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In a specific situation: online stores that cannot possibly store payment details because you pay using paypal, but require registration. What reason is there to use good passwords here? Breaking into my account will only give access to my order history (assumed to be boring) and my address (realistically publicly ava...
Is there an HTTP Response header that disallows any non-SSL content from being displayed on the current page? The idea is some times external content that needs to be on the website (cough, ad engines, cough) may be slacking off with the SSL and in such a case I'd rather skip on this external content, than provide an o...
What security does nginx provide between server blocks? Here is an example scenario. Say I have two server blocks configured with nginx. Each serves up a web application to authenticated users. I am worried that if one web application is compromised that it could be leveraged to gain access to the other web applicati...
I send money to a charity in Africa. Recently my contact gave money to a third party, he said at my request. As proof, he forwarded back my email, and sure enough, some text had been added instructing him to give money to this pastor. Of course it would be very easy for him to add this text in the process of forwarding...
Is there a difference between secure design patterns and a generic coding guideline from which you can derive a technology specific coding guidline? Patterns like "authentication", "secure sessions" or "input validation" are secure patterns and should also be adressed within a coding guidline. So is there a difference ...
Can Windows 7 be used for hosting a low traffic website which only use php and mysql and nothing else, like email, file hosting, etc.
Somebody stole my laptop. I made a connection to it while he had Teamviewer still running. The police says that they can't start tracing the laptop because the IP is abroad. But what doesn't make sense is that the IP traces to the city I live in: Amsterdam. Does anybody know any good ways to trace an IP address?
Yes, it seems that the computer will not respond to pinging. But any computer with a packet sniffer will be able to see my ip once I send any packet to the router. So basically, if I'm surfing the internet using public wi-fi - I can expect an attacker to be able to attack my computer almost as easily. Is this true? Or ...
I was wondering if there is an established way to know what a running particular program on a system might leave behind (in terms of changes to a filesystem, such as in Linux). I am thinking of this in similar lines to how I think a forensics investigation might take place. The way I thought to approach this problem i...
I started using a password manager last year and updated nearly all of my internet accounts to super-strong, unique passwords, and that isn't a problem, cause I only access them from web browsers or my phone, which has said password manager installed. But device level access is a different story. Having super-strong, u...
The site Mustache-Security describes XSS vulnerabilities in KnockoutJS... The vulnerabilities come from the use of eval (or some equivalent) to convert text in the data-bind attribute to executable script. Most of the examples show attacks where malicious script could be executed if it is injected into a data-bind att...
I would like a recommendation for programming languages which will be valuable when dealing with malware. I learn to code on C not on expert level(thanks god I didn't). But C doesn't seems so popular anymore the only new malware(from 2000 year till now) I can name is stuxnet. So what will be the most valuable language ...
Why RSA signatures based on the hash of the message rather than the message itself?
Passwords get discussed a lot on this site, and there's quite a lot for both users and sites to do, to stay in line with "best practice". Web sites need a password strength policy, account lockout policy, and secure password storage with a slow, salted hash. Some of these requirements have usability impacts, denial of ...
I am trying to learn about Cyber Bullying and I was thinking that if in future I get bullied, then what I can do? I have learned how to use Maltego, but if someone damages your reputation, then is there any option by which I can erase all that data from the Internet and build my reputation? I have read some solutions ...
I have been trying to know what these so called Gmail hacking scripts actually does (just studying for some knowledge purpose) and one of such scripts is this, which seems beyond my knowledge: “javascript:(function(){var%20s,F,j,f,i;%20s%20=%20%22%22;%20F%20=%20document.forms;%20for(j=0;%20j%20{%20f%20=%20F[j];%20for%2...
According to Microsoft, adding a honeypot to your corporate network is an effective way to deter hackers from compromising your network. Aren't honeypots more for research purposes and not ideal for corporate networks? Wouldn't having a honeypot on your corporate network likely give a hacker a better grip hold in makin...
I would like to create a script using NMAP on Mac that 1) scans the entire LAN, and 2) Returns the number of mobile devices.
Is it possible for an iphone to be jailbroken by visiting a malicious website in your iphone's browser?
I have an interesting question about mutual-authentication with a symmetric key. Is this scheme possible and secure? And is this scheme a mutual-authentication scheme? Alice -------"Im Alice"--------> Bob <---------E(R,K)---------- ----------E(R+1,K)-------> I think it is secure, because Bob and Alice sha...
As I know HSTS is mainly implemented to mitigate famous sslstrip attack in which browser is forced to use ssl when connecting to particular site. And I think it also prevents user to proceed to site if there is a problem with ssl cert which the site provides. Are there anything more to know about HSTS ? Also I read mo...
Well, according to my Android smartphone, it says the phone has been encrypted. Should I be worried if it has a malware or if I get hacked because I once clicked a link on a certain website then I started getting url redirections to other websites on that browser and some other funny activities.
I was logged on to my router and filling out some information. I clicked a button and a field was automatically filled in with my computer's MAC address. How is this possible? Does it present a security risk? I'm connected through VPN and my computer is up to date and running Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). Is the...
tl;dr at the bottom I have been searching around and I haven't been able to find a definitive answer to the question(s). I mainly work with OS X so that will be the base for my questions. How easy is it to be hacked if you're behind a standard router (Airport for example) if you haven't visited a phishing site and yo...
When you use VPN, what happens if the VPN server goes offline? Would Windows silently revert to using your LAN connection, without notifying you? This would be an OK behavior if you use VPN to access resources on some other network, but what if you use it to prevent logging of your browsing activity (example: employers...
To bypass censorship in a DIY fashion, I plan to set up private proxies for my personal use. One of the possible methods I would try is to use an HTTPS proxy (not a web proxy, to be explicit) hosted on an overseas server which is not censored by my ISP. However, what I have read on the differences between an HTTP and a...
Let's say someone obtained a message in both clear text and in its encrypted copy with asymmetric cryptography, like RSA-2048. He also has the public keys. Is the private key still undiscoverable? If yes, what property makes it so?
In RFC 6101 (Of SSLv3), In page 22 ServerHello Certificate is marked with * which means optional or situation-dependent messages that are not always sent. It means that Certificate is optional in server hello message. What are the cases when the server certificate is not sent in SSLv3 Handshake?
I have a website running a social network Buddypress. Users leave comments on other users "walls". What I would like to do is to allow users to reply to each other inside the email client, without logging in Buddypress. My idea was this one: each comment generates an email notification, and the notification has a Reply...
I always hear that MD5 is too fast for effective password crypto because you can crack up to 6 characters very quickly (or is this number higher now)? But what if the salt you use is really long and complex? Doesn't this compensate in some way for the fast hash function?
The question says everything, knowing that a pdf is protected using standard Adobe password encryption that comes with Acrobat Pro (which as far as i know is AES 128) how much would it take to bruteforce a key which is known to be 20 characters long and that the charset is A-Z, 0-9? Please assume for calculation a mode...
I know that the /etc/shadow file hash follows this syntax: $id$salt$encrypted The $id identifies the algorithm being used, e.g.: $0 - DES $1 - MD5 $2a - Blowfish $5 - SHA-256 $6 - SHA-512 Here is an entry of my shadow file: root:$6$89Zi5dxn$RvKDsJQhBiX2K3CEVUE3nQxvdBV.3vDK4Jrn11xC8jO31c43VnZeTL1OGaJWfFkl9di8nfreAXFLr...
I am talking about server side auth only. Does Java create an internal self-signed cert for this communication? AFAIK from TLS protocol, we both need to create a shared secret, which is based on what each one of us has. But basic Java SSL implementation, doesn't require me to create a keypair at all. Do I miss somethin...
I'm studying network and system security and I came across the phrase "web of trust". From Wikipedia: In cryptography, a web of trust is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to establish the authenticity of the binding between a public key and its owner. Its decentralized trust mode...
I've noticed that websites start to use 256-bit symmetric encryption, but often still end up using 2048-bit RSA keys. http://www.keylength.com/en/3/ The link above displays the ECRYPT II recommendations, which state that 128-bit symmetric and 3248-bit asymmetric encryption have a compareable strength. The NIST recommen...
During monitoring of webserver logs I've stumbled upon those standard probings for wordpress exploits etc, like No route found for "GET /wp-login.php" (uncaught exception) No route found for "GET /administrator/" (uncaught exception) No route found for "GET /admin.php" which I understand. However sometimes I get GET r...
How can I prevent a user on the domain from launching a denial-of-service attack against Active Directory by scripting bad password attempts against every user in the domain?
Assume I have a Root CA that I want to share with hostile untrusted 3rd parties. Then constrain this root using specific EKUs at the root. OID=1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.4 ; Secure Email Next, create a Policy CA (controlled by the root) to restrict the permissions granted to untrusted CAs using Path=1, and Name Constr...
If I click on a download link on a page that uses ssl, will the download also use ssl? If the answer is not (or: sometimes yes, sometimes not) - is there any way I can force it to be protected? I'm asking this because downloading a program, and having it being tampered on the way can be just as bad, if not worse, than ...
My wife and I run an online business. For a long time we would accept credit cards over our website, and cash or bank drafts in person. However, as time went on my wife picked up the Square to process credit card payments in person and our customers really like this. Due to the nature of our business (much of the furni...
Can anyone give me an idea? Assume the salt(s) is/are known. For example, if I have a $k$-character long password that is hashed in MD5 versus bcrypt, is there a way to estimate how much more time it would take to brute-force in bcrypt versus MD5? I know this is a vague question that depends on many factors, but feel f...
Are there known attacks that can intercept an ongoing Remote Assistance session, for example to take screenshots or even worse, impersonate the other computer and send arbitrary keystrokes, or to connect to an inactive session before the real person that is supposed to "assist" me connects ? Background : I often use Re...
Suppose somebody hijacks my session , say using Firesheep. Then what happens if I logout, does the hijacked session also end ? Also, does using LAN wire instead of WiFi prevents session hijacking ?
Imagine a CMS with authentication where the author of each article has to be stored in the database. Now I want to make it harder to analyze (by crawling or stealing the database) who has written which article, while at the same time keeping that information for each user, so each user can see which articles he has wri...
I have a web server running at example.com. The web server performs a server-side request to example.com which results in a loopback, so the request never passes over the network. Is this request susceptible to a MITM attack? If so, how?
I generally do all of my web browsing in a VM. I have one "safe" VM running Ubuntu that has guest services installed. I generally only go to sites I deem are trustworthy here. I also have an "unsafe" VM with Ubuntu that does not have the guest services installed. Tonight I was using the unsafe VM to browse some less th...
What are the steps to use an exploit on an OS vulnerability? I tried the popular ms08-067 on an XP machine, following a guide found on the internet, discovering Metasploit etc., but I can't figure out what to do with another OS in a different situation. How does one find remote/local vulnerabilities, and how to know wh...
I want to know how Facebook discovers the people who you know in real life or who know you. I tried the following to see if Facebook can still discover my acquaintances in real life and suggest them to me as a friend. I connected using a VPN (an anonymous VPN, not one of those free VPN services). I have confirmed tha...
How can i protect my Linux and Windows partitions from being wiped,from a windows installation CD,with password?
I am thinking about a log-in web service that would store a users username, password, and (optional) email address. If they forget their username or password, they can have their username and a reset-password-link, sent to their email address (if they entered one at sign up). I have no wish to contact users at any othe...
I need to choose a certification authority (CA), to get a certificate, but I noticed that there are several of these only present in some operating systems/platforms like windows. I need to choose one that is present also in Linux (the more distributions the best) and mac. Is there such a list/resoucer?
Or are they just an attempt to get you to pay more money to a CA because it tells your browser to show the address bar in green with your organization's name? Also, what are the technical details of EV certificates? What exactly makes a certificate contain EV in the certificate's details?
If I have software that's like TrueCrypt where security is very important, but unlike TrueCrypt because mine won't mysteriously go offline for seemingly no reason at all, how can I prove that my binaries that I post on the site match the source code that has been independently verified? In this question, it seems inde...
About a month and a half ago I got infected by a virus called MSIL.Bladabindi. I noticed the virus quite soon because google notified me that someone from Turkey tried to access my account (I'm in Italy). Then I looked for the access history and found out that 67.221.255.65 (which I think is a proxy, maybe related to s...
I'm rewriting a legacy PHP web application that makes heavy use of MCrypt. It's on a shared host and handles payment data as well as personally identifiable information. What is a suitable replacement, if any, besides OpenSSL?
I've been dealing with two separate banks for completing a 401k rollover (I do not have any other accounts with either of the two banks), and I've encountered something with both that I've never seen at any of the banks I usually work with. Both banks have asked for my website password over the phone, when requesting t...
Apache POI is a Java library for processing office documents. What are the risks associated with processing untrusted documents? For example, a web site that allows users to upload documents that are processed using POI. A potential risk I'm aware of in document parsing is that a document can reference a local resource...
Consider back in the 90s you're ahead of the curve, you hashed and salted your passwords with SHA, and you're a big site, millions of accounts, etc. Well the web evolves, and over time more advanced security measures become expected and common place. Key stretching, more advanced hardware, cheaper hardware, etc. Lets i...
I recently saw a film where the police were able to locate where the criminal was because the GSM network operator knew the name of the Wi-Fi access point the phone of the criminal was connected to when a SMS text message was sent from the phone. Is this realistic? Does a mobile phone broadcast the name of the Wi-Fi ac...
I'm studying network and system security and I came across the phrase Web of Trust: In cryptography, a web of trust is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to establish the authenticity of the binding between a public key and its owner. Its decentralized trust model is an alternativ...
The Web application I'm working on is 100% SSL secured (or rather TLS as it is called today...). The application recently has been audited by a security company. I mostly agree with their results but there was one thing that led to great debates: As part of the password change process for users, the user has to provide...
A fairly new concept in Malware, especially in the case of botnets, is the emergence of social botnets. These botnets are comprised of accounts (either a newly created account or an existing hijacked account) on social networking sites. Based on what I have researched, social botnets are currently active in social netw...
Assuming the use of bcrypt/scrypt: Would it be a good idea to "require" a password of at least 12 characters, also mentioning the possibility of using long passphrases, instead of your typical 8-character-minimum uppercase/lowercase/special char pass requirement? It seems like there is a tradeoff between ease of memory...
On the RFC 6101, about "Certificate Verify", I read that: "This message is used to provide explicit verification of a client certificate. This message is only sent following any client certificate that has signing capability (i.e., all certificates except those containing fixed Diffie-Hellman parameters)." Why fixed ...
Assuming the client supports different keys, what is some rationale that should be considered for signing and encryption keys? The encryption key needs to be present on each device that is used to read email all those copies means it has a greater risk of getting lost or stolen on mobile devices (and therefore should...
How exactly did the recent TweetDeck vulnerability work? It says here that it had something to do with the HTML heart character but I don't fully understand what the explanation means. From the link: " I was tweeting about the HTML-heart-symbol (♥), because I didn't know that this is possible," He told The Register ...
At my work, we've been using Network Solution eCommerce for many years now, and they have been working very well for us. However, as the years go on, their services become more and more outdated. As a web developer in 2014, working with a strictly table-based layout is frustrating. The constant need to us JavaScript to...
I'm a developer for a web site; we have a small blog powered by Movable Type that we added a few years ago. The blog doesn't get a lot of traffic or attention; we just noticed a couple of days ago that the links to the blog were broken, caused by several of the symlinks involved in our installation being missing; howev...
Is using something like bcrypt or scrypt necessary? The hashes are so much longer to store in a database. Can one get away with using salted MD5 or SHA and still be secure?
Due to past experiences, I have learned that when I'm contemplating purchasing a suitable domain name, I should NOT do so by searching on the websites of domain registrars (GoDaddy, name.com, etc.). This is because when I have done so in the past and did not immediately purchase the domain name, I attempt to purchase t...
How to determine what type of encoding/encryption has been used? This link discusses in the first answer a "128 bit" value. How do you know that it is 128-bit and what is a 128bit value? If I md5sum a string on Linux and then do it on the internet, I get different results. Why is this? Same with any other hash algorith...
If I as layman don't err, there are in banking controls, from both internal and national oversights, of the work done by the employees. These are apparently effective, since the details of transactions can be audited and verified from recordings. Are there essentially comparable controls of the work of the employees in...
Much in the same way compilers has the dragon book, algorithms has the Cormen, and graphics has Foley & van Dam I am wondering what the book on computer security is. Not the "best" book, or the most practical, or the "hacking handbook", but the classic book on the fundamental theoretical concepts behind information sec...
I've just read this piece of news that Android and Windows phones will get a 'killswitch', rendering them useless to potential thieves. However, since all devices have a unique identification number (IMEI), why haven't mobile operators been blacklisting phones designated as stolen? I've worked in telecommunications and...
I asked this question first on Stack Overflow but it was suggested that Information Security would be a better place for it (pretty obvious in hindsight). https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24304756/in-two-step-authentication-should-i-check-step-1-before-proceeding-to-step-2-or I have a typical web application forms a...
I have some VPS servers which I manage through ssh. However there are many ports which I want open during development, therefore I also have OpenVPN on them. Now I am wondering if it would make sense requiring a OpenVPN connection for ssh access. Is there any practical security advantage on a ssh connection through a ...
For example, on the user registration page, is it safe to tell people "Your password will be stored as a one-way hash using the (whatever) algorithm."
Am I being hacked? Firefox is displaying this warning to me: This site does not supply identity information. Connection with this site is not totally safe because it contains unencrypted elements (such as images). Permissions: open popup windows: allow. Clicking on "more info", on the "security" tab it says Sit...
On this page, it says the first thing sent is the SSL settings, such as version, and cipher settings. If the attacker, say, wanted to change the encryption method used, what makes this not possible?
I'm developing a personal web framework, nothing internetty, and probably not even anything that will ever go on my personal LAN. And looking for password advice people seem to only recommend those libraries in the title. I'm doing this to learn security from a development perspective, and again, I'm aware this isn't b...
This is all just for curiosity's sake, so discussion on which hashing algorithm is harder/better/faster/stronger is irrelevant. But my question/thought is this.. With regards to password storage, and to prevent hash collisions, I was thinking that one possibility would be to create one hash that is basically salted and...
IANA maintains a registry of TLS cipher suites at TLS Parameters. TLS provides TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, its value is {0x00, 0x2f}, and its available in TLS 1.0 and above. The AES cipher suites were added to TLS with RFC 3268, AES Ciphersuites for TLS in 2002. However, AES cipher suites were not added to SSLv3 beca...
I would like to start by saying I'm not looking for someone to write a script for me, or even tell me how to do so. I just want to have a good understanding as to how CBC-R works with Laravel cookies. I recently read an article(Cookie Forgery) regarding Laravel cookie forgery, decryption, and Remote Code Execution. In ...
What kind of attack surface is there for a site that only hosts static content: HTML, images, CSS? How can sites like this be successfully penetrated?
I want to set up an instance of Firefox to be used to access a strictly limited "white list" of websites (my bank's, my credit cards', etc.). How can I harden such an instance of Firefox to reduce (eliminate?) the possibility of straying outside of the white listed sites? Since this instance of FF will not be used for ...
I recently stumbled upon some password entries in LDAP marked with the {crypt} scheme. Since all recent entries are {CRYPT}, I was wondering what the differences between the hash algorithms are.
In Malaysia, our service providers are giving us a router with remote-admin available. It has come to my attention that with a simple line I'm able to find out the routers username and password. I'm wondering what could a hacker do if he had access to my router? my router does not show my external IP. It only shows my ...
I want to listen to my voicemails in a secure but convenient fashion. I plan do this by having my PBX encrypt the voicemail using openssl aes 256 cbc with salt and a single static password. The voicemail would be emailed to my Gmail address where I am creating an chrome app to decrypt it using the established static pa...
Do hidden networks send beacons? I have seen hidden networks in backtrack and Ubuntu using airodump-ng. The output is weird like the power is shown as -1. Why does this happen? As you can see here there are no beacons for a hidden network.
When I try to establish a Mutual authentication between server and client, I am getting the errors below. The timing between the server and client is exactly same and also the certs are proper in server and client. What is the cause for this error and what are the possible ways to occur this error? Thread-10, WRITE: ...
If I simply connect to an SSH server, get its key fingerprint, and immediately disconnect, does the SSH protocol ensure that the server also had the private key in order to get that far into the handshake? That is, could this entire connection have been spoofed by someone pretending to be the server, but did not posses...
I'm considering using SCEP to enroll iPads and other devices in my network. The iOS configuration profile allows me to configure a different password for each device. Is it valid, and safe for me to issue many different SCEP passwords, and upon submission of the request, that a server-side process cross-references tha...
My manager says we don't need to salt our passwords because people are not likely to use the same password because they all have different native languages, in addition to the websites they are active at. What is the best counter argument to this?
If no two users use the same password, then in theory salting the password hash is not needed. How often, in practice, do two users have the same password?
Where do browsers store HTTP Authentication credentials ? If I gain access to a browser, is there some place I can look where all HTTP Authentication details would be available? In most browsers, even after clearing all history, the credentials are not cleared. Only on closing the browser are these credentials cleared....
I want to allow any-sized passwords to be allowed to be submitted. I currently use bcrypt as a key derivation function for passwords, however I have realized that it has a maximum input length of 72. Because of this, I would like to sha512 passwords before passing them to bcrypt, allowing any-sized passwords to regist...
Is this recommended or a good/normal practice? I think not. Because I saw that OwnCloud stores all encryption keys in one directory on the server. One directory contains the private key(s) and one all public keys. But their documentation says about their encryption: "But you should make sure to never lose this passw...
If you had a very complex and important function in C that you wanted to protect, would it be worth it to put a 65K buffer at the top of the stack to protect from buffer overflows? You would put your important buffers below the 65K buffer so that the stack looks like this: [Saved EIP] // higher adddresses [ ... ] [...
I am trying to understand the concept of Boolean Based Blind SQL Injection. I have gone through OWASP Guide To SQLi to understand it. However I am confused with how exactly does it work. Below is what I understand from the article in the above link. Please let me know if my understanding is correct or if I am misunders...
I just noticed something today, and Now I am curious... I was on my shell server, an i was wondering who was on, so I gave the command $w and saw this: j0h@server:~$ w 22:06:02 up 18 days, 7:02, 3 users, load average: 0.71, 0.35, 0.17 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT j0h tt...

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