-
Interview: Robert Seacord on the CERT C Secure Coding Standard
"Robert C. Seacord and David Chisnall discuss the CERT C Secure Coding standard, developing C standards, and the future of the language and its offshoots. I recently had the opportunity to interview Robert Seacord, author of the recently-published The CERT C Secure Coding Standard. Robert has been deeply involved with C and UNIX for longer…
-
Unicode attacks and test cases: IDN and IRI display, normalization and anti-spoofing
"Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI’s) are a new take on the old URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), which through RFC 3986 restricted domain names to a subset of ASCII characters – mainly lower and upper case letters, numbers, and some punctuation. IRI’s were forecasted many years ago by Martin Dürst and Michel Suignard, and formalized in RFC…
-
Anti-XSS 3.0 Beta and CAT.NET Community Technology Preview now Live
"CAT.NET – Community Technology Preview CAT.NET is a managed code static analysis tool for finding security vulnerabilities. It's exactly the same tool we use internally to scan all of our Line of Business (LOB) applications; it runs as a Visual Studio plug-in or as a stand-alone application. It was engineered by this group (CISG) and…
-
Mod_Security Author Calls It Quits
The author of modsecurity Ivan Ristic has decided to leave Breach Security, the company that retains the rights for modsecurity. I interviewed Ivan in 2006 about the sale of Mod_security who eased concerns that it will remain open source. Based on email conversations with him he will not be leaving the appfirewall scene and will…
-
Executing scripts with non-english characters
There is a write up at Coding Insecurity on filtering non ascii characters to prevent XSS attacks. "I have been working on a medium-sized development project lately and, came across a peculiar phenomenon where I could execute scripts on a page without the use of less-than (<) or greater-than (>) symbols. Instead I used double-byte…
-
Budgeting for Web Application Security
Jeremiah has published an entry on budgeting for web application security in your company. "“Budgeting” is a word I’ve been hearing a lot of questions about recently, which is another data point demonstrating that Web application security and software security are increasingly becoming a top of mind issue. The challenge that many security professionals face…
-
Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 2 Anti-XSS Filter Vulnerabilities
Rafel Ivgi has published an extensive list of IE8 XSS filter evasions. "Aspect9 has discovered several vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 2. This new version of Microsoft's famous browser includes new security improvements such as a Cross Site Scripting(XSS) filter. This version also includes a new object that safely allows transferring data…
-
Article: What the NSA thinks of .NET 2.0 Security
Romain Guacher to the SC-L mailing list that the NSA has published a massive 298 page unclassified document on .NET 2.0 security. From the introduction. "The purpose of this document is to inform administrators responsible for systems andnetwork security about the configurable security features available in the .NET Framework.To place some of the configuration options…
-
Understanding How to Use the Microsoft’s Exploitability Index
"On Oct. 14, 2008, Microsoft added another piece of information to the bulletin summary to better help customers with their risk assessment process: the Exploitability Index. This section is a brief overview to explain how customers can integrate the Exploitability Index with the Severity Rating system into their own risk assessment process. The Exploitability Index…
-
Integrity-178B Secure OS Gets Highest NSA Rating, Goes Commercial
"An operating system used in military fighter planes has raised the bar for system security as a new commercial offering, after receiving the highest security rating by a National Security Agency (NSA)-run certification program. Green Hills Software announced that its Integrity-178B operating system was certified as EAL6+ and that the company had spun off a…
-
Microsoft’s Stance on Banned APIs
Microsoft has a blog entry on their mentality/process on banning certain API calls to improve their software’s security. "Jeremy Dallman here with a quick note about a code sanitizing tool we are making available to support one of the SDL requirements – Remove all Banned APIs from your code. This requirement was put in place…
-
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…
-
W3C Working Draft for Access Control for Cross-Site Requests Published
"This document defines a mechanism to enable client-side cross-site requests. Specifications that want to enable cross-site requests in an API they define can use the algorithms defined by this specification. If such an API is used on http://example.org resources, a resource on http://hello-world.example can opt in using the mechanism described…
-
Fxcop HtmlSpotter – Spotting ASP.NET XSS using Fxcop and Html encoding document
An anonymous user writes "In his previous blog post, Sacha provided an updated list of the asp.net control html encoding information. He now integrated the content into FXCop to help quickly identify spots in asp.net binaries that should be reviewed for XSS issues." Read more: http://blogs.msdn.com/sfaust/archive/2008/09/18/fxcop-htmlspotter-spotting-asp-net-xss-using-fxcop-and-html-encoding-document.aspx
-
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,…
-
ViewStateUserKey Doesn’t Prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery
"ViewStateUserKey is not a completely effective mitigation against Cross-Site Request Forgery. It doesn’t work for non post-backs (I.e. GET requests), and it doesn’t work if the ViewState MAC is turned off. In several different places, we see a piece of advice repeated – use the ViewStateUserKey property to prevent One-Click Attacks. Often, this piece of…
-
Real World XSS Vulnerabilities in ASP.NET Code
Microsoft has posted an article on what real world XSS vulnerable code looks like in ASP.NET applications. Handy if you develop asp.net or audit it for issues. "From couple of weeks we have been seeing some XSS vulnerabilities in asp.net code. Today I wanted to show you guys some real world examples ranging from property…
-
WASC Threat Classification v2 Project – Call for Participants
In addition to running CGISecurity I also participate heavily in The Web Application Security Consortium and its projects. I sent the following email to The Web Security Mailing List seeking participants for v2 of the WASC Threat Classification document. "I’m sending this email to the list seeking people to contribute towards The Threat ClassificationVersion 2.0.…
-
How To: Detect Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities using XSSDetect
"Last time we saw how to fix a cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability. This time we look at how we can detect cross site scripting vulnerabilities using automated tools. Being the most common vulnerability found in web applications, it is very important to detect and mitigate XSS vulnerabilities early in development cycle. Arming developers with…
-
Article: SDL Embraces The Web
Bryan Sullivan from Microsoft has posted an article on SDL use to secure web applications. "The Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) team recently released details of the SDL process that has been so successful in helping to make Microsoft products more secure. You can find these documents at microsoft.com/sdl. As you read through this SDL guidance…
-
Which ASP.NET Controls Automatically HTML Entity Output Encodes?
Sacha Faust has just published a grid mapping which asp.net controls automatically perform html entity output encoding when used. Link: http://blogs.msdn.com/sfaust/archive/2008/09/02/which-asp-net-controls-automatically-encodes.aspx Grid: http://blogs.msdn.com/sfaust/attachment/8918996.ashx
-
Understanding the security changes in Flash Player 10 beta
"The next version of Adobe Flash Player will offer a variety of new features and enhancements as well as some changes to the current behavior of Flash Player. Some of these changes may require existing content to be updated to comply with stricter security rules. Other changes introduce new…
-
Cross-site hacks and the art of self defence
Generally, browsers stop cross-site communication by following the "same-origin policy". This rule is pretty simple: if your site has a different origin – protocol, domain, and port don’t all match – you aren’t allowed to access information from or send requests to the other site. Without this simple rule, there would be no security on…
-
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…
-
Rich data: the dark side to Web 2.0 applications
"All web applications allow some form of rich data, but that rich data has become a key part of Web 2.0. Data is "rich" if it allows markup, special characters, images, formatting, and other complex syntax. This richness allows users create new and innovative content and services. Unfortunately, richness affords attackers an unprecedented opportunity to…
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