Category Archives: Security

Watch your SaaS: Partial parameter checking or The case of the unfinished homework

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“Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.”

- Otto von Bismarck

I’m not sure how many of you have kids or how diligent they are with their homework but I’m sure you’ve heard stories of parents observing that their kids have finished their homework in a remarkably short period of time.  However, upon investigation, you quickly discover that your child has only finished half of their homework.

Sadly, this state of affairs can also true for SAAS providers offering web application scanning services.  Only half of the work gets done, resulting in rapid, but inaccurate scans and potentially vulnerable websites that are given clean bills of health by the scanning company.

Taking shortcuts

Properly configured web vulnerability scanners should test parameters by locating all of the parameters on a page and then making attacks against individual parameters at a time.  So if there are 10 parameters, you do an attack against parameter 1 and put acceptable values into the other 9 parameters to successfully complete the form request.

Why can’t you just attack all 10 at once?  Well, let’s say that parameter 1 is vulnerable and parameters 2 -10 have good filters. If you attack parameter one with an attack that works (i.e. the application does not recognize it) and parameter 2 with an attack that trips the filter in the application, the application will quite likely appear to not be vulnerable.

Now the problem is that if you are testing various attacks (SQL Injection, Blind SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting, etc.) you will have dozens of attacks of each class against each parameter.  Your total attacks per parameter will exceed 100 and if you have 10 parameters on a page (which you will likely have in a signup form, for example), you will have over a thousand attacks for that page. On top of that, some of these attacks, like blind SQL, will have multiple requests per attack.

Performance vs comprehensiveness

Many SaaS vendors want to complete scans fast to make them look more impressive. The problem is that in order to accomplish, you have to cheat.

To speed up a scan, you might only test the first parameter or the first three or whatever and then skip testing the rest of the parameters.  If the customer doesn’t test the site and doesn’t get hacked, no one is the wiser if those untested parameters are vulnerable.

Does this matter?  Is it possible that one of parameters 4-10 is vulnerable if 1-3 are not?  In a word, yes.  Different parameter types (dates, text fields, numerical values, etc.) will have different filters.  Just because a developer got 1 right doesn’t mean that he got them all correct.  We’ve seen numerous cases where one parameter is 100% clean and others are full of holes.  You have to thoroughly test every parameter.

Letting those POSTs get away with murder

Since dealing with forms on web pages can be difficult and there is a possibility that they could modify data in the database behind the web application, some SaaS solutions don’t even attack them. So this means all the inputs from the forms never get tested.

On many of the sites we have tested over the last decade, the form inputs sent over POST have been some of the most critical attack points with some of the worst vulns and often the most important areas to test on a website. Not testing them is the same as locking your doors, but leaving your windows wide open.

How can you assess your vendor

Ask your vendor the hard questions, such as:

1. How many parameters do they attack per page? Are there limits they impose.

2. Ask them to demonstrate that only one parameter at a time gets attacked while the other fields having good data. Heck, ask them to put these answers in the Statement of Work (SOW).

3. Confirm that they attack forms and POST data. Ask them to demonstrate it or test it yourself with a trial.

NT OBJECTives Positioned in the “Visionaries” Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

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Recent Gartner research positioned NT OBJECTives in the Visionaries quadrant for Dynamic Application Security Testing(DAST).(i) Gartner’s report was published in December and is now available to all Gartner subscribers.

Analysts Neil MacDonald and Joseph Feiman state in the report that “Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) solutions should be considered mandatory to test all Web-enabled enterprise applications, as well as packaged and cloud-based application providers.” They go on to note that “the market is maturing, with a large number of established providers of products and services.”(ii)

We consider our positioning in the “Visionaries” quadrant by Gartner confirmation of our mission and ability to deliver technologies and services that solve today’s toughest application security software challenges. Web application security represents one of the greatest security challenges facing the information technology industry today. We will continue to innovate and deliver the products today’s security teams need. In the months ahead, we are excited to launch a number of products that will further enhance our market position and help our customers.

In the report, MacDonald and Feiman also note that “as organizations have improved the security of their network, desktop and server infrastructures, there has been a shift to application-level attacks as a way to gain access to the sensitive and valuable information they handle, or to use a breach of an application to gain access to the system underneath. In addition, there has been a shift in attacker focus from mass “noisy” attacks to financially motivated, targeted attacks. As a result of these trends, application security has become a top investment area for information security organizations, whether improving the security of applications developed in-house, procured from third parties or consumed as a service from cloud providers.”(iii)
Gartner clients may view a copy of the Magic Quadrant for Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) report via Neil MacDonald’s blog, “The Market for Dynamic Application Security Testing is Anything but Static”.

Disclaimer:
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About NT Objectives
NT OBJECTives, Inc brings together an innovative collection of experts in information security to provide a comprehensive suite of technologies and services to solve today’s toughest application security challenges. NT OBJECTives solutions are well known as the most comprehensive and accurate Web Application security solutions available. NT OBJECTives is privately held with headquarters in Irvine, CA.

(i) Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Dynamic Application Security Testing” by Neil MacDonald and Joseph Feiman, December 27,2011
(ii) Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Dynamic Application Security Testing” by Neil MacDonald and Joseph Feiman, December 27,2011
(iii) Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Dynamic Application Security Testing” by Neil MacDonald and Joseph Feiman, December 27,2011

Surviving the Week – 02/17/2012

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The NTO team keeps growing and the demands of running the business and supporting our customers is keeping me busy… and its a blast. But now its good to be getting back to these weekly postings.

On to the news, so I can help keep you all informed about the important news in web app security.

  • Will a standardized system for verifying Web identity ever catch on? - Maybe the question is “Do we even want a standardized system for verifying Web Identity?” I for one see stuff like this everyday, and if the FBI’s site can be hacked, who is going to promise the security of OpenID? It will just become the single place an attacker has to attack to get access to everyone’s confidential/private data.
  • CSRF with upload – XHR-L2, HTML5 and Cookie replay - XHR-Level 2 calls embedded in an HTML5 browser can open a cross domain socket and deliver an HTTP request. Cross-domain calls will abide by CORS, but browsers end up  generating preflight requests to check policy and based on that, will allow cookie replay. Interestingly, multi-part/form-data requests will go through without the preflight check and “withCredentials” allow cookie replay. This is how some new cutting edge attacks are going to be performed.
  • Vote Now! Top Ten Web Hacking Techniques of 2011 – This is an incredibly useful survey that they do each year. So, please vote to help the community get an idea of what is interesting and important to you.
  • Twitter Enables HTTPS By Default – As sites like Google, Facebook and now Twitter start pushing all traffic to HTTPS, I fear that users will mistake this for real security. “Oh, I can put all my information on Facebook/Twitter/etc now because they are ‘secure’. See there is even a little padlock icon in my browser when I go to those sites, just like the bank.” – FAIL

Tales from the Web Scanning Front: Why is This Scan Taking So Long?

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As CEO, I’m constantly emphasizing the importance of customer support and trying to attend several support calls each week to stay on top of our support quality and what customers are asking.

Surprisingly, application scan times are one of the most common issues raised by customers.  Occasionally, scans will take days or even weeks.

At this point, I would say that in almost all cases, there is an issue that lies within the application’s environment as opposed to a something within the software.

First some background on web application security scanners. Web scanners first crawl websites, enumerate attack points and then create custom attacks based on the site.  So, for example, if I have a small site with 200 attackable inputs and each one can be attacked 200 ways, with each attack requiring 2 requests, I have 200*200*2 or 80,000 requests to assess that site.

Now NTOSpider can be configured to use up to 64 simultaneous requests so depending on the response time from the server, you can run though requests very quickly.  Assuming, for example, 10 requests a second, that’s 600 per minute, 36,000 per hour and you can get through that site in 2.22 hours.

The problem is that quite often the target site is not able to handle 10 or even 1 request per second.  Some reasons can include:

  • Still in development - The site is in development and has limited processing power and/or memory.
  • Suboptimal optimization - The site is not built to handle a high level of traffic and this has not yet shown up in QA.  We were on the phone with a customer last month who allowed us to look at the server logs and we saw that one process involved in one of our requests was chewing up 100% of the CPU for 5 seconds.  Another application was re-adding every item to the database each time the shopping cart was updated (as opposed to just the changes) and our 5,000 item cart was severely stressing the database.
  • Middleware  Not to bash any particular vendor (Coldfusion) but some middleware is quite slow.

So let’s look at our 80,000 request example from above and assume that our site can only handle 1 request per second.  Our 2.2 hour scan time balloons to 22 hours.  For our 5 second response in bullet 2, we get to 4.6 days for our little site.  The good news is that NTOSpider can be configured to slow itself down so as to not DOS the site (this is our Auto-Throttle feature).  The bad news is that it will take some time.

So what’s a poor tester to do?

  • Beefier hardware  If you are budgeting for a web scanner,  consider spending a couple of extra thousand dollars on some decent hardware to test your apps. (Note – a modern laptop with optimal ram for the OS you are running – 32-bit OS = 4 Gigs of ram / 64-Bit OS = 8 Gigs of ram – will solve 90% of all performance issues.)
  • Scheduling  In some cases, you can schedule scans so that even if they are longer, you can still get things done in time.
  • Segmenting  In some cases, if you know that only a portion of the site has changed, you can target the scan to test only that subset and dramatically reduce scan time.
  • Code Augmentation  Not to put too fine a point on it, but if a single request is taking 5 seconds to process, a hacker can DOS your site by hand.  You might want the developers to look at adjusting the code.

 

An Information Security Place Podcast – Episode 01 for 2012 – Breach Report

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Standard Podcast [ 32:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (381)

Wow! Six Months…and two job changes later, we are finally back to recording! YEAH!….Here the latest show from our intrepid hosts.

Show Notes:

InfoSec News Update –

Discussion Topic – 2012 Breach Report

  1. Care2 Discloses Breach; Company Has Nearly 18 Million Members
  2. AntiSec hit California and NY Law Enforcement Sites
  3. Anonymous Nabs 50,000 Credit Card Numbers From Security Think Tank

Music Notes: Special Thanks to the guys at RivetHead for use of their tracks

  • Intro – RivetHead – “The 13th Step”
  • News Bed – RivetHead - “Beautiful Disaster”
  • Discussion Bed – RivetHead - “Difference”
  • Outro – RivetHead – “Zero Gravity”
  • Tour Dates:
    1. Jan 6 – Dallas – Curtain Club
    2. Jan 27 – Dallas – Trees
    3. Jan 28 – Dallas – Trees
    4. Mar 2 – Dallas – Curtain Club – 7th Album CD Release Party
    5. Mar 3 – Houston – BFE Rock Club
    6. Mar 24 – Fort Worth – The Rail Club
    7. May 5 – Dallas – Renos Chop Shop

 

Assessing risk before you buy software: Is company risk inversely related to company size

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Software purchase risk assessment
I recently stumbled across this article which got me thinking about the risks organizations take when they buy technology products and what kind of risk assessment process is conducted. Our company sells application security assessment software to people who are experts at managing IT security risk, so I’m curious to hear what others think.
11 Companies On the Edge in 2012
#8 on the list.
Hewlett-Packard. Stock decline: 38 percent.
“HP is on its third CEO in less than two years, with the turnover reflecting strategic confusion that has impaired earnings, enraged shareholders and raised concerns that HP is too unwieldy to be run effectively. With operations in many business and consumer markets, HP has numerous competitors that have been nibbling market share, leading to disappointing results likely to continue into 2012. Some analysts worry that a heavy focus on acquisitions in recent years has left holes in HP’s new-product pipeline. New CEO Meg Whitman may enjoy a bit of a honeymoon, but she’ll need to prove herself by the second half of 2012.”

First, I’d like to clear the air in the spirit of full disclosure.

  1. I have nothing against technology conglomerates and believe that they fill an essential role in our economy.
  2. At various times in my own company’s history, HP and its subsidiaries have been customers, partners and vendors.
  3. I have personally purchased and used many HP products over the years and am a fan of Meg Whitman for her work at eBay.
  4. My company directly competes with HP in the application security space as I mentioned.
  5. I am co-CEO of a privately held company that has been profitable for over six years.  Now on with the post.

The common wisdom seems to be that when purchasing technology products there is little or no risk with large firms and significant risk with smaller firms.

In my experience, this isn’t really true.

Let’s look at the varying types of risk in purchasing technology (this is not specific to application security technology)

  • Technology and Support Team Risk – With any technology, particularly complex technologies, there is a huge risk that the team responsible for creating that technology will change for the worse, and later versions of the product will get worse over time after the customer has spent a significant amount of money for a perpetual license where the product is supposed to last 3-5 years or more.  Customers expect to be able to get ongoing support for the product that they have purchased. This is particularly important with more complex products.
In building application security software, for example, building and maintaining a team of top developers is crucial because the industry-specific knowledge requried to create a leading product requires years of coding and domain expertise as is the case in many industries.
  • Bankruptcy Risk – Obviously, if a company goes bankrupt and is dissolved, there will be no further upgrades or support.
  • Strategic Risk – Companies can decide that the product purchased by the customer does not meet its overall strategy and end-of-life the product. Upgrades will be limited and support will likely wither during the last years of the product’s life.
  • Layoff Risk -When companies effect layoffs, products can suffer, which impacts both the technology on an ongoing basis as well as the support.
  • Risk of Sale – When private companies sell to larger companies, there is always the risk that technology and support teams will leave. This can even be the case if their shares vest over time if there are significant cultural or power conflicts or if the incentives are insufficient.

Let’s look at these risk factors by firm size, profitability and recency of technology acquisition:

Unprofitable Private Companies

  • Technology and Support Team Risk – Generally this risk is less because the core team has a significant equity stake in the company and will stay so long as the company has funding.
  • Bankruptcy Risk – This is the most significant risk. Pre-profitable companies rely on investors to fund losses and investors can be fickle. If funding dries up, the company can be forced to sell (in which case the team may leave) or liquidate.
  • Strategic Risk – Smaller companies typically have few products so this is a minimal risk.
  • Layoff Risk –  Smaller companies can cut back on growth if they cannot raise funds, harming development and support.
  • Risk of Sale – This is a significant risk.

Profitable Private Companies

  • Technology and Support Team Risk – Generally low because of equity incentives. Support can suffer with rapid growth.
  • Bankruptcy Risk – Less than for unprofitable private companies for obvious reasons.
  • Strategic Risk – Again, generally a minimal risk.
  • Layoff Risk – This can be a risk, although less than for unprofitable private companies.
  • Risk of Sale – This is the most significant risk. Most private companies do not go public and there is always the risk that the founders of a profitable private company of sufficient size will cash in and move to an island, harming the technical and support capabilities behind the product.

Large Company with Newly Acquired Technology

  • Technology and Support Team Risk – This is a significant risk.  Technology companies suffer significant attrition in their technical staffs post-acquisition.  Some founders leave because it is more lucrative to be an entrepreneur and some leave because they no longer have to work. For others, the work at large companies is not challenging enough and the entrepreneur in them feels stifled.
  • Bankruptcy Risk – Generally minimal.
  • Strategic Risk -This is a small risk short term.  See below for the longer term risks.
  • Layoff Risk – This is potentially a significant risk depending on the financial profile of the company.
  • Risk of Sale – Less of a risk than for smaller companies.

Large Company with Longstanding Technology

  • Technology and Support Team Risk – After a while, the creators of the technology leave and are replaced by a team that wants to work at a larger company.  This can be good or bad but is generally somewhat stable.
  • Bankruptcy Risk – Generally minimal.
  • Strategic Risk – This is a huge risk.  Large companies go through strategic review constantly.  Many products exist as parcels in larger groups controlled by a single executive or executive team.  When turnover occurs, priorities change and centi-million dollar acquisitions can be written off like week old bananas.  We were partnered with a company that wrote off a $150 million acquisition after 3 years because it didn’t make strategic sense.
  • Layoff Risk – When large companies are in financial trouble, they tend to cut across the Board which can significantly impact product quality and support both from a pure numbers as well as a morale standpoint.
  • Risk of Sale – Less of a risk than for smaller companies.

To sum up, the issue of company risk in technology purchases is far more complex than is ordinarily assumed.  The saying, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM” may not necessarily be true.  Conversely, I’m not arguing that buying from small companies because they are small makes any more sense than buying from large companies because they are large. IT professionals must evaluate the risks of the companies with whom they are doing business on a case by case basis.

Surviving the Week – 12/09/2011

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Sorry I missed last week, this one will cover the last two weeks.

 

Announcing SQL Invader

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Today, we announced SQL Invader, a new free GUI-based tool that enables testers to easily and quickly exploit a SQL Injection vulnerability, get a proof of concept with database visibility and export results into a csv file. In just a few clicks, users will be able to view the list of records, tables and user accounts on the back-end database.

Tools like this are still critical for comprehensive application security testing and can help organizations remain a step ahead of the bad guys. SQL Injection has been the dominant method used in this year’s high-profile web application attacks; with millions of sites attacked in 2011.

We created this tool because our customers and the community at large have expressed a need. We want to always contribute to the community as much as we can. Although SQL Injection is well documented and there are tools to discover the vulnerabilities, it has been very difficult to determine if the vulnerability can actually be exploited because most existing SQL Injection testing tools are executed from a command line, lack an intuitive user interface or are no longer supported.  Without the ability to clearly demonstrate the exploitability of a vulnerability, remediation efforts are often delayed and friction between security and development teams surfaces. We designed NTO SQL Invader so that penetration testers and developers can quickly and easily leverage a vulnerability to view the list of records, tables and user accounts on the back-end database.

SQL Invader works as a standalone solution or with NTOSpider and enables you to:

  • Paste the injectable request straight from an application scan report
  • Control how much information is harvested.
  • View data in an organized manner using tree control and data grids.
  • Leverage logging data in CSV file

 

Surviving the Week – 11/25/2011

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I hope that all of you in the US had a great Happy Thanksgiving.
As is normal for a holiday weekend, the new is a bit light, but here is what I was able to gather for this week.

Surviving the Week – 11/18/2011

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This week was a busy one for me, as I’m finally done traveling for awhile and and got back to working on NTOSpider6 and our growing team. I should be able to keep up with this weekly post again, and will keep you all informed about the important news in web app security.