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I am very technical, but I do not know much about fax. I was told to send a fax to somebody with some very private information, and not to worry because they had a secure fax line.
That's all well and good, but I do not have a secure fax line. Does this matter? Or am I in the right not wanting to send this data to them... |
There have been a couple of instances where malware infected USB drives have been given away unknowingly as promotional items at conferences, e.g., IBM in 2010.
Besides this, if a healthcare company were to give away "branded" USB drives, what other risks might be involved with such giveaways?
Further, if the recipien... |
Recently, I've learned how some rootkits are able to hide certain files, services, etc. from programs in the kernel or user modes.
This got me wondering: Are there any antivirus programs, or other intrusion detection systems, that use "canary files" with common strings in their filenames that are normally hidden by ro... |
I would like to ask about the availability of any sensor or device that can be used to read magnetic bits inside hard disks? I tried to google that but I did not see any useful thing till now. I think data recovery companies should be using something like that device.
|
I've started working with ettercap and ARP-poisoning; however, I've stumbled upon some problems. I've executed the following command:
ettercap -i wlan0 -w log -T -M arp:remote /192.168.1.254/ /192.168.1.0-84,86-253,255/
192.168.1.254 is the gateway, 192.168.1.85 is my own internal IP address.
It starts sniffing but... |
My Android smart phone has fancy features that I can get only if I root it, e.g., free-wifi tethering or Cisco VPN (with group name/password). However, the procedure to root my phone makes me question the underlying security model.
Specifically, I used a Lifehacker's method that uses an application called "Revolutiona... |
I don't really have an issue with advertisements simply being blocked by individual users who are visiting a customers site or my own site. As an individual you have the freedom to choose not to look at them. The issue is with browser add-ons that detect and conceal a websites ad space with a third party application. T... |
I'm into extend a authenticating service and like to ask about the security perspective of HttpContext.Current. Let say you have a authentication serve websites / wcf and such (where http is applicable). HttpContext.Current are used to store the session and other info in the Items array, no need passing credentials ar... |
I've been put in charge of educating developers on web application security. One way I will be doing this is through an explanation of various web attacks (e.g., OWASP top ten).
In addition to an explanation of the attack and possible mitigations, I would like to give a real life example describing what sort of damage... |
For developing a mobile app, there is a choice of storing usernames and password data in the device itself, or in a server (user will be authenticated to a server). Other than possibly the user have to manage multiple passwords if he has multiple devices, is there a drawback for the former choice? Also, the app is supp... |
I have a classic DMZ architecture:
My webserver is placed in the DMZ.
The webserver needs to communicate with a database server. This database server is the most critical component of my network as it contains confidential data.
Where should I place the DB server and why? Should I add a second firewall and create an... |
When forming a JSON data structure, are there any security risks with allowing the field names to be chosen by an attacker? You can assume they'll be quoted properly. I'd like to know if allowing the attribute names to be attacker-chosen poses any additional risks over allowing the attribute values to be attacker-cho... |
We currently have an application that we deploy via the web, users access it by connecting to a link which opens an executable file. This file was compiled with visual foxpro.
My question is - is this setup secure? Are my transactions, data transmission to and from the server secured? Or is it better to develop a web a... |
I am currently using PDO with prepared statements for some integer values (see PDO::PARAM_INT). That means I call PDO like this:
$stmt = $conn->prepare("SELECT `lastMove` FROM ".GAMES_TABLE.
" WHERE `id`=:gameID AND (`whiteUserID` = ".USER_ID.
" OR `blackUserID` = ".USER_ID.") LIMIT 1");... |
I have one project (in Java) that the programmer used URLEncode to output content as part of HTML instead of HTMLEncode.
What is the risk that it is XSS vulnerable? (Let’s forget that it’s different encoding and he will get different results)
What is the right way to do HTMLEncode in Java?
|
I hear stories about insecure web servers and sites which people (or bots) break into and execute their own code on the server.
My question is how is that possible? I heard of people putting their own javascript on websites stealing cookies and techniques how to do that. I never heard of actual attacks to execute code.... |
i have a program which is pretty simple.
Its just a simple login form.
Is there any possibility to log what this program is doing (maybe which file he is accessing and which website he is visiting (also what this website is returning)
I mean a program that is logging which file this program is accessing and which websi... |
My son's school uses a 3rd party to handle tuition and fee payments. I have recently come to the realization that they completely fail in the area of password security.
Last month they sent a statement to my home. Included with the statement was a letter that had my username and password.
OH NOES! They don't encry... |
I just finished a project in which I coded a man in the middle attack on an unsecure network. I've tried to see how feasible it would be to extend this a secured network. Some internet searching has left me a bit puzzled. I have a few questions:
What exactly do wireless encryptions hide? I assume it is everything after... |
Is man in the middle attack possible in a typical challenge-response based authentication? For a typical reference one can go through this paper.
My question is that is it possible for an intruder to act as server(possibly using DNS spoofing; for the client) and as client for the server and become the man in the middle... |
I'm working with a smartcard (DESFire) that supports both TripleDES and DES. In the specs it is stated that both modes of operation use 16 bytes keys. When the first 8 bytes in the key are identical to the trailing 8 bytes, the DES mode is used. Otherwise, the TDEA algorithm is selected.
This is a shock to me since it ... |
How can I (maybe with a proxy, but I need names of programs!?) log all my interactions of programs with my Internet connection, so that I could see WHAT a program is sending and WHAT it is receiving. (For example a program receives an XML Doc and I would like to read it.)
Also it would be very useful if I could modify ... |
How are mobile telephony networks like LTE (4G) and HSPA (3G) encrypted? between what parts is the communication encrypted? who has access to the keys? is symmetric or asymmetric encryption used? is it similar to TLS?
|
In many of the privacy policies, I noticed there is one section as a disclaimer mainly talking about "our websites contain links to other websites, and it is your own risk/responsibility to familiar yourself with the privacy policies about those sites".
E.g. quoted one paragraph of this kind:
We are affiliated with ot... |
I have a local proxy on my PC. (localhost:8888)
But unfortunately there are many programs which are not able to go through this proxy.
So how can I force all my programs to go through my local proxy (or tunnel my connections to my local proxy)?
So all the programs on my PC could go through this proxy before reaching th... |
As a follow-up to Cipher for Product Registration, are there secure yet usable cryptographic standards/protocols for protecting software and data used by software? I'm interested in hardware and software techniques for:
Software registration
Anti-reverse engineering
Piracy prevention
Intellectual property protection (... |
I'd like to know what it means to say "the cryptosystem C uses keys with a length of x bits". I do not understand what the bits length means... doesn't it depend on the encoding? The same word encodes to bit strings of different lengths in utf8, iso and unicode, so is there a general encoding used to define the length ... |
Could anyone provide some insight on performing an internal vulnerability assessment regarding Novell NetWare as the backend with client workstations and servers running various versions of Windows?
Essentially, I'm looking for tools or techniques on how to run a thorough scan by joining my machine to the Novell "tree"... |
I work for an embedded system manufacturer and on our older generation systems, which are powered by Windows Embedded, a number of customers have been experiencing virus infections. Due to the real time nature of these systems, anti-virus solutions are not particularly practical.
These are primarily caused by their em... |
Today I sniffed some unencrypted wlan traffic during class and I found quite a few passwords by a simple search for "pass" and "user" in wireshark. Turns out about half the sites we use for school don't encrypt their data in any way - they use GET-requests like ?username=user123&password=passwd123 on login. I started t... |
I got an external Debian server. The problem is that my university campus doesn't allow connections to go outside when the port is different than TCP port 22, 80, 443, or UDP port 123. I tested them manually. On my Debian server I would like to listen to all my UDP and TCP ports so I can clearly figure out which TCP an... |
I came across this plug-in that started some alarm bells ringing. The add-on would help submit a website to web directories. The first 100 submissions are free, then you need to pay $20 via pay-pal (no other option) to get additional submissions.
This gave me the creeps! First install this plug-in and then do a payment... |
IA technical specification I'm following requires me to send:
The Digital Signature must be in the form of a null content Digitally
Signed message (i.e. a PKCS#7 object containing the signature but not
the data that was signed).
To my understanding, this means a detached PKCS#7 signature, is that correct?
I could... |
I was wondering if different hashes (e.g. md5(sha1($data)) ) are ever used together for data security and if there was any reason for it (either positive or negative answer).
|
I've got a user on my work network who brings her personal laptop (macbook) in for work. They've been having some horrendously slow network issues on everything past that hub, so I did some packet sniffing and log checking on my firewall.
I'm showing hundreds (probably moving towards thousands now) of packets sent fro... |
Why do we encrypt passwords? Is it to protect the password from eavesdropping? to protect the password after saving it in database? both? or for some other reason?
|
For S/MIME, I now know I can verify PKCS#7 detached signatures with:
openssl smime -verify -in detachedsign.pem -content content.txt
But what about non-MIME messages?
So if I sign the message Hello, World! with openssl smime -sign -text.... it will actually be signing
Content-Type: plain/text
Hello, World!
Is it pos... |
As a IS consulting firm, we would like to have our very own password cracking machine.
Great.
Now, after some sketching and brain storming we concluded that GPU is the best way to go (contrary to CPU or rainbow tables).
And the questions that we found hard to tackle was what is the best choice - can we buy just enough ... |
The EFF recommends using HTTPS everywhere on your site, and I'm sure this site would agree. When I asked a question about using Django to implement HTTPS on my login page, that was certainly the response I got :)
So I'm trying to do just that. I have a Django/nginx setup that I'm trying to configure for HTTPS-only - it... |
Since we all know files are recoverable with programs after being deleted from the recycling bin, everyone is told to do secure wipes by putting random data over the files you're deleting on the disk itself. From what I understand with Hard Drives (and CDs, and Floppies, etc), the data is written to either be reflectiv... |
The Command Pattern is widely used to create a robust, salable applications. However I see guidance in this MSDN article that could allow a caller to invoke a late-bound command... enabling the caller to call any assembly, class, and method available to the running process:
Figure 7
[Serializable()]
public class LateB... |
I've seen some implementations of HTTPS SSL and, as a visitor, forced to rely to a lot of those. What would a secure implementation look like and where can one expect problems? I expect the installer to understand what should be done by implementing the SSL itself.
The question come of the fact that some https sites s... |
UPDATE: The server was rooted, php.ini was replaced that cause the injection to appear. Still haven't figured out which directive is injecting the javascript.
I'm troubleshooting a hacked website where a javascript is injected in every PHP file and only PHP. The injection only show up in IE also. I have experience with... |
Is there a website, application, or script that will allow you to give an input/output for a hash function, run these against known functions, and return any matches?
Here's one attempt to list the functions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hash_functions
|
I want to know if my method of encryption can ensure the security of my data if my database was hacked as well as the authenticity of the data I am decrypting. I am using GnuPG's implementation of the OpenPGP encryption standard.
I have a web application that is situated on 'Server A' where users can submit information... |
Reviewing some logs recently, and came across a strange failure in our Windows 2008 DC.
An account failed to log on.
Subject:
Security ID: NULL SID
Account Name: -
Account Domain: -
Logon ID: 0x0
Logon Type: 3
Account For ... |
We're facing an audit and we are sorely lacking in documentation regarding information security policies. I've done some Googling and have been surprised by the difficulty of finding a good "template" or base document for different aspects of compliance as they would be defined by common audits such as ISO 27002 or SAS... |
How can we design a market for information disclosure where individual security researchers may benefit economically in an ethical way?
Assume a market where the participants are governments, researchers (black and white), educational institutions, corporations, and non-profit non-governmental organizations.
What reg... |
I'm researching models on building security into the SDLC and so far have come across:
BSIMM
Microsoft SDL
Open SAMM
Are there any other documents and resources to look into? Specific tools that incorporate the principals of these models to help dev teams build secure software?
Also any resources that might be spec... |
This discussion came after showing a friend this Security.SE post regarding DNS attacks, and after reading about a Cable Modem MITM attack.
Given the current options available to consumers, what medium (ISDN, Cable Modem, DSL) is inherently more secure than the others?
|
I would like to know if it is safe for the host system of a virtual machine (VM - VirtualBox OSE in my case) to execute malware.
Can a virus break out and read or write data from the host system? Can it establish an Internet connection if I disable it in my VM?
Is a VM a safe environment to try to find out what a viru... |
I came across this article and got a basic understanding hash, salt and brute force attack.
My question is in the article, the author emphasises how hard it is to reverse the hash/salted password to the original one. But if the intruder has write access to the database, he can
create a new account with pwd "12345678"... |
What I like about about the boot-able CD concept, is it can connect to the Internet and get updates, however I'm not clear how effective they are at really finding things that are heuristic? How do heuristic scans even work, if an executable isn't actually running?
|
I'm investigating a vulnerability in an application that echoes a user-supplied filename without sanitizing the filename.
E.g. a file named test-<script>alert("evil");.txt will result in that text echoed into the XHTML. (In case it matters, this particular document is served as text/html and the doctype is xhtml1-trans... |
How can you remove your presence from the Internet?
For example from social networks, from email servers, from forums etc. Problem is how records of you are identified on the internet?
We have well known services such as:
Facebook
Twitter
Youtube
MySpace
Stackexchange
Warez forums
If know I have account on a particul... |
Most modern browsers support "private browsing mode" (also known in Chrome as "Incognito mode"), where the browser does not save any information to disk about your browsing while in this mode.
In modern browsers, can a web site detect whether a user who is visiting the web site has private browsing mode enabled or not?... |
I've looked at the questions regarding certifications on this site and they are essentially asking what to go for.
I hope that my question is distinct enough that is is not considered a dupe.
I travel a lot and frequently, so am looking for a certification that is accepted in many countries. The CISSP would serve this ... |
What are approaches to forming solid relationships with security researchers?
For example, is publishing a public PGP key on the "contact us" page of a company's website for high levels of risk related to security standard practice?
|
If application needs opened port X UDP, or X TCP combination. Is there any potential risk by opening both UDP/TCP as I usually am not sure which one the application uses?
|
Are you getting this message on chat?
LAST WARNING : Your account is reported to have violated the policies that are considered annoying or insulting Facebook users. Until we system will disable your account within 24 hours if you do not do the reconfirmation.
If you still want to use Facebook, Please confirm your acc... |
I receive a number of notifications from ESET Smart Security about Port Scanning attack. But I'm behind a router. But as far as I know, computers behind a router is not accessible from others (Please correct me if I'm wrong). Then how can ESET report about such an attack.
|
What can a person with stolen credit card details do?
Buy porn?
Buy tons of server resources to perform an attack?
What else? I'm sure that if he buys books, shoes and bicycles or transfer funds to his account they'll eventually find and arrest him.
|
I have a question regarding Swedish gov eID (but I guess it is a pki/smart card general question); Why is there two certificates/keys on the card?
Background:
In Sweden you can have a "citizen electronic ID" on smart card (issuer Telia). The smart card have two certificates with different keys and different key-usages.... |
Truecrypt contains a feature that let's you create a hidden volume. It's said that it can't be proven if a hidden volume exists. However, is it possible to infer from the state of the data on the disk that a hidden volume is very likely to exist? Firstly, if the non-hidden partition didn't take up the whole disk, th... |
What algorithms are best being attacked by a GPU powered password cracker?
For example, I heard that md5crypt that is being used in unix shadow file, is not the best choice for GPU cracking because it is practically md5 being utilized 1,000 times over the original password to get a hash...
|
What can hackers do with personal information that includes this: First name, last name, snail mail address, mobile phone number and email address?
|
By default, Solaris uses Traditional DES to encrypt password hashes in the shadow file.
Is there a way to harden the security by changing this default behaviour and make it to be hashed using a stronger algorithm?
|
Does it make any sense at all to salt a hash which might be available publicly?
It doesn't really make sense to me, but does anyone actually do that?
UPDATE - Some more info:
An acquaintance of mine has a common salted-hash function which he uses throughout his code. So I was wondering if it made any sense at-all, to d... |
How many FLOPs does one AES-256 operation take in ECB mode? How many AES-256 operations in ECB mode can a maximized Cray XE6 perform per second?
Cray states that it can be scaled to over 1 million processor cores, but the brochure doesn't state how many, exactly. With 1 million processor cores, working at cabinet peak ... |
I host all my websites from a single VPN, and am about to sell some limited space of my Linode to a friend to host their new blog. It'll simply be another entry in Apache, and then a dedicated folder to that website which will contain all the Wordpress files.
My issue is with security. If someone manages to compromise ... |
I writing a security layer for my app and I would like your input on updating users' email addresses (also used for the login).
I'm interested to hear from anyone who has written an application with similar requirements. How would you go about it? Here are some ways I thought of, but I suspect I'm missing something:
Ap... |
We have users in our organization who own iPads and we'd like to connect them to the network; however, if the users download and store sensitive data on the devices, that can pose a security issue. Is it possible to prevent users from storing any data on the device? In other words, they can connect to the network and r... |
I was trying my hands at DOM-based XSS. I came across a scenario where a user-controlled string from the URL is included in JavaScript as below.
var userControlled=substring of URL;
window.location="/abc/xyz?param="+userControlled;
The URL is something like http://mydomain/param1=qwerty, where I can enter any value fo... |
I know how a form tag is prone to CSRF which does not use any token (or any other challenge-response mechanism) but I was wondering how an iFrame can be used to cause XSRF attack and what would be the mitigation techniques?
Following is the code example:
document.write('<IFRAME SRC="https://somedomain/abcde;src=;type=;... |
Do anyone know of a script that uses no third party executables (preferably a batch file) that can be used to audit windows machine state security wise? (including best practices features - gpo, services, shares, updates etc.) so one can run the script on a server/workstation and analyze the output elsewhere?
|
I have read about the Kaminsky bug, but I don't fully understand how easy it is to use this vulnerability for an attacker.
Are DNS-software updated now so it's not that easy to use this vulnerability for an attacker? or does a secure site need to use DNSSEC to be secure?
E.g. think of an Internet bank. Does it need to ... |
Suppose that we do not generate initialization vectors randomly (using AES in CBC mode). Instead it is initially all zeroes and we increment it by 1 each time a message is encrypted. How can this cause a problem? Could explain with an example?
|
Sticky bit are mentioned in every UNIX security book, but I couldn't find anyone that describes the exploitation of Sticky Bit set on a file.
Can you?
|
Exception and error information can be used by a malicious user to map out the API of an web application, so it is routine to see security checklists to advise returning only a "Please contact your administrator" type of message.
On the otherhand, we are encouraged to use HTTP standards, which recommend errors such as
... |
I have IPs attempting to probe our web server trying to find open URLs. The two known methods are attempting to find specific nodes on our drupal site, or attempting the ../../../../ trick to try and access the root of the web server.
Both tricks don't do anything against us, but LogWatch sometimes returns that the pro... |
I'm asking this question here since I think people on this forum
probably have the best knowledge of firewalls and routers.
Say I'm designing a multi-player game and I want to push data to the client spontaneously. Since it's probably more efficient and puts less load on the server
than clients constantly polling the s... |
Hello IT Security!
I have Apache2 vhost with HTTPS listening on port 443, ie. https:// securesecret.com.
I have another vhosts with HTTP listening on port 80, ie. http:// one.com, http:// two.com.
When I visited website http:// securesecret.com:443 I got this message:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"... |
Another newbie question but I just don't get the purpose of certificates signed and trusted by CA. We already have public/private keys, hash functions to sign/encrypt messages so why do we need certificates?
|
Many merchants offer to save credit card info in an encrypted form for faster checkouts from their store in the future. How is it that merchants can store this information in an encrypted format and still be able to decrypt it to plain text later?
|
Is it correct to use form field(hidden) for storing Session Token instead of using Cookies? What is the security risk associated with it?
|
Consider a domain that had been in active use for some time but is no longer desired — perhaps the company is out of business or a name change took place years ago, or whatever. The domain registration will be allowed to lapse.
I'm guessing there are potential vectors of attack by "dumpster diving" a second-hand expire... |
I need to store encrypted information in a MySQL table. I would like to use the AES algorithm but I don't know if 4096 bit encryption is supported and if it is a good length to encrypt data like: credit card, email etc.
|
I have a heterogeneous system (both MS and *nix) that communicates with CIFS/SMB. How can I ensure proper data encryption at the application layer?
|
I have some Java source code on my laptop that would cause me a great deal of suffering if I were to lose possession of the laptop and the source code were to fall into someone else's hands.
Is there a way to encrypt the source code on my hard drive but still be able to edit it in Eclipse?
The other problem is I have b... |
I have been hearing a lot of good things about EventStore 3 and am looking to upgrade my server event forwarding systems for PCI compliance next year and was wondering if anyone had looked at the possible uses of EventStore in a PCI logging scenario.
Any feed back would be greatly appreciated.
(repost from https://stac... |
I am Developing a program in several platforms and languages, But I don't want anybody to discover the origin computer where the program was developed, is there any way that someone can discover that ?
|
We need to determine a password policy for our organization.
All users, in general, will have 90 days until they will have to change their passwords, complexity required and passwords need to be at least 8 characters long.
When you were determining your password policy, have you differentiated between computer-team in ... |
Both Mandatory Access Controls and Capabilities allow for fine grained privileges to be assigned to applications irrespective or in place of privileges inherited by the running user.
Is there any practical difference between these two approaches? I understand for example that a capability based operating system can rel... |
Host Intrusion Prevention Software can restrict applications from taking certain actions regardless if they have the privileged to do so as assigned by the operating system.
Given that with the use of HIPS applications can be significantly restricted and a principle of least privilege enforced (somewhat), can HIPS soft... |
I'm a noob and just set-up a linode account to play around with linux development.
I started nginx and made a simple homepage for my domain (giuliopizzini.com).
Today I checked the nginx logs and there is some really weird traffic going on, as if my web server was hit for random websites. I'm attaching Nov 23 logs as ... |
I'm curious what cloud storage systems offer an append only mode, especially open source ones. In particular, would any cloud storage systems support the following workflow :
Anonymous users may upload messages/files into identifiable locations which we'll call buckets.
All users should have read access to all messag... |
How should I configure a VPN in order to access blocked websites and to hide my identity?
Usually I use SSH tunneling to protect my privacy and to escape censorship. I know nothing else about VPNs but I would like to know how to use it correctly.
(I'm on Mac OS X)
|
Timing attacks can have a devastating impact in scenarios where the secret is involved, often in cases where byte-wise array comparison is used.
Now there are those that advertise using constant time array comparison in any situation where data is compared that was derived from a secret, not only when comparing the se... |
I am looking for a protocol where there needs to be mutual authentication between client and server. For example server should connect to a particular client only. That is client should authenticate to client and client should communicate to server. Also after this all the communication should be encrypted.
Whether SSL... |
How can I find statistical data about the performance of various encryption systems, such as RSA, DSA, ECC etc?
|
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