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I started working at a large financial institution several weeks ago as a software engineer and despite every other aspect of this job being great, I am haunted by the constant restrictions that workstation security policy here puts us through. We are not allowed local administrator rights on our Windows 7 workstations which is normal and I agree with. What is more of a concern is that we are only allowed to use software on these workstations that has been approved and added to our Advertised Program list. Being on a greenfield project and working closely with a vendor to get a POC off the ground, this process is too slow and sometimes prevents us from doing our jobs. I know that other teams have run into this issue and I am unsure how they tackled it, but apparently it is a battle that has already been fought and lost by several groups, even for exceptions to be granted. I am preparing a document that seeks to demonstrate how if we were allowed to run VirtualBox on a Windows 7 workstation that we can get all the benefits of local admin rights while not causing any undue security risks on the machine or network. I know they are going to look for the easiest way to dismiss my proposal so I am trying to rebut in my document any security concerns that this group might have. Are there any significant security concerns that are introduced by the introduction of local virtual machines on a restricted workstation? If so, how can such security concerns be mitigated? My apologies if this question is too broad or posted in the wrong place.
I was wondering about the following: If someone tries to get my password with Brute Force, will a password starting with "a" guessed faster than one starting with "z" ? In this case assume the password is not salted, just hashed. Does a Brute Force attack start with "a", try and then go on or compute all hashes first and then see if any matches?
I'm trying to build my own PHP based REST Api for my Android app and I'm a litte bit confused by all the different user authentication stuff one can find on the internet. So I want to present my security considerations and would be glad about some feedback. First, I want to make clear that I don't want to build a public API where 3rd parties could register for an API key, instead I want only be able for users of my app to do all the register/login/sending requests stuff. So my plans are as follows: When a user wants to register, my app first exchanges generated keys with my server using the Diffie-Hellman method. For this, my server and my app store information about the same prime number and the same base (often called p and g). My app then generates a secret and creates a public key out of p, g and the secret. The public key is send to the server, which answers with sending back a user id in the Java UUID format and the server's public key based on the server's secret, p, and g. At the end, both parties are able to generate a common secret. The whole transaction is done using TSL/SSL and can be seen here. Instead of the whole numeric, pretty long secret, a SHA-512 hash is stored in the database and the app. After exchanging the key, I can now send the user's account information (userid, password and other stuff) to the server using TSL/SSL. The app's secret is used for HMAC making sure that the app instance (the user) is authorized to send me this stuff. I can check this as I stored the SHA-512 hashed secret and the userid in the database. The password needs to be transmitted to be able to re-login if the user logged out or for wants to change his password. The password is hashed follwowing these instructions. After logging in, a random login token is returned to the user representing his logged in state. This login token is also stored in the database. Instead of sending the user's credentials with every request, the login token is used as login credentials and the secret generated in the first step is used to do HMAC. So if I get a request, I can first check if the user is authorized to sent me a request by doing the message authentication with HMAC and then I can check if the user is logged in comparing the transmitted login token with the one stored in the database. This transaction may also be done with TSL/SSL but doesn't need to. Is this a valid concept or does it lack of some crucial points, contains misunderstandings or is there any other kind of problem with it?
I am looking for a program that can lock or encrypt folder, but in case if my laptop is stolen and C drive is reformatted and reinstalled, and i have locked folders on D drive, these folders to remain unaccessible. Also, these folders to remain unaccessible if someone try to use live linux distros from USB drive. Is there such a program?
Can JavaScript malware be as dangerous and damaging as more traditional viruses that are programmed mostly in native APIs?
While reading through the newes OWASP ASVS standard (still beta) I have found a requirement V2.6 saying Verify that the session id is changed or cleared on logout. I do not see a clear point why it is necessary to have the session id changed or cleared after logout. It is necessary to have the session invalidated so after logging out no protected resources can be accessed. But why should I want to change the session id? Defense in depth? EDIT: Another answer to the question.
Today I read an article on a French newspaper that our government listens to us when we use our cell phones. I wonder what type of programming methodoly or technology that allows this espionnage ?
Imagine a scenario where there is a DDOS attack against a target - clients would be unable to connect to the target, but I would like to know if the target could initiate a connection to the outside, and then have the response get through due to it being of a higher priority (since it was a requested connection vs an anonymous request)? edit: for this scenario assume that the (single) pipe is filled, while the server/firewall is dealing with the flood just fine alternatively, if there is an existing connection, say a site-to-site VPN tunnel, would it be impacted? (again, assuming only the pipe is filled, while the equipment can handle it)
Can a Linux environment be PCI compliant if the swap partition/file is not encrypted and PANs are loaded into RAM by an application?
I generate passwords for everything that requires security using the following method: ksoviero@ksoviero-Latitude-E7440:~$ head -c 16 /dev/urandom \| base64 gorv/cp+lSiwiEfKck2dVg== 256^16 combinations is more than enough security (for me at least), and would take 2e21 years for even the most powerful computer to brute force (at 5 billion attempts per second, which is impossible). However, notice the last two characters? Those are always there due to the format base64 takes and the fact that I'm using 16 bytes. Is there a reason to include or not include the two '=' symbols? The argument to include them would be that they add additional symbols and length to the password. However, if you assume that the attacker knows that I generate passwords using this method (and for security, you have to assume that they know everything sans that actual password), then the two '=' symbols are already known, and therefore add no additional security. However, can they hurt?
I'm new to concept of TOTP, but as I understand, 16-character base32-encoded shared secret is stored in the client application(for example Authy, FreeOTP)? This means that if I remove the application, the key is lost and I can no longer generate my one-time passwords?
As you can start a PC through its 'WAKE ON LAN' feature on private networks, can you trace someone's online status through their MAC address over the internet ?
Please Note: I am not going to name the websites which have these horrible standards for their clients and users. I have had to change my passwords for my routine update just recently in the last few months, several of my major services that I use forces weaker password standards. These weaker standards, which all of my passwords has to have, is special symbols (!@#$%^&*) and other special requirements. A few of the major issues which came up with my password using their standards of a password is as following: Must not start with a number Must not have a special character Must be a max of 8 to 12 characters long (depending on the service) Why would they promote weaker passwords with these requirements? I thought that passwords were suppose to (currently) be as long as we want, have special characters, and who cares if it starts with a number, etc, etc, etc. Update 1 I may have forgotten details of what is going on, but I can provide some more information on the issues that I am seeing seeing here. One of these services is my banking company and the other is my cellphone service provider. I am stuck with these two services given where I live. These services are widely used, so they should be able to afford high-quality security.
I'm trying to understand how SSL/TLS certificates work, but I'm missing something. I have obtained my current understanding from this website: http://www.moserware.com/2009/06/first-few-milliseconds-of-https.html. I've also seen this post: How do the processes for digital certificates, signatures and ssl work? After reviewing both links for the nth time, the real mystery for me surrounds how the client verifies the server's certificate. Here's my understanding of the steps: 1. Certificate Authority (CA) gives an encrypted root certificate to a server. 2.a. Server gives client a locally encrypted certificate and a public key. 2.b. Server gives client a root certificate which is decrypted with the public key already on the client's computer. 3. Client uses public keys to decrypt certificates. 4. Certificates contains information that satisfies client of servers authenticity. I'm probably missing some critical information at each step, and probably also missing steps here. Assume I am the client. Here are my questions: Q0. How do I (the client) know that I should use the given public key to decrypt the certificate? In other words, if an imposter can obtain a decrypted certificate (which--can't anyone who visits the server get these?); can the imposter encrypt the certificate with his own private key, and give me a new public key? In this case, I think I should be able to decrypt the certificate. The clear text check may simply not work. But, can the imposter edit the clear-text to make my browser happy? Q1. What if an imposter simply forwarded me the encrypted certificate? I would decrypt it with a real public key. There's probably something in my step 4 that I'm missing. In this case, again the clear-text certificate must have some info that reveals it is bad. What is this info? Q2. Is there clear text information in the decrypted certificate validates that I (the client) am connected to the server I want to connect to? I'm sure the certificate should say something like "from stackoverflow.com". Since this is done by a computer, I assume there are many comparisons done? Q2.a How do I (the client) know that I have the correct certificate? For example, if stackoverflow.com sent me a certificate for Amazon.com, how would the browser detect a problem if (for malicious reasons) the certificate decrypted?
I have a client that needs to be able to secure a data site from hackers. This is the methodology we currently are looking at: server.com (web server) —> HTTP JSON API request —> dataStore.net (data server). He doesn’t want to force people to authenticate just to visit server.com. Authentication would be needed just for accessing dataStore.net. The cross-domain javascript call is possible via CORS, but CORS is not security. I need to prevent: some-person.com —> HTTP JSON API request —> dataStore.net Any ideas on how to accomplish this?
import os, random, struct from Crypto.Cipher import AES def encrypt_file(key, in_filename, out_filename=None, chunksize=641024): """ Encrypts a file using AES (CBC mode) with the given key. key: The encryption key - a string that must be either 16, 24 or 32 bytes long. Longer keys are more secure. in_filename: Name of the input file out_filename: If None, '<in_filename>.enc' will be used. chunksize: Sets the size of the chunk which the function uses to read and encrypt the file. Larger chunk sizes can be faster for some files and machines. chunksize must be divisible by 16. """ if not out_filename: out_filename = in_filename + '.enc' iv = ''.join(chr(random.randint(0, 0xFF)) for i in range(16)) encryptor = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_CBC, iv) filesize = os.path.getsize(in_filename) with open(in_filename, 'rb') as infile: with open(out_filename, 'wb') as outfile: outfile.write(struct.pack('<Q', filesize)) outfile.write(iv) while True: chunk = infile.read(chunksize) if len(chunk) == 0: break elif len(chunk) % 16 != 0: chunk += ' ' (16 - len(chunk) % 16) outfile.write(encryptor.encrypt(chunk)) This is how I encrypt file, but if you run it twice or more on the same file it will keep encrypting it no questions asked, I want to add some kind of a if check if it's not already encrypted by AES? Is this possible?
We are creating an app and registration of user happens in following way. User sends via app: email-id/phone and username. Server sends a pin to enter in app via phone/email. User enters the pin in the app. After this we are thinking of two ways we could store some authentication information on app. A. Server send a token which used by app with all subsequent requests. OR B. We negotiate on a secure key using Diffie–Hellman. Then there is a login function which includes server sending challenge and user answering. After this token is generated, used, and later discarded. All communication is happening over https. Though option B looks better, option A is easier. Any particular reason we should choose B ? One reason I see is unable to change token, but are there any obvious security risks ? Also comments to improve A or B are welcome.
I posted this originally on Drupal Stack Exchange, and it was recommended that I try here for an answer. Here is the original question: Visiting my Drupal 7 site just now with IE 11, I get this message: Windows Defender blocked content on this website lx7pyv.dofeqilr.com Hosted by: poligo.com Recommended icon Go to my home page instead Windows Defender blocked this site because it might contain threats to your PC or your privacy. What's up? I get no hits when I search for "lx7pyv.dofeqilr.com". I also have not issues in Chrome or FF. Is my site infected? Is there some kind of malicious code on my site? Since posting, I have noticed that it happens sometimes when I switch to Japanese (down in the footer of the site), but the English version seems to be OK. It is also intermittent. The error message changes too. I get different URLs reported, like one.hretiopalika.net.in etc.
To put this problem in context, I have a touch monitor screen whose firmware program is protected by a password. The firmware program is downloaded over RS232 via a Windows utility program provided by the manufacturer of the touch screen. The problem is, upon completing the download, the utility program asks for a 6-character alphanumeric password, and I have no idea what it is. The company I bought the screen from has closed down since, so there's nowhere I can get hold of the password. Since it's an alphanumeric password, (2*26+10)^6 = 56,800,235,584, my questions are: How easy is it to crack the password? What are the possible ways of cracking it? How would you attempt to crack it? (ex. robot program that will try to enter all possible passwords on human's behalf, etc.) What software tools would you use?
I'm designing a server which accepts anonymous messages using ECIES: as in, anonymous users send the server an ephemeral EC public key, and the server uses ECDH to derive a shared secret, and some KDF to obtain a shared symmetric key to decrypt the actual message. The problem is ECDH, which is among the fastest key exchange available, is really slow. From some quick tests, my computer can only handle about 3000 key exchanges per second. An attacker could be constantly computing key exchanges and sending them to the server. I'm not too worried about this if the attacker has actually done the key exchanges. At least that way, the attacker will be doing as much work (slightly more with ECDH) as the server. The problem is an attacker can send a garbage key and make the server do a lot of work doing the key exchange on garbage. My first question is, in a reasonable implementation like OpenSSL, will the key exchange quickly return with an error, or take a long time doing useless computation? Assuming the above is fixed, there are two more problems: an attacker could use the same ephemeral key over and over, keeping the shared secret but making the server do the key exchange repeatedly; and an attacker could precompute a lot of ephemeral keys beforehand and send them all at once. One attempt at a solution to both problems is for the server to keep its own ephemeral keypair which changes every ~10 minutes. It can publish its ephemeral public key signed with its permanent private key. Then it would not be unreasonable for the server to remember the keys and corresponding secrets received during this period. However, this doesn't really solve the precomputation attack because correctly generated EC keys will still work with a key exchange, they just would produce garbage data. Is there any fast way for a server to know that a given key will actually decrypt the message? Sorry for the long post, and thanks in advance to any comments.
I have an IP address of a computer which I am currently away from, and I need the MAC address. How do I get the MAC address if I ony have the IP?
On October 24th, 2013, the admins of the famous php.net website said that their website delivered malware to its visitors using a drive-by download attacK. I have several questions about this malware, however I prefer to ask only few of them since I already found answsers for other questions: I take this quote from this article: While the userprefs.js code was served to all visitors, only some of those people received an additional payload that contained malicious iframe tags As I am working around the security of browsers such as FF, GC and IE, I wonder how come a website can legitimately writes into the profile of a Firefox user and writing into its userprefs.js ? How come is this dangerous behavior is a normal thing used by php.net servers ? Always from the quote: are the iframes in such cases ALWAYS hidden ? From the same article, I have a question about this quotation: some webserver malware runs entirely in memory and hides itself pretty well. How come a virus can hide itself by running within a memory ?
If an attacker were just given 256 bits, and they were either a SHA256 hash or a 256 bit elliptic curve key, would they be able to tell which one it is? Just out of curiosity, would they be able to tell the difference between the above and an AES256 encrypted block, or a 256 bit ECDSA signature?
Malicious JavaScript (generated by malicious hosted PHP code for example) can lead to attacks. What are the types of attack that malicious javascript could perform? Are the drive-by download attacks the only ones that malicious javaScript performs?
I have read a few articles about SIM cards, stating that the chip inside them uses some cryptographic magic to prevent people from cloning your number. This to me seems borderline impossible, given that you could manufacture a new chip with exactly the same circuitry hard-wired into it. So how does this cryptographic stuff prevent the cloning of SIM cards?
My downloads stop completing and some page in the browser appearing blank or with text only without css or js and so on, some program after complete return me a message when trying to start installing: The setup files are corrupted. Please obtain a new copy of the program. Also I can't install google chrome or antiviruses programs for example. I have avira and do scan without results, What is the problem and is there any solution ?
According to this answer, a valid login token schema would consist of the username (U) the time of issuance (T) and secret key K owned by the server only The suggestion then is to concatenate the values as following: token = U+T+hmac("sha256", U+T, K) Does this mean the server would have to split the token to validate it, take the username and the time, rebuild the hash (with the same key) and then compare the new build hash to the provided hash in the token? Isn't it a problem to sent the username and time in plain text? Wouldn't it make more sense to encrypt the userid and time as well (and decrypt it for validating the token)?
A few years ago, there was a high-profile attack on a Wired editor, where the hackers added a credit card to the target's amazon account, then used that self-added credit card to gain access to the target's account. So they effectively poisoned Amazon's database for their attack, then social engineered their way through. How can a developer mitigate this specific attack vector, namely the attacker using data they added themselves to gain access? I had this idea that, for the above example, you would allow the credit card to be added, but the user wouldn't be able to use it for recovery purposes or payment until he clicked a link in his mail to confirm that he wanted to add it, kind of like we already require email verification to create an account. That way, an attacker would have to compromise a second account as well. And of course the customer care rep wouldn't be able to do this himself.
I've recently started using LastPass and one of the things you can set as a policy for you password vault is Prevent offline access when using Google Authenticator. The local cache can be accessed without a second factor when using Google Authenticator [unless this policy is enabled] How can they enforce that? If they somehow encrypt my password db with a key returned by the google authentication procedure then how can they allow offline access in the first place? And if they don't encrypt it with something from google then how can they prevent offline access?
I maintain a small site that runs old-fashioned classic ASP pages with an Access backend. Recently, the site got hacked. The attacker managed to add a large quantity of code to the index.asp page. Mostly it was static content, lots of links to dubious sites, that sort of thing, with a bit of scripting thrown in. I didn't stop to analyse the scripts - I just deleted everything and reposted the page. There's nothing in that index page which accepts dynamic input: no search boxes, no file uploads, no querystrings. There is elsewhere on the site, which includes some simple forums software, but not on the front page. Because there's no input on the page that got hacked, I presumed this was a flaw in the host's defences, and alerted them to the fact there might be a problem. After a couple of days, they got back to me claiming they were fully secure and the attacker must have used some form of injection attack to do the damage. This surprised and alarmed me, because I was not aware that there were techniques to use injection on pages that don't accept any input. But my knowledge of security isn't great, so if there are, I want to know about them. So, how can an injection attack get on a page that doesn't have a form or a querystring? Or are my hosting company bluffing, and there's a possible flaw in their security?
How can I spoof my public IPv4 address to another without using proxys? I don't need any response, the TCP handshake needn't be completed! I just want to send a SYN packet with spoofed (specific) source address! My problem is, that every packet I craft can just have a spoofed private IP and my router would simply drop the packet (or at least the ISP would) and I don't know how it could reach a webserver outside of my network at home. Are there any possiblities to make the ISP to forward it? If I forgot important information, let me know. thx
I am not familiar with all the steps involved in a full-fledged information security review of an in-house developed application, so I am wondering whether or not the following scenario is commonplace. A web application is created, and runs on top of Microsoft's .NET framework. Under the terms of the security review, all third party code, defined here (however rightly or wrongly) as code not written in-house, needs to be reviewed. Thus, even the .NET stack itself - not just the in-house code written on top of the .NET stack - needs to be audited. So besides the initial audit of the code, any Microsoft updates would have to be audited. For instance, suppose the app is using MVC 5.2, and Microsoft releases MVC 5.3, and the app upgrades to MVC 5.3; in this case, the app could not pass review until (among other tests) the MVC 5.3 codebase itself is run through auditing/review. Is this part of normal information security reviews? Is it standard practice to conduct a security review of Microsoft's own code base when you build an app on the Microsoft stack? How could one assume an internal auditing and review process (using whatever third party tools) would be more sophisticated than the tests Microsoft itself would run? And where does this cycle stop? Who is to say the third party tools and/or internal tests are up to par? I guess there should be an audit of those processes as well. And then an audit of those audits...etc., etc., etc. At some point, this has to stop and there has to be a level of trust, right?
I have a PKI certificate in Keychain Access.app on OS X 10.9, together with the private key. The manual page for /usr/bin/security indicates that there is a -x option for security import to specify that private keys are non-extractable after being imported, which I believe must have been used on my key. However, there's no magic storage with copy protection, and if the certificate is still usable in the system somehow, then surely it is still in there somewhere, stored in its full glory with all the relevant bits, and surely there must be a way to still export it. How?
So if a group has made open source software, and the source code is available on github, and is bundled with an executable in their main download, can it be proven that the executable is compiled from the source code that is on github, and not modified source code (like adding a backdoor to the system that isn't on the github version)? Is it as simple as compiling it yourself and comparing the hashes of both executables, or is there a flaw in that method?
There are three different ways how TLS (1.2) can be used: server and client authenticate only the server authenticates neither authenticates If neither server nor client authenticates using a certificate the connection is not protected against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. The TLS 1.2 specification says that the connection is safe as soon as the server authenticates. And I wonder: Does it make any security difference whether the client authenticates or not if the server authenticates? If both the client and the server need to authenticate, does it matter whether the client sends a trusted certificate in the handshake or just sends a secret (and strong) password as application data?
What is the difference between using Google Safe Browsing and using other traditional anti-webmalware tools ? Which one is more efficient to protect against malicious web content ?
I've been monitoring my network traffic with Little Snitch, and today, when launching Chrome, just the default Chrome tab (shows most frequent sites), it alerted me Chrome was trying to connect over SSL to the domain goldenticket.disconnect.me According to whois lookup, this domain is registered to a "dedicated server" that is also an Amazon AWS instance (goldenticket-658146952.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com). The entry indicates its IP address is in Ashburn, VA, right outside of D.C. Pointing a browser at disconnect.me brings up some company site about browsing security, with a product called Disconnect that I have never heard of or installed on my machine. What else can I determine about this traffic? I can't account for it, and I've run Chrome several sessions with LS3 without seeing this before.
In a recent question (can't seem to find now), someone asked: Is it possible to track a phone which is off? and received a response of Who's to say that it's really off? Your phone has both a CPU and a baseband processor, which may keep running after you've "powered off" the phone. Details of baseband processors are trade secrets and are proprietary. Are there any cell phones available (preferably running Android) which do have an open-source baseband processor and code? If they're all proprietary, how can anyone be sure that they don't have a backdoor built right in by Qualcomm?
I've got an ASP Classic system that passes around sequential ids corresponding to keys in the database. I had gotten an encryption module (chilkat, an activex control) that I was using to encrypt and decrypt entire querystrings. However, since I do validate a user's right to access a particular resource (noted by an ID on the querystring), do I still need to do URL encryption? Would my site pass a security audit in this case? (or more importantly, should I continue doing both or is access control sufficient)
Following is a excerpt from COMPUTERWORLD Yesterday, in talking about the zero-day vulnerability in Tails, Exodus Intelligence wrote: "We publicized the fact that we’ve discovered these issues for a very simple reason: no user should put full trust into any particular security solution. By bringing to light the fact that we have found verifiable flaws in such a widely trusted piece of code, we hope to remind the Tails user base that no software is infallible. Even when the issues we’ve found are fixed by the Tails team, the community should keep in mind that there are most certainly other flaws still present and likely known to others." What is known about recent zero day flaw with Tails up to this point in time, and is Tails able to keep us anonymous from a global adversary? Following please find COMPUTERWORLD and EXODUS links: http://blogs.computerworld.com/malware-and-vulnerabilities/24177/zero-day-broker-exploits-vulnerability-i2p-de-anonymize-tails-users http://blog.exodusintel.com/2014/07/23/silverbullets_and_fairytails/
Two questions about User-Mode Linux: Suppose that a privilege escalation attack is used to gain root in a UML guest. Assuming modern (3.0 or later) host and guest kernels, is it trivial to escape the sandbox, as with a chroot? Or is it more difficult? Is it possible to run a privilege escalation exploit against the host kernel directly, from within a UML guest? Or is bypassing the UML kernel not practical for an attacker?
I've read that the Server header would disclose information, and that its use would be bad. The arguments made in that question also apply for the User agent header. So why is it still used, and not a "dummy", like the one google uses for the server header field? As I understand it, the user agent was useful in the days browsers were still heavily buggy, and would render very different results. To a certain extent, this is also true today, but certainly has decreased. Is there no other method to know whether a browser sais "I'm mobile" than the user agent? Also, user agents are a mess. The browser vendors tried to trick stupid user agent recognition scripts, because of which the Chrome user agent reads like a list of relevant browsers and rendering engines. So why aren't they abandoned?
We are implementing a REST service that requires authentication and authorization. Because of the stateless nature of REST API's, we want to use JWT to make authenticated calls to the API through a token, without the need to hit a database for each API call. After evaluating the JWT we had some questions: How do you handle a situation with a compromised token secret which is shared between a client and the server? Do you logout all your clients and define a new token secret for future requests? (that would be a bad experience) Is there a way to just logout the compromised client? Background detail: We will use that flow between an iOS app and a Node.js backend.
For a client-side only webapp run from file, how can a keylogger gather data and then transmit it? In this scenario, please limit the scope to the client code only, that an attacker somehow has injected code. Vulnerabilities outside of the browser is out of scope. There is no flash or java in the original code, and please assume that the client has flash disabled and does not permit java to execute. All original code is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are some web-safe images such as those supplied with jQuery. It seems to me that it can easily be read via a JavaScript code snippet, but how can it be transmitted? Websockets only?
Use connection of A and B as an example. Their communications were encrypted by Public Key Encryption. Before they exchange their public key, ISP MITM attacked. A got "B"'s public key (ISP generated) B got "A"'s public key (ISP generated) A send message X to B. A->"B"'s public( (A's private(X) )->ISP When ISP got that ciphertext(C), ISP decrypt it by "B"'s private( (A's public(C)) ) Then, ISP got the message. After that, ISP encrypt message X for B. ISP->B's public( "A"'s private(X) )->B Then B decrypt ciphertext(C) by B's private( "A"'s public(C)) Then B got message X and they don't know ISP got the message. Is it possible? Sorry for my poor English and explanation.
If I publish my public key (I think I understand how this works, I'm still learning encryption) and I have a common name, could this leas to problems at all? OR does the email part guarantee that this will work fine? Does this not make it extremely easy for someone to compromise my identity? In retrospect, this seems like an extremely stupid question.
My goal is to build a perfect stationary workstation from which I can work anonymously. Most instructions on being anonymous usually involve, at some point, moving around and switching from coffee shop to coffee shop. Is there any way around this? Currently, my best-possible imagined setup involves tails OS plugged into an android device (anonymous second-hand cash purchase, no cameras) with a pre-paid 3g SIM (anonymous second-hand cash purchase, no cameras) and then everything goes through Tor (because Tails). But I expect that all ISPs are geolocating (via cell towers?) all cellular devices all of the time and storing this data, timestamped, alongside the device ID/SIM numbers and the IP they are allocated. So if Tor can be compromised via some malicious third party with government-sized resources, perhaps by them owning significant numbers of entry and exit nodes which I unfortunately use simultaniously, allowing them to link end-to-end the original 3g IP with my web activity, then this malicious third party could then query my ISP for the geolocation data associated with the relevant IP address at that specific time and find out where I was. Over time, they could profile my location and look for patterns. In the case of a stationary workstation, my cover is blown. In the case of a going to a new coffee shop every day, in the case that this malicious third-party has live monitoring of the TOR network and can instantly query the ISP in question, then the could litterally watch you as you work, totally destroying all anonymity. Now, I am split on whether or not I believe a malicious third party has compromised Tor as such. On one hand, it seems quite doable, many research papers point to entry/exit vulnerabilities, and we have the recently pulled conference talk. On the other hand, Schiener, Snowden, and others still recommend Tails/Tor as sufficient to protect anonymity, and surely they know better than I. But it would be prudent to act in a manner, if possible, which allows me to be wrong without reprocussions. What is the ideal anonymous workstation setup?
The file is binary, named '96748', and it's 12.8kb in size. Ubuntu thinks it's an swf. Thank god I was in a Linux VM and not Windows. It doesn't seem to have done anything, and it's just sitting there in my downloads folder. This is the URL (don't visit in Windows) h**p://www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/orlando-bloom-tried-to-punch-justin-bieber-after-a-scuffle-i Does anybody know what this could be? Is it malicious? How can I investigate further into it to see what it may be? I already cat'd it to look for strings and there was nothing.
When I am doing a lot of sudo operations, I like to spawn a bash shell from sudo to make the operations go quicker. I am against assigning a root password because I do not like the root account enabled because it is an easy target for hackers. There are a couple of security concerns I have with using sudo bash as well, but to me it seems safer than just enabling the root user all together. Which option is safer? Using sudo bash to obtain a root level shell as a nomal user, or just enabling the root account and using su root to gain root access?
Without using Private and Public keypairs, i do not understand how Diffie-Hellman is able to generate a secret key between two parties on the internet without passing something between that could be sniffed. There is a term for this that comes from Generals sending messages through hostile territory. I do not understand the math or logic behind DH and just can not see how it is possible. Someday i will spend another week or two going over the math, but until i can verify, i cannot trust. Further why use it when public private key pairs can be used to establish a shared session key with much less risk? On the other hand, the uneducated masses historically sling pitchforks into progress. Explain it to me like i am 5, how can DH provide a known secret to two parties over an unencrypted connection without it being intercepted via MITM? Changed title from: "When a public-private keypair is already in place, why is Diffie-Hellman used at all?"
I need to pull some data from network storage to a publicly available laptop that is running Linux. The network storage used to be provided via a server that could be connected to via ssh, but it has now been switched to a server that only provides access via samba. I used to connect from the laptop to the server with SSH keys and I sand boxed the key on the server to only run rsync to make it more difficult for the compromised laptop (it is publicly available after all) to limit the damage (or at least make it more difficult) to damage/compromise the server. It probably would have been better to push from the server to the laptop but the IP address changes depending on where it is used and I frequently couldn't get through the firewall the laptop was behind (it is used in peoples homes). I asked IS how I should implement the data sync on the new system. There response was to store my password in plain text on the publicly available laptop and use that to mount the samba share. There comment to me was: I would suggest that storing a plain text password on your machine is no more "dangerous" than storing both of your public/private SSH keys on the same disk. Anyone who "roots" your machine can log keystrokes to learn passwords in either case. I am pretty sure this advice is just wrong. I work at a university and we use a single log on active directory set up. With the SSH key someone can get access to a single service on a single server, while my password will give them access to "everything". Is there a way to securely mount a samba share without making my password available? For example, maybe setting up a (virtual) server that acts as a go between. A second, and decidedly softer, question is, is the advice about plain text passwords so bad I should report the IS person, who is on the file storage team, to someone on the IS security team?
I am working on a system that consists of several applicaitons communicating with each other. Some of these applications will run on the same server and some will run on a different one. So there is going to be communication from one server to another one and from one server to itself. The communication will be TLS protected which of course takes time. In order to make the system more efficient I could only TLS-protect the communications that are not on the same server. Of course this is only safe if the non-protected content never leaves the server it comes from and also goes to. Let's say One server has the IP 1.2.3.4 and wants to send an IP packet to 1.2.3.4 (itself). Will this IP packet ever leave the server so that it would need to be protected or will it never leave the NIC of the server?
I need to share some sensitive information with someone else who can only communicate via E-mail. I don't love the idea of sharing this information freely over email in plain text, so I was considering encrypting it using asymmetrical encryption (It's not a nuclear missile launch code, I just want to prevent someone finding a copy of the email in the 'sent' folder). I don't mind creating my own keys and so on, but this other person might find it difficult. Is there a trust-worthy service on the internet that makes it easy to share sensitive pieces of information securely with others (via public key encryption or any other secure method)?
I'm doing some research on user account guessing, and wanted to ask a question about some "bad practices". My thought is generally this is a trade-off between great user functionality/UX and security. For example, I could create a user webservice that checks if an e-mail exists, and when a user is attempting to register, I can (as a convenience) let them know that this account already exists (instead of having to go through the entire process only to find out at the end the account is taken). In addition for a login form, telling the user 'this username/password is invalid' instead of 'that username does not exist' will help reduce the chances of an attack. At the end of the day (for registration), my thought was the aforementioned webservice is a bad idea, but there needs to be some way to ensure the user knows that name is taken/available. What are some techniques people do to secure this? I thought that rate-limiting service requests from a server perspective is a good idea. Is this common? For example I have some sort of means of blasting away at that webservice using a dictionary attack. After enough time, I could have a whole list of e-mail addresses that are valid and now I only need to guess passwords instead of both. But if the service is limited such that after N requests, the response slows down, or asks for a CAPTCHA, it would be harder to pull this off (now I need to use unique IP addresses, etc). I wanted to see if my thinking was right here or if anyone could add on to this. By the way, I noticed Microsoft does not do this! When you go to live.com, and you type in some made-up username, it tells you that username does not exist. When you try a valid username but bad password, it tells you that password is wrong! Isn't this a bad practice? What are some reasons they allow this? Because it's a popular service and getting a live e-mail address is pretty easy? Or maybe that coupled with lots of server security?
I just read about PGP encryption scheme here, and started wondering what is the need to encrypt the file with a one time random key? In other words, how is this scheme more secure than simply sending the file which is directly encrypted using the public key? (Because the one time key is anyways sent along with the data)
I would like to know what the minimum access is to be able to dump from the lsass process on a Windows machine (any version) to try and grab LSA Secrets. The reason I am asking is because I had thought it was restricted to admin and higher, but accross multiple penetration tests and different versions of windows, I have in the past been able to obtain LSA Secrets without getting local admin first, sometimes while logged in via RDP. Now, is this because my user had admin access and I didn't realize it? Is that the only possibility? Or are earlier versions of Windows less restricted in allowing access to LSA Secrets?
Let's say a friend gives me a SD-card which I'm not sure is safe (i.e. it may contain malware), what is the safest way to access this card on a Mac OSX? E.g. is it possible to create a sandbox in Finder? I know some of you may say, "Just don't access it." But assume this is a scenario where I have to access it.
Does a typical computer begin with any shared secret with a certificate authority when I buy it? If not, a compromised home router could fake everything and get my credit card info when I attempt to buy something, even if I were careful to use https.
Is the Java programming language used for penetration testing in practice? I've wondered whether Java is used or can be used for penetration testing in the field (people write pen-testing suites and attacks in Java)? If so, does the same apply to C#? I know Python and Ruby are used a lot, but I would like to aim for specializing in Java, since it applies to many domains. Could someone with experience in the field answer my question?
I see other similar question here. I want to become Malware analyst. I have learn to program in Python and C++(not on expert level but fairly good). Before I continue with Assembly language I want to learn about OS. Could any of you recommend book(s) that will give me the concepts I need to know. I will be very grateful if somebody help me. P.S. I had read the rules and I think this question isn't constructive, but I saw similar questions that aren't put on hold or closed, and I get confused. I want to apologize if this question isn't constructive.
We have a requirement for 2-factor authentication for our internal WiFi SSID's. Currently we use PEAP w/ MS-CHAPv2 to pass windows creds through the AP to a RADIUS server (A Domain Controller running NPS). This has been recently been accused of not being 2-Factor authentication because it's only supplying 'something you know' in the form of your windows credentials.. However, on the NPS server they have to be a member of one of two groups in AD as well to be allowed on, so in my book that would be 'something you are'. Making it two-factor.. So is our current setup really two-factor or not. Thanks in advance!
We had a web server that had the wrong SSL certs installed yet the browser was able to find another trusted path to a root and supply the page properly over HTTPS. We also have proprietary software clients that use SSL outside of browsers that connect to the same server yet these failed SSL validation. My question is what is the mechanism in browser logic that allows it to find alternate paths to a trusted root?
Assuming no XSS and a client-side only page, how can a keylogger be identified in javascript code? Should I simply look for the id of the targeted fields and possibly some sort of DOM traversal to get the value in an obscure way? Is there anything else?
If I am connected in a public WiFi, is there any way to know whether I am under attack or not while browsing sites using SSL? For example, if I visit facebook.com and the URL starts with "https://", does it mean that I am 100% secure? What methods can be used to verify this?
Wired, and others are reporting on a research paper by Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell. The paper apparently shows how any USB device (not just memory sticks) can be infected with malware at the firmware level. This can then be used to attack any device the USB device is attached to. As the malware resides in the firmware, even wiping the memory stick of data is insufficient, as the firmware remains untouched. USB is such an entrenched standard; can this be fixed in the next version? Bruce Schneier suggests that this is the kind of attack the NSA would favour. Note: There will be a presentation at BlackHat 2014 by the authors. Edit: Adam Caudill and Brandon Wilson have released proof of concept code for this at DerbyCon 4.
I have read that bios passwords are sometimes good--or bad, if there is a default. Places mention that these passwords are pretty much just available through google, but I can not find them. Where would I find them?
We're developing a web application in which certain not logged users (clients) need to send their credit card details to other users (merchants) - which, we'll assume, are PCI compliant. We are looking into getting PCI compliance, but the process will surely needs a lot of time. Therefore we are investigating other solutions which don't require us getting a certification and protect us from getting sensible data stolen. Our plan is to: Make the merchant generate a private and a public key Store the private key inside his browser using localstorage (and provide a mean to backup it) Provide the public key on the form used by a client Before the client send the data, encrypt everything with the merchant public key Store the encrypted data in our server Provide the encrypted data to the merchant Make the merchant decrypt the data in his browser using his private key The idea was to use JavaScript and the library jsencrypt. Do you see security issues in this workflow? Do you think we still need PCI compliance when employing a system like that? The reasoning is that, for anyone without the private key, those are just random bytes. The only attack I can think of is someone compromising the server and replacing a merchant public key with his own key. But he could as well steal a token for another payment gateway and fake the communication needed to do something nasty. We know about services like Paymill, Braintree and Stripe (which offer pretty good client side libraries) but they're not fitting for our solution (or better: they're alternative we'll make available for merchants - but it should be up to them to decide). Thank you in advance EDIT: I totally agree with you guys and I'd rather work with thirdy party solutions. The problem is that we're working in a market in which most of our competitors are small companies working without PCI compliance (and most of them even without HTTPS!!). Our competitors simply receive CC data, store them and give access to the users. We know about the risks of such approach, but the users don't and they prefer their solutions to ours because they'd rather have the whole CC data, instead of just having buttons to execute actions.
My application is vulnerable to XSS attack. Technology used in the application are Servlet 2.2, JSP 1.1, Jdk 1.3, WAS 4.0. I wanted to remediate XSS vulnerability with migration of technology or remediate with the current technology. As of now i thought to migrate servlet 2.2 to 2.3 to use filter interface. Please advise what changes i need to make in the current application to migrate servlet from 2.2 to 2.3. Any other advise for remediation is also welcome.
I am reading a book on network security and when talking about user confusion it writes: "It is not uncommon for a user to be asked security questions such as Is it safe to quarantine this attachment? With little or no direction, users are inclined to provide answers to questions without understanding the security risks." Could someone please tell me, a confused user, what are the dangers of quarantining an attachment? My understanding is that a file in quarantine cannot interact with the OS in any way, thus it isn't a security risk but we also cannot analyze it to see if it is a virus.
I'm trying various sandboxing solutions on linux. I'm used to running untrusted programs (for example, a web browser, a pdf document reader, etc) inside a selinux sandbox, which I'm quite satisfied with, but there is a problem: it's only supported on rhel/fedora. AFAIK other distributions don't really support selinux (even when they say they do, they don't ship usable policies or documentation), and even when a quasi-working policy is provided, policycoreutils-sandbox is not available (see debian). What could be a multi-distro sandboxing solution? I'm trying docker/subuser, which allows me to start a docker container running the application of interest and giving it access only to part of the filesystem. For example, I can run 'chrome' in a docker container and let it only access my Downloads directory. This seems a convenient solution since it's distribution independent and doesn't require me to install the program I'm planning to run and its dependencies on the host. However, I'm not quite sure about how much security is there in 'subuser-security': https://github.com/subuser-security/subuser First of all, docker doesn't yet support user namespaces. This means that every 'container' runs as root on my host, even if it's isolated by lxc. this also means that, if I follow subuser's recommendations, I have to add my user to the docker group. since dockerd runs as root, having access to it means that I have full access to the whole host filesystem as root, I can run privileged containers, etc. If this isn't enabling privilege escalation (even if not from 'guest' apps, I hope), I don't know what it is. furthermore, let's say that I'm running chrome in subuser. Now I have a chrome browser running with its sandbox disabled (one less layer) inside another sandbox under the root user. Is it really a benefit from simply running chrome with its sandbox under an unprivileged user? I would not be able to limit its access to my home directory, but apart from that, I don't see reasons to prefer subuser/docker. what other distro independent solutions are left? I'm starting to think that the least cumbersome solution would be to simply use standard unix users. One user per application, maybe install an app and its dependencies under ~local, ~bin, etc. which package managers support installing a package, mantaining a package tree, as a user inside a user's home directory? are there any third party package managers for linux that support this? how would you share files between users? I'm thinking of the possibility of running an unprivileged ftp daemon on localhost, let's say as a 'standard' or 'storage' user and use virtual users to export parts of that home dir (eg, /home/me/apps/webdownloads) to other users, applications, and mount that via fuse. Is this reasonable?
I have a database with individual contact data for students... this data includes name, address, phone number, birthdate, etc. (no social... that would have made this too easy apparently, ha ha) I would like to allow their parents to access their data from home, and be able to view and edit it. Obviously, security is a huge priority here; I don't want a creeper gaining access to their address or somesuch. Are there any methods that I could use that: Don't require me to generate a code or input new data for them manually (this is just impractical, and requires me manually verifying each student/parent combo). Could not be easily mined from, say, a facebook account (name and birthdate are both easily accessible for example). Don't lean on data that is more highly likely to be inaccurate (a street name is much more likely to be misspelled than a last name for example... and by the same token, first names aren't always trustworthy [some people go by a middle name, but might have their first in there, or a nick name, or whatever]). I'm stumped... I'm hoping there's a technique here I'm not thinking of, but perhaps there is simply no way to do this without making it much too easy for someone to access it.
I don't know if this is some injection attempt or a weird bot or what ever. An IP opened several pages within my Drupal 7 website with the appendix http://domain.com/some/url/$tags.get(%22pixelLink%22) I didn't find anything on Google. What does $tags.get(%22pixelLink%22) mean? Should I prevent this and if so, how?
Not really new but it's all over the news right now. You can hack a USB firmware to run an attack by emulating a keyboard. I wonder how difficult it is create an USB thumb that emulates a keyboard. I am trying to evaluate how likely such an attack is. Can the kid in my neighborhood do this or does it require are secret agency?
We have a website, and somebody wrote us an email claiming we are insecure! What should I do
I am hosting a site on a hosting server. How to identify whether my site is vulnerable to DOS/DDOS attacks?
Suppose that there is a http proxy server outside the firewall of an organization hosting a web server. All client connections to the web server happen through this proxy. The client negotiates SSL with the proxy server and connections terminate at the proxy. Since the proxy is deployed outside the firewall, there are chances of its certificates and private key getting compromised. How is this problem prevented in proxy servers?
We use a custom app which uses Matrix SSL (client side) to perform certificate validation on MAC and Linux systems. My question is, does Matrix SSL keep a cert store cache of intermediate and trusted roots so it can perform its checks against what the server sends? Or does it call up something like OCSP or use AIA extensions like browsers do in order to validate the chain? Or can Matrix SSL be developed to use both methods?
What are the risk that I encounter when increasing the timeout of a vip between a web server (apache) and mysql cluster (two servers). Actually it is set to 5 minutes. If time_out was 1hour, knowing that all servers have a proxy to go out the vlan, could this be a security threat ?
I'm using Tor (Orbot for Android), and when I look at the log of the connection establishment phase, I see that I'm repeatedly being connected to familiar nodes, especially the Entry Nodes which 3 out of 4 times are the same 3 nodes that I'm connecting to every time! Even the whole 3 Nodes in my path are more often than not also familiar and so much so that I almost see no randomization process happening! I understand that if 1 malicious node is in my path, my anonymity won't be much affected, but if at least the Entry and the Exit Nodes are malicious, then I'm not anonymous anymore since the entry data and exit data can be monitored and compared. Question is: How do I force randomization of the connection, and WHY am I being assigned these nodes repeatedly (i.e. is there a known attack in which an entity can deliberately assign users to specific ranges of nodes to strip them out of their anonymity?)
Given a secure wireless network (lets say WPA2) with clients A and B, what level of traffic can A see from B? if the router has "wireless isolation" enabled? does it make a difference?
Alice wants to encrypt her data. She is not comfortable with using only a password. While she prefers to use a properly random crypto key, she isn't confident she can protect the key file from theft or loss. So she wants to use both. Bob proposes that she derive her encryption key EK from her password P and input key IK (the key Alice keeps in a file) as follows: EK = HKDF( IK + PBKDF2(P) ) In which + is concatenation, PBKDF2 uses plenty of iterations, and both KDFs use SHA-256 and null salts. Alice is interested but not yet sold on Bob's proposal. She has two questions: Wouldn't it be better to use a salt with the KDFs? If so, where to keep it? Since she needs to back up the file containing IK in a couple of safe places, shouldn't it be encrypted and have an HMAC? Bob scratches his beard, mutters "good questions". Eventually he says that these two extra steps add complexity to the process that needs to be justified, and asks, "What, if anything, do they add to the security of your data?" Given Alice's requirements, how would you answer Bob's question question? (Or is Bob's proposal faulty? (Or perhaps Alice's requirements do not make sense?)) The story continues... Bob is trying to taking Alice' worries seriously because he knows her government's reputation for brutality and suppression of dissent. So he posts a question to a social Q&A web site called "Information Security" and get's a very through answer from Tom Leek for which is is very grateful. From that answer Bob gleans: Encrypting IK using another key derived from P does little to make it harder for Alice' wicked government to obtain her plain-text data. Decryption of Alice's data requires IK, P and the encrypted data either way. Adding encryption and authentication could make matters worse if it is not implemented correctly, for example, by exposing side channels. Using null salt input to PBKDF2 means using an empty string as the salt. This is not the best choice. He decides to use a random value for salt and, for operational convenience, to keep it in the same file as IK. Authentication of the key file is valuable, even though its encryption is not. So Bob's revised proposal involves adding an HMAC to IK in the key file beside the salt. Thus the key file looks like: salt + HMAC + IK In which HMAC is computed over IK using an authentication key derived from P but different from EK.
When I go to whatsmyip.org under my host name I get "Your.Ipv6.Is.Under.Attack.By.The.Smurf6.Info". What does this mean? I'm using private internet access as my VPN so I'm guessing PIA is under some sort of attack? What should I do?
From my experience a card can not be used for online payment without a valid CVV, then why is it still always emphasized that card number must be protected? What can a hacker do, assume that he has all the information on the front side of the card (card number, holder name, expiry date) but not the CVV?
I have a Truecrypted, airgapped (no internet connectivity at all) laptop that I use as a completely secure computer for sensitive files. I want to add images from my iPhone (I know), camera or other device. What is the safest way to do this? I know safety will have to be compromised in some way, but I need to best. Here's my thoughts: USB: On a normal computer, transfer the files from camera to usb. Then from usb to airgapped laptop. Problem: malware could transfer from normal computer to airgapped laptop via USB. Upload from iPhone to internet, connect directly from airgapped laptop temporarily before returning to internetless state. Problem: internet access is dangerous. Upload from camera to Tails booted from any PC. Transfer to formatted USB, then transfer to airgapped laptop. Problem: very slow, inconvenient and Tails may have driver problems with certain devices. Is there an obvious solution I am missing?
Due to very paranoid customer requirements, we have to install several Windows services on two different systems that should run under a shared service account. Each system should each have a copy of the service account with matching name and password. I originally planned to generate the password at install time for one of the two systems and network it over to the other one, along with some other ideas, but here are some of the complications handed to us: No domain, just a workgroup. USB and other external storage media is not permitted While each of the systems will be connecting with the other at some point, they should each be able to be fully installed offline from the other. As a last resort, the administrators may just have to create and know the password themselves, but the customer would prefer that this not be the case, as they've apparently had low-level administrators tamper with such systems for the expedience of their immediate team, which works against the business rules and everything else in place. Is there any method for creating a good password that the installing administrators cannot know but can be used at install time?
We would like to digitally sign DOC (MS-Word) and PDF documents using PKI. Is this possible using an internally deployed CA? I've found lots of articles getting email digitally signed but almost no reference for Word documents.
I've noticed that my Dropbox installation really loves sending unencrypted information over the net including a "user_id" and it's user-agent. What i want to know is if it's possible at all to determine who owns the account from the user_id or from something else in the url. This is an example of the url with the numbers changed. /subscribe?host_int=1234567890&ns_map=12345678_1234567890123&user_id=12345678&nid=0&ts=1234567890
What can I do to protect my Linux laptop from BadUSB attacks as described by ArsTechnica here? Perhaps writing an appropriate AppArmor profile would help?
I want to know what type of server facebook uses ? If they use sql server , then is it vulnerable to sql injection ? Are all sql servers vulnerable to sql injection ? I just want to know this information and i have no intention of hacking as i have just started reading sql injection attacks and defense book
While I was searching online for information about Linux security, the most typical explanation was: Linux is secure, because the root password is required to access the kernel and install new applications - therefore external malicious software can't do any harm as long as the administrator is the only person to know the password. OK, that sounds good. But when a password is the only thing that stands between restricted access and total control of the system, is the system really that secure? By that I mean all kinds of tricks hackers think of to access systems, and particularly to reveal data (passwords).
I understand that most antiviruses by default quarantine infected files. I have changed it to remove all infected files immediately. Would this cause more harm than good?
I have implemented a stateless auth over HTTP in Laravel, using JWTs. I send my username/password from the frontend. Server authenticates user, sends back a signed JWT with an expiry time. I'm using the HS512 algorithm to sign with a private key (only available to the server). Frontend stores the token for future requests. Frontend sends next request with the token included. Server verifies that the token is valid, and not expired, and lets the action continue if yes to both. When the token expires server sends a 'logged-out' message. All these communications happen over HTTPS. So I can see that this is secure from these points: Attackers can't sniff traffic and steal the JWT token because of HTTPS. Attackers can't generate and send any odd token because server verifies the signature using its private key. Attackers can't modify which user (and hence, the role+permissions of the requester) is making the request, because that's part of the sub claim in the token. But, I have two questions: What if there is a virus on the user's computer or mobile, and it stole a valid token from RAM or from the browser. It can then send more requests, and they will be accepted. Is there any way at all to protect against this? Is there another way to attack this system that I am not seeing?
Referring to this vuln: http://bluebox.com/technical/android-fake-id-vulnerability/ and this permission: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/permission-element.html "signature" A permission that the system grants only if the requesting application is signed with the same certificate as the application that declared the permission. If the certificates match, the system automatically grants the permission without notifying the user or asking for the user's explicit approval.
I have been running alot of javascript code on nike.com through the console in order to create a shoe bot. The code i paste into the console has one intense loop with many iterations which makes me worry as I got a temporary site down when i tried to connect to the site earlier. My code is by no means harmful, all it does is scans the site for elements using normal js functions. Could this be considered as spam? Could I get into trouble? What is considered not okay when running console javascript code on a site in your browser? If my question isn't clear please let me know and I will try to explain it better.
I've been looking at how PBKDF is used to generate encryption key for AES. One thing I couldn't get my head around is that how those OS keep the encryption key safe apart from using hardware modules. So far my understanding is that OS like Windows stores user hashed user password in a file (SAM file). The password hash is then used to generate the encryption key for applications which need to encrypt data. THis is done in DPAPI and applications can just call the API and the system library will automatically extract the user password (hashed) from current context and derives a key from it (in a simple way,maybe more complicated than this). But how does windows ensure the safety of encryption key, even if the key is only generated on the fly, as long as the attacker obtains the hash, wouldn't it compromise the encryption key in someway as they can apply the same PBKDF2 (provided if they somehow can try those with possible cases). If an attacker grabs the windows password file and extract the hash out of it (this shouldn't be too hard), is he able to apply PBKDF2 (or any possible derivation function) on top of it to get the encryption key? . Is it some hard-coded salt value when the PBKDF2 is applied to the hash in windows's source ? Thanks
Vulnerabilities are discovered everyday. The recent Heart bleed attack caught many people off guard. I was wondering if a serious flaw was to be discovered that allows unfettered access to SSH, how should I defend myself and minimize my exposure to such an attack in order to have sufficient time to patch the server?
Given that Site X uses HTTPS, how can it be blocked by a country? My browser reads: 128-bit encryption \| ECDHE_RSA as key exchange. I say it's blocked since when I use Tor, it works fine. One important thing to point out is that it's not blocked in the typical sense we are used to see, which clearly shows a page that says it's blocked, instead, site X is blocked in a way that my browser just doesn't load the page and displays the error: This webpage is not available, Error code: ERR_CONNECTION_RESET for the HTTPS version, and that regular "page is blocked" page when requesting the HTTP version. Note that no other HTTPS sites are blocked! Just this one! I assume this is evidence that excludes port blocking and protocol blocking. However, it leaves DPI; but there are other HTTP-blocked websites which have the HTTPS version still working! If they can DPI-block site X, why can't they block the other HTTPS sites the same way?
I've been trying to understand something. When you generate a CSR from IIS, how is the private key kept as a secret, or is it? Do CA's email you a certificate that includes your private key? Because nothing seems to tell me otherwise, and nobody should know your private key but you. Instructions to generate a CSR from IIS typically go like this: http://www.digicert.com/csr-creation-microsoft-iis-8.htm
I plan to use a DNS service, I'm just wondering what sort of information gets sent. Will my passwords, browsing activity flow through the DNS servers? I kind of know what a DNS is, but I'm not sure about the security risks from my point of view, I don't want my passwords compromised.
I'm trying to implement some security access control in a software I'm building. I came across Stormpath for user management and they have somewhat an approach for RBAC yet what I was considering is to rely on XACML for ABAC and more specifically BALANA from WSO2 in the sense that I may set the attributes for users and store the profiles in stormpath while I rely on XACML for the policies. I'm a bit new in this so I was just wondering whether this is advisable or there is another approach would prove useful in my case in order to reuse things for security rather than building things from scratch.

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