSRF attacks against FTP services, in this case Sun Solaris 10 ftpd. An attacker could embed a payload such as the following to execute commands on ftpd. <img src=”ftp://…..////SITE%20CHMOD%20777%20FILENAME”;> The NetBSD team addressed this issue by failing on large commands. The interesting thing…
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2010 SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors Released
I was luck enough to assist in this project and I must say that a lot of great discussions took place. Unlike many other top x security lists, SANS/MITRE's methodology is fairly extensive and well documented giving you insight into how decisions were made. I do want to point out that top x lists in…
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Potential risks of using Google’s free DNS service?
Google has announced that they are offering a free DNS service to anyone wanting to use it. Unfortunately the motivations/privacy concerns aren't being discussed in as much detail as I'd like, and people aren't asking the important question of why google is offering such a free service. Several points to consider Google can profile a…
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Months later, more products identified using exploitable transparent proxy architecture
It's been more than 3 months since I published my paper on abusing transparent proxies with flash, and 4 months since CERT's Advisory (VU#435052). Since that time additional products have been identified as being exploitable. Still Vulnerable Squid http://www.squid-cache.org/ Astaro http://www.astaro.org/astaro-gateway-products/web-security-http-https-ftp-im-p2p-web-filtering-antivirus/24916-socket-capable-browser-plugins-result-transparent-proxy-abuse.html QBik Wingate http://www.securityspace.com/smysecure/catid.html?ctype=cve&id=CVE-2009-0802 Tiny Proxy? https://packetprotector.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4018 Smoothwall, SchoolGuardian, and NetworkGuardian http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/MAPG-7M6SM7 Products with fixes…
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PayPal Software Security Podcast
Gary McGraw posted the following to the secure coding mailing list today. "Episode 6 of the Reality Check security podcast features our own Andy Steingruebl chatting with me about Paypal's software security initiative. This was a fun episode for me, because though I have known Andy for a while I had little insight into his…
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Socket Capable Browser Plug-ins Result In Transparent Proxy Abuse
For over a year in my spare time I've been working on a abuse case against transparent proxies at my employer, and have just released my latest paper '"Socket Capable Browser Plugins Result In Transparent Proxy Abuse". When certain transparent proxy architectures are in use an attacker can achieve a partial Same Origin Policy Bypass…
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The security industry needs to re-align its training expectations for QA
I've been involved in the security community for over 10 years and have worked for small, medium, andlarge companies. I have also worked in Quality Assurance and base my comments here on my experiences being a QA tester, and speaking with them as an outsider. I've seen advice in articles, and conferences discussing the need…
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Security metrics on flaws detected during architectural review?
I recently attended a private event where there was a talk on security metrics. Security metrics can be used to determine if action x is reducing risk y. Software security metrics typically involve counting the number of defects discovered over time to see if things are getting better. Most of these metrics involve issues discovered…
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Rant: Mac user’s security arrogance clouds common sense
F-Secure has posted the following blog entry at securityfocus. "There has been a lot of talk (link 1, link 2, link 3) during the last few days about a support article that seemingly appeared on the Apple website. In the article, Apple advised users to install an anti-virus software to make sure their computers are…
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Dave Aitel on Static Analysis Tools
Dave Aitel has posted to dailydave with his thoughts on Static Analysis Industry. From his email "So OWASP was dominated by lots of talk from and about static code analysis tools. I wandered around with a friend of mine at the various booths (CodeSecure [1], Fortify[2], IBM AppScan[3], Ounce Labs) and tried them all while…
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Dealing with UI redress vulnerabilities inherent to the current web
Michal Zalewski of google has posted a proposal on browser security enhancements to the whatwg mailing list. "I am posting here on the advice of Ian Hickson; I’m new to the list, so please forgive me if any of this brings up long-dismissed concepts; hopefully not. For a couple of months now, along with a…
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The Palin Hack: Why most question recovery systems suck
Motley fool wrote an article blaming Yahoo! for the Palin Hack. Computerworld has pointed out Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail as being vulnerable as well. To be clear any site supporting answering of common questions as a way to restore account access is vulnerable. The issue is not that these sites are vulnerable and others aren’t,…
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Affiliate Programs Vulnerable to Cross-site Request Forgery Fraud
Intro The following describes a long-standing and common implementation flaw in online affiliate programs allowing for fraud. For those unfamiliar with affiliate programs, they provide a way for companies to allow 3rd parties/website owners to direct traffic to their site in exchange for a share of the profits of user purchases. Most view affiliate programs…
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My current stance on Web Application Firewalls
Andre Gironda has posted an interesting take on ‘what web application security really is’. I agree with some of his points however one in particular I’m going to have to disagree with and that related to using Web application firewalls. For many years I’ve been anti Web application firewall and as a general rule I…
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Bots Use SQL Injection Tool in Web Attack and Rant
"The Asprox botnet, a relatively small botnet known mainly for sending phishing emails, has been spotted in the last few days installing an SQL injection attack tool on its bots. The bots then Google for .asp pages with specific terms — and then hit the sites found in the search return with SQL injection attacks,…
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Performing Distributed Brute Forcing of CSRF vulnerable login pages
Update: Apparently this is described in a paper by sensepost that I wasn’t aware of. Check out there paper at http://www.sensepost.com/research/squeeza/dc-15-meer_and_slaviero-WP.pdf. We know that CSRF is bad, and that if your application is performing an important action to utilize a random token associated with the users session. I started thinking a bit about CSRF and…
Favorite Links
- Security Templates (New)
- The Web Application Security Consortium
- QA Security
- The Web Security Mailing List
- Romain Gaucher’s Blog
- Jeremiah Grossman’s Blog
Popular Pages
WASC Threat Classification
- Abuse of Functionality
- Application Misconfiguration
- Brute Force Attack
- Content Spoofing
- Credential/Session Prediction
- Denial of Service
- Directory Indexing
- Information Leakage
- Remote File Inclusion Attack
- Routing Detour Attack
- SOAP Array Abuse
- XML Attribute Blowup
- XML Injection
- XML External Entity Attack