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Are shell scripts / bash suitable for any kind of task as long as the developer(s) write correct, security bug free scripts? Or are shell scripts / bash less advisable for some tasks such as parsing untrusted data over networks? Are shell scripts / bash inherently less secure than other (script) languages such as pytho...
Currently, some services use a second layer of veficiation if logging in from a new device: Gmail and Facebook send a text or call with a code Facebook generates a code in the mobile application The problem is: Countless times, I've been abroad with a cell phone whose battery had died, and needed to access my Gmail ...
It is customary to protect certain critical files with a password. For example: PGP keys, VPN keys, password managers, etc. The practice dates back to before full disk encryption being common. These days, people tend to have full disk encryption. I realise that there is still a small security benefit from password prot...
I just got a new laptop and the first thing I wanted was to install Chrome. I opened IE and searched for "google chrome" in Bing. The first result was an ad with the link pointing to www.Google.com/Chrome like below I clicked the first link and to my surprise it opened a suspicious site http://www.thesoftwarelive.com/...
Reading the doc for setting the password, the command is : python -c "import crypt; print crypt.crypt('password', '\$6\$SALTsalt')" SALTsalt is the 8-character crpytographic salt. Valid characters in the salt are ., /, and any alphanumeric character. So, do I type in different password, and replace SALTsalt? Can someon...
Suppose I want to figure out which of a group of people is distributing my content without authorization. So I create several different versions of the same content, each with a unique watermark embedded. Then, when I come across a pirate copy of the content in the wild, I can check the watermark, so I can see which ...
http://www.incontrol.co.nz/82/Cards-and-Tags Say, for example, a group of people were given the card tag, "Proximity Blue Key Tag", in the link above. This card tag gave access to buildings 'A' and 'B' to those with the cards (card AB). Another group of people were given the same card key tags, but half of them could o...
I was asked during a job interview the following question, to which I couldn't find an answer then, and this thing is still bothering me. I was hoping someone might know the answer here: Consider two banks that communicate through an encrypted channel, where you are able to listen to the communication between them: ...
We have been asked to evaluate Conversant Tracking. http://www.conversantmedia.com/solutions/enterprise-solutions From what I can tell its pretty straight forward tracking, like google re-marketing, you pass them the information you want to via some javascript, and they target your visitors with targeted ads you have s...
If this header is set Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * javascript can make a request to the domain and read the response if and only if no cookies are sent over, otherwise the javascript cannot read the response. Generally speaking why is this header considered an insecure practice for a stateful web app that requires au...
What are all the values need to be entered in the source and destination IP address and Subnet mask in order to block the bit torrent file exchange.. i.e. blocking torrenting My router's filtering webpage asks for: Source IP adress: Subnet mask: Port number: Destination IP adress: Subnet mask: Port number: I have no ...
I downloaded a File Checksum Utility executable file from Microsoft. This tool is for checking the hash of a file. I'm wondering what is the version of the "Info Hash" section on the torrent site "thepiratebay.se". Is there anyone here knew what is it?
I have client / server and there is a firewall between them.The server is listening on a port and I want to check if this port is allowed by the firewall. I can only know the ports that the machine is listening on using netcat, but I want to know if the server port is allowed to pass.
I have a TP-Link wifi router. There is no screen on the front to indicate how many devices are connected to it. Is there any way to either access logs or in real-time monitor how many devices are connected, so I can verify that it is secure?
I watched an old episode of The Real Hustler in which they demonstrated how strangers can use some devices to force your Bluetooth-enabled mobile phone to call a premium rate telephone number. The victim's phone gets charged and the owner of the premium rate number gets the money. This TV show may have aired before wif...
I have an expect script on my server which opens a WebDAV connection to another server, expects a username and password, and then sends $arg1 and $arg2 as the username and password respectively. Example: Running the script: # ./script.exp username password This executes the script with username and password as argumen...
I am trying to exploit the mutillidae web-application and I found a page vulnerable to sql injection but with a blacklist check embedded into the HTML code. I've tried to bypass this by forging a POST request with CURL but I don't know why it return always all the html source code of the page. The command I use is this...
I currently store my users passwords as PBKDF2 hashes, for the authentication part of my web application. Each user also has their own private key and public key (also stored in their user profile in the database). The private key is encrypted with their plain text password upon registration. Now, I've come to the par...
I've long been under the impression that with unix, you should never login as root. Now I've started using Virtual Private Servers over at DigitalOcean, and some advice is to use SSH keys to login as root. This makes sense to me but I feel uneasy, like I've been caught using tabs and spaces in the same text file. Is it...
I was one of the people who thought that enabling 2-factor in Apple would have prevented the download of images from iCloud; it was recently pointed out to me that, in fact, I was gravely mistaken. Apple's 2-factor only works in a subset of their services and therefore their 2-factor lends a false sense of security (at...
I was testing an SQL injector I made in Java and the site I tested it on said 'Detected security breach attempt' blah blah blah. Is what I did illegal or not? I have found different opinions and answers on different web pages and dont actually know. (I live in the UK). If it is illegal, how serious is the crime?
According to this ArsTechnica article, using a self-signed certificate on a mail server is a bad idea: When we set up a Web server in our previous series, getting SSL/TLS working was a recommended but optional step. However, it is most definitely not optional for this guide: you must have a valid SSL/TLS certifi...
If a server was rooted, to the point that we know a Perl script which creates a remote shell was placed on the filesystem remotely, and the server was rebuilt entirely, patching the original Apache vulnerability that allowed that exploit, but the same SSL cert was used for the new Apache config (I know this is foolish)...
I am looking to create a ePHI database for a small physical therapy office and I would like some advice on some of the security that I will need to implement. Most computers will most likely have no internet access, except for doing scheduled updates (checking Windows Updates, etc). The data will be stored most likely ...
I have to log into an account to use the university internet, so I imagine they can see all the sites I view, but can they see what account I am logged into, and can I do anything to hide this?
I've been using NoScript for a couple of years now but I can't seem to figure out which scripts are safe to allow and most of the time I just temporarily allow all the scripts. Is there a way to check if a script is safe other then running it to find out?
I am doing some egress monitoring on my computer. Once in every few days, I would find some strange connections being logged, which I believe is initiated by the web browser through a related but not established HTTP(S) connection. IN= OUT=eth0 SRC=192.168.1.2 DST=54.242.237.165 PROTO=TCP SPT=33001 DPT=843 SYN URGP=0 I...
Say I have the SSL certificate for google.com. I intercept it, edit the certificate with my own domain name and public key and use it to intercept all traffic to google.com. What mechanisms exist in the SSL certificate to prevent me from doing so?
Ally Bank uses a 'trusted image' system to supposedly make login more secure. I can't find evidence that this is standard practice, so I'll explain it. When creating an account, you choose an image from a list of images. When you log in, you enter your username on the first screen, then on a second screen you're shown ...
Out of curiosity, and also to check whether this is doable at all: Is there any way using standard tools to assign an expiry date [only] to the passphrase of an ssh private key, or to enforce the expiry and change of the passphrase without changing the private key itself? (I'm not talking about scripts that check [a,c,...
Many security articles discuss about adding an extra layer of security at the link layer by either authenticating the data at the link layer authenticating and encrypting it. If we have encryption enabled at the application layer, what is the point of using authenticated encryption at the link layer vs only having a...
Recently, me and at least one other person I know received an obvious scam E-mail that starts off something like this: We considered your resume to be very attractive and we thought the vacant position in our company could be interesting for you. Our firm specializes in consultation services in the matter of bookkeep...
Let's say there is a C program that simply takes a string argv[1] and uses sprintf to copy it in a finite buffer. Classic stack buffer overflow. Let's even say the program is more complicated, allowing for techniques like ROP. But then it's compiled with a stack canary/security cookie, and run on an OS using ASLR and...
I am re-setting up some OpenVPN infrastructure to be more secure than the original and wanted some guidance. It's noted that the best security policy is to keep the Certificate Authority (CA) offline and separate from the server, but there's not much guidance on how to achieve this. If I have a CA, server, and client, ...
I recently received an e-mail from Virgin Media indicating that I might have the Citadel virus. It obviously sounds like a fake e-mail, but I am almost certain it is genuine, as they had my name and account number, and a generic version of the e-mail available on virginmedia.com, here: http://my.virginmedia.com/custome...
WebsitePanel is a windows hosting control panel that uses a CryptoKey to hash passwords into the databases. We have lost WebsitePanel config file and lost CryptoKey. We have to reinstall WebsitePanel but for passwords we need old CryptoKey. We have orginal and hashed passwords. Is it possible to find CryptoKey from or...
GSMs vulnerabilities have been known a long time now. UMTS was supposed to fix those problems. Why is GSM still used?
For example: I am using HMAC SHA 256 to sign an XML file. Part of the file data is a version number. If I append the version to my secret to use it as a key, does that weaken the HMAC? As the version is also part of the signed message is it weakend or still safe?
I made a small application that displays hello world to the console output and attempted to open it in another computer that had Kaspersky fully updated. When I ran the application, Kaspersky gave a message about Application Privilege Control and the hello world application not having a digital signature so it wasn't t...
I have a mobile app that communicates to server over HTTPS. To authenticate the client and to make sure its who I believe it is, I return upon successful signup (apart from the username) a secret API key (saved locally on the app). Every private method call following successful signup is SHA256 using the [method_name +...
For example: from Issued SSL Certificate: CN = abc.com.my, OU = Room, O = House, C = MY from generated CSR: CN = abc.com.my, OU = Room , O = House, L = KL, ST = KL , C = MY Is it legal for a public CA to change the distinguished name when issuing the SSL certificate, or must the distinguished name exactly match what I...
Is it possible to get the IP address of the person who posted a comment on my Twitter profile?
I have been robbed in the past by thieves using my HSBC Debit Card (issued by UAE branch) to purchase mobile phones and accessories by signing for the purchases. While the card has chip & PIN protection, HSBC mention (in the fine print) that, because not all merchants have chip & PIN, they also allow the PIN to be bypa...
I don't understand how using a random salt for hashing passwords can work. Perhaps random salt refers to something other than hashing passwords? Here is my thought process: The salt is used to add extra junk to the end of a password prior to hashing it, to fight against the likelihood of being cracked by a rainbow t...
From the Android website: Android requires that all apps be digitally signed with a certificate before they can be installed. The signature ensures that only the original developer can publish an update for their app. It doesn't ensure that no faked app gets delivered to the user the first place. The developer can'...
The security industry typically uses rolling code algorithms to authenticate sender & receivers in keyless entry systems, which is called RKE (ex: KeeLoq). In key-less smart key car system, The transmitter periodically (at interval of 1-2 seconds) sends a low power RF signal. If a receiver is around it will check the ...
I found a USB drive while riding the subway and I want to read it to see if I can return it back to it's owner. If I can't find any info on the stick, I'll use it for my own means. Assuming I have a perfect sandbox and I reformat the USB drive, how large is the possibility that my system gets compromised from using thi...
I am reading up on TEE in ARM. I am looking for pointers for the following questions: How does the TEE load code from the OS securely and guarantee that its not malicious code? I am guessing the code is signed and the TEE can verify the signature. So that brings up other questions -- Who is loading the code? The load...
In the PCI DSS version 3 it says: 1.3.3 Do not allow any direct connections inbound or outbound for traffic between the Internet and the cardholder data environment. But in the event of hard drive failure, fire, natural disaster, or terrorist takeover, I wouldn't want to lose the information stored there, so I resear...
My child's school is using a Google Web Form to collect student and parent information, including occupations, addresses, maiden name, birthdays, contact information, and who the child resides with. How do I know how secure my information is, if I choose to fill it out?
I have been using CrashPlan for a while internally (i.e. local backup server). I would also like to setup off-site backup but my experience is that I have to forward a port from the router sitting at the perimeter of the network where my offsite server is to be located. Otherwise, the client and server cannot see each ...
Is there an existing exploit, virus or malware that doesn't need any user interaction? In metasploit for example. No link to clicked, no pdf to open , no vba or exe to execute by the victim.
I'm familiar with the basics of multi-factor authentication. Now I'm trying to understand how a physical signature, as written on, say, a check or a credit card receipt, would be classified: Is it a knowledge factor (something you know), in that you know how to write your signature (and someone else can learn it)? Is...
I just tried to demonstrate a simple Web app program to simulate the Http Header Splitting attack but I failed. I realise that this sendRedirect() function has filtered my carriage return and replace to space (%20). I wanna to confirm whether I am right or I doing the wrong way. Any comment and and suggestion are welco...
Background I have am developing a service which consists in a small headless client device (e.g. OLinuXino) which will contain sensitive data. The device will be plugged to a remote network (maybe behind a firewall) and its goal is to open a reverse ssh tunnel to a server automatically (i.e. unattended). The device wi...
Say I have 2 separated servers which are one web server (apache) and one proxy server (nginx), I want to use HTTPS for the website running on the Apache. Do I enable SSL on apache or nginx or both? If enable on both, is it duplicated setup? because my internal network (between apache and nginx) are very secure. If bot...
I have a smartcard that can be read by websites using a Java applet (see http://www.springcard.com/online/applet_pcsc/). I would like to monitor and is to replay packets going from this java applet to the network. The problem is that it uses SSL. I tried to make IcedTea plugin (the open source version of oracle's java ...
I've the following headers in the e-mail which I've received as spam: X-Source: X-Source-Args: /usr/sbin/proxyexec -q -d -s /var/run/proxyexec/cagefs.sock/socket /bin/cagefs.server X-Source-Dir: silvianimberg.com:/public_html/wp-content/themes/ultimatum Can you explain how and why proxyexec/cagefs.server is used? Do...
I've received the following spam e-mail (with the link to viagra site): From: si...
We currently have a custom, cloud based application that can analyse then route HTTP and HTTPS traffic through to a domain. So if a client wants to use our service, they re-point their DNS to our application's IP address and our application will analyse the traffic and then route as appropriate. In order to satisfy our...
If the suspect's computer is Linux, can you directly use tools such as dd or dcfldd on his computer to acquire the disk image? Or do you need to use forensic live cds like Helix, Penguin sleuth or FFCU on top of the existing OS?
Is it possible to configure an access point to use one-time passwords for authentication and encryption ?
In Kali Linux whenever I open a binary in Olly Debugger after compiling the c source file, it gives an error: "The file is not a valid PE file." No debugging takes place thereafter. Is there any workaround for this?
I once read that if I send a DDoS attack via a proxy (for example with LOIC), I won't target the server I am trying to send a DDoS attack to but I will actually DDoS the proxy server. Most important question: is this true? And if so, why? For the record: I don't want to do anything evil :)
i want to write (and currently writing) a php script to display external images, not hosted on my website. Something like facebook's safe_image. What I'm currently doing is file_get_contents('pic') (or curl) the url and checking for httpcode and content-type, resulting in a 404 or whatever other code if content-type di...
I have a gmail address only. It is a copy of the email. I do not have the original email. Is there anyway to trace it?
prey project tracks mobile devices and helps to find stolen devices. Is it safe from privacy perspective? How can I know that it doesn't spy on me?
Most webpages from Stack Overflow use http even if you are logged in. Isn't it a security issue? Could an eavesdropper steal my session and authentication cookie then impersonate me since it's sent over http? Edit I found this great post by Troy Hunt that explains the security of Stack Overflow.
I noticed that the brute force times (the time it takes to find a message that hashes to a given hash) of various hashing algorithms seems to be 2^(num_bits / 2). For example, people say that brute forcing SHA1 (without using the vulnerability that reduces the brute force time to 2^69) is 2^80. In fact, if you look at ...
I am not intimately familiar with Java, so this could be a stupid question. In a C program I can find buffer overflows or may be a ROP based exploit to run custom code. How is it done in the context of Java? Is it even possible? In Java strings or other data types are all bounded and so overwriting memory is not possib...
As I understand the paper An Improved Clock-skew Measurement Technique for Revealing Hidden Services (6/23 = pdf page 3), it implies that a NTP client leaks the system's local time because of TCP sequence numbers. Is this the case or does that paper mean something else?
I'm using elliptic curve cryptography (curve25519 and ed25519) for key exchange and signing. The signing and key exchange keypairs are independent. I need two users to be able to verify each other's identity using their permanent ed25519 keys. One solution I came up with was to have each user generate a nonce, have ...
I'm currently reading about an access control and saw something interesting about smartcard contact & contactless. From what I understood from the book, smartcard contact is like an ATM Card. Then smartcard contactless is like RFID, which is used for door access at a lot of companies. I was just wondering, is that pos...
Our web application offers users with the option to bulk email a bunch of interesting information to multiple email addresses at once. It's fairly easy to register an account with the service and thus it's pretty easy to start spamming people with email they never wanted to receive. You can't actually change the conten...
A computer hasn't been connected to the internet for 2 weeks but has still been used. It's running Windows 8 and various notices are complaining about virus definitions and updates not being current. What's the best thing to do once it is reconnected to the internet? Just let it sit and update itself? I remember in the...
I know the hosts file is often deemed obsolete by an actual DNS, but what is/are the best way(s) to secure a hosts file (Current Best Practice)? Example: Would I delete the hosts file, input known "good" addresses, assign specific permissions to the file/make read only, host on separate single machine/server (like DNS...
Ok so basic overview of the environment I'm envisioning: Webapp w/ db backend storing sensitive data, possibly phi; standard user:pass auth due to unteachable users. My idea was to encrypt row data in sensitive tables stored in a db using a key that was derived from the user's password (ie the hashed pw using a differe...
Upon building a kernel for a small CLI system what option is the best one? I don't know much about what microkernels can do so bear with me if I'm being ignorant: In one instance, there are monolithic kernels which allow the user control over services before reaching hardware but this could compromise the kernel itself...
The default usage of HttpClient and HttpWebRequest .NET classes is setting Credentials property and then asking the class instance to perform an HTTP request. If the target requres Basic authorization the following happens (those classes do this under the hood and Fiddler shows what's going on): the first request is s...
Since I was a teenager (that's 20 years ago) and till now-days you see movies with professionals stealing a super-computer and use it to crack a password or a home security system using brute-force (I assume). However they always demonstrate by showing them trying to crack a pin or a password that consists of many digi...
I am using a VPN to ensure to encrypt my traffic. I wonder though if I could check somehow if the datastream really is encrypted?
For the past days some script kiddie has been scanning our site with w3af and some basic manual checks. Although I know the site is "secure" because I analyze it almost everyday, I'm not perfect and some hole may be found. I told my coordinator to block that IP, as he (the kid) is always attacking from the same IP, but...
I'm looking for the typical ways to generate a One Time Password. I know about the HOTP and TOPT. But, in my case, the problem is that the "server" only has a display as interface and the otp-generator-app should work on one or more mobile devices. Currently I am thinking about using a secure Pseudo Random Number Gener...
What is the best way to go about getting rid of hackers that have gained access to all my personal computers, (both old and recently purchased) phones, and even random computers I use to simply get emails out to my clients? (Ive attempted to Explain my story below) My current solution involves using Deriks boot n nuke...
I know that Gnome-keyring hashes the master password between 1000 and 2000 times. It picks a random number. I would like to ask where it saves this number, what is the location of that file? As far as I know it needs this count number when decrypting the files with saved passwords.
Per the OpenSSL announcement for CVE-2014-3508, sensitive information can be read from the stack. The OBJ_obj2txt function in crypto/objects/obj_dat.c in OpenSSL 0.9.8 before 0.9.8zb, 1.0.0 before 1.0.0n, and 1.0.1 before 1.0.1i, when pretty printing is used, does not ensure the presence of '\0' characters, which allo...
I'm trying to find a way to crack XKCD-like passphrases (correcthorsebatterystaple) from word dictionaries. Basically concatenate X number of words from a dictionary file. Right now it honestly doesn't look like there is an easy way. After the XKCD comic there were plenty of tools like this made, and I could always spi...
Problem I'm streaming MP3 files to users. Users are not allowed to share these files. I know that it's in the end impossible to not let anyone download the files. That's not the problem, people can download if they really want (but still I will try to prevent it as much as possible). No, my problem is that if someone f...
Should a test/demo/non-prod system be prohibited from using the same HSM as production? Since the same master key would be used for both test and prod it seems like it could raise eyebrows but I can't find any specific guidance around this topic.
On credit cards, the security code is printed on the back of the card (usually), on the premise that having a credit-card slip or photo of the front of the card won't allow you to use it fraudulently. Recently, I got a voucher from an airline for losing my luggage. It had a voucher number and security code, but they we...
I have a web application built with PHP with a login page where the visitor is supposed to enter his / her account's email address and matching password. Since I'm using the PHP native (slow) hashing function, every time a visitor enters the email of an existing account it will use the password verify function to check...
I've got a page with a login system where you type your username and password, the salted hash gets pulled down from the database depending on the username ... SELECT hash FROM db WHERE username = ? bind theSubmittedUsername The potential password is then run through a method to verify if its the right one or not. Is...
Here's a specific scenario that I have. I want to have subkeys on my laptop and store the master key safely. So I went ahead and created new keys: gpg --gen-key gpg (GnuPG/MacGPG2) 2.0.20; Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it. There is NO W...
I was playing a little bit with signature algorithms, trying to determine which CAs among the ones I use are currently issuing SHA2 certificates. I generated a CSR specifying the SHA256 hash (either using gnutls-certtool with the hash param and openssl req with the -sha256 param) and the CSR is clearly displaying sha25...
453.7 million social security numbers have been issued to date. There are only 1 billion = 1000 million distinct 9 digit integers. This means that if I were to make up any 9 digits, I would have roughly a 45% chance of guessing someone else's valid social security number. With that said, is it fair to say that if a cri...
Occasionally on his show, John Oliver points his viewers to the comments section of websites for companies/organizations that have done something putatively nefarious. For instance, when he pointed his viewers to the FCC's website to comment about net neutrality, the FCC was subject to a DOS attack. Now, in that case, ...
Are Android apps, specifically Chrome, isolated? Can other apps listen to other apps' activity? If so, how can apps be sandboxed?
As far as I know, IDS sniffs network traffic, and if intrusion is detected, reports it. And IPS sniffs network traffic, and if intrusion is detected, rejects it, and reports why it was blocked. Am I right? And I read that some IPS can even be configured not to drop packets, just to report them. Apart from the ability ...
I thought I would ask this question here as it as to do with security. There are a few people on my Facebook that are close to me in real life. I don't mind it in real life (considering my real life is boring), but they seem to want to know every detail about everything I post on Facebook. One person ALWAYS comments on...
According to this article on Wikipedia, a trojan horse can allow a remote connection by opening a random port if it is able to bypass the firewall. I'm not much of an expert of routers and Network Address Translation but if a trojan horse opens a connection through the firewall, how does this allow the owner of the tro...

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