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So.. There are household alarm systems (to defend against burglars) which send SMS/e-mail alerts if an intruder has been detected or an alert is trigged. However, Mobile networks can be jammed, and the phone lines and ethernet cables can be cut. Also wireless networks like WiFi (which rely on the hard-lines anyway) co...
I have some network issues in my network due to misconfiguration of Cisco router and switches. Please give me some advice or solutions to fix these vulnerabilities and configuration issues. Vulnerability Name: SSH CBC Mode Ciphers Enabled Description: CBC Mode Ciphers are enabled on the SSH Server Solution: Disable ...
I'm connected to a squid proxy that does digest authentication , and I have installed another squid proxy on my centOS 6.4 and configured it to use the upper proxy . The problem is that I need another PC to connect to my proxy without authentication and that means the authentication must be done in my proxy somewhere i...
I am a little confused on the contextual differences between permission and privilege from computer security perspective.Though I have read the definition of both the terms but it will be nice if someone can give me some practical example e.g. User A can read write file X What is privilege and permission in this case...
What does capture filter means in wireshark? Is it same as display filter?
Please read before assuming this should go in another forum (like an android forum) - this is a Security question. Here is the scenario: Developing an health care based android application that has several "credential" elements that need to be stored and used during the application context. These are not the type of cr...
A recent discussion regarding ways to keep data secure through multiple iterations of a program's execution (with repeated read/write operations) raised a question regarding known-plaintext attacks that I'd like to have a solid answer to. If I have multiple ciphertexts, and I know that they were all produced from the s...
I am building a small web app in php, that accepts .doc /.docx / .rtf and .txt files. I've validated them against their mime-types. But now I'm thinking about virus scanning. I know there are systems like siteLock that can scan your systems for malware/viruses. I also know there are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clam_An...
I have a web server, and I would like to anonymise it as much as possible, to prevent unreported exploits directed at my web server (original cracks). My ideas: change server header customize 404 pages My homepage headers: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Vary: Accept-Encoding Content-Encoding: gzip Last-Modified: Mon, 26 Aug 2013 ...
Suppose my smartphone has been compromised and there is malicious software running on it. You can assume that the malicious software has broken out of any sandboxes and is running as root. If I'm on a phone call, can the malicious software change what I'm hearing? Can it modify the audio of the phone call? In other ...
We're a website developer agency, and most of our websites are made using in Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal as a CMS. I'm having trouble to decide how we should manage our passwords, and I'm open for suggestions. We could: Use a default password for every website (big no) Generate an unique password for every website and...
I had this idea a few hours ago, but of course it already exists and there is even an RFC... Why don't we publish the fingerprint for the SSL/TLS certificate via DNS? We need DNSSEC to make sure the answer is legit and we need to make sure the nameservers are in a secure environment, but besides that I see no issues th...
I've heard about ssl strip in the past that allowed for man in the middle attacks to take place against browsers, but those vulnerabilities were patched long time ago. So my question is...are there still any form of attacks that can be used to bypass ssl encryption on sites and perform man in the middle attacks? Also w...
My company has a very large distributed network which we scan monthly for vulnerability assessment. As part of that scanning, we try to find all accessible network hosts with a ping sweep. Since zmap can be used to map the entire internet (according to reports) in around 45 minutes, could the tool be used to map an org...
I currently have a fully encrypted Windows System, and I'm looking at switching to Ubuntu. Is encrypting my home directory (with ecryptfs) sufficient? On windows this would be problematic due to software leaking out some possibly critical details, but on Linux I usually wouldn't have write permission to many places ou...
By default, Amazon S3 blocks cross-origin requests. However, it allows users the ability to set up per-bucket CORS policies. It offers fairly elaborate controls for which domains and methods the user wants to enable. To me, such conservative defaults and fine-grained settings suggest that there is some reason that I mi...
With the attack on Twitter's whois information today, I got into a bit of an argument about whether or not the SSL certificate error messages that web browsers have will actually do any good to prevent an attack, assuming that the attackers can't manage to get a valid certificate somehow. The average error page or erro...
I'm doing an assessment of a small network that is using a good bit of virtualization. They have cloned some of their linux machines after generating their SSH server host keys. So the servers all have the same host key. I'm certain this is bad, but I can't explain why. Can you explain why this would be or provide an e...
I'm doing an educational pen test exercise and I'm trying to sniff traffic from a compromised Windows machine. I've been using the post-exploitation sniffer and packetrecorder Meterpreter modules, but so far, they've only contained packets either destined for the host I'm using or broadcast traffic. I'm trying to fig...
For Android Lookout can scan an app before it is installed, and I think it scans a new app the first time it runs too. It displays the message "this app is safe" and I'm wondering, how does it determine? Does it just check for virus signatures? I'm inclined to think it does more since "this app is safe" sometimes shows...
was hoping someone could give me a hand with deciphering this obfuscated Javascript added to a webpage that I own. As the code is quite large I will just link to pastebin posts but I can add them to the post itself if needed. I'm not quite sure of the best practises and etiquette in regards to posting malicious code so...
OpenSSL 1.0.1c onwards seems to offer CMS support. I have difficulty understanding the difference between smime and pkcs7. S/MIME specs are layered on PKCS#7 (so says Wikipedia). Now in openssl I have the following commands: openssl smime openssl cms Are these equivalent commands ? Why then have two implementations...
This is a sort of security-related thought experiment. In a (slightly odd) conversation I recently had, we got to discussing ways that a file could be kept the same, even when malicious users attempt to edit it. For the purpose of this discussion, we can assume that the "attacker"'s access to the file cannot be restric...
Since Android allows for Java and Native implementation of cryptography, I would like to know how to provide a particular implementation of cryptographic algorithms (say just RSA for example). What would be the best (in terms of ease of development, ease of integration, ease of use) way to provide it? Is it as a Java ...
Recent events like the Lavabit case have shown that it is no loger possible to host a server in the United States and guarantee your users that you will keep their data confidential, because the US government can force you or your hoster through a National Security Letter to spy on your users for them while forbidding ...
I want to make a DVD movie which will be playable on a standard DVD player, but I want to make it copy restricted. I know it is practically impossible, but I just want security to protect it from normal users, not from high end software pirates. Any software freeware/shareware will help me.
I saw this behaviour many times but I never solved it. Sometimes using sqlmap after retrieving good data from columns it fails retrieving only one of them. I can't figure out why this happens for just one of the columns. This is an output sample: +-------------+--------------------------------------------------+ \| logi...
I am wondering how encryption schemes are developed and why certain decisions are made. For example. I have seen a company hash a string with SHA1 and then RSA encrypt it. Why? I've also seen the hash and plaintext be concatenated and then RSA encrypted. My (broad) question is how does combining different methodologies...
I have root login disabled in SSH and I want to be able to eliminate the possibility of a sudo user editing the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and enabling root ssh login. Is this possible?
Consider this scenario. You have a client machine which is compromised, and a "master" machine which monitors that client's status (IsCompromised = {True\|False}). The client has an agent which checks back into the master at a defined interval in order to relay this information. Assuming that the client is able to g...
I got a document with integration with another application. They mentioned I need to hash and then encrypt data with my private key before sending it over HTTPS. By doing this, they are making sure that data was not altered in the middle of transit. I wanted to know what is the reason for three layer security(SSL+SHA25...
I'm trying to setup IPsec using x509 certificates on Linux. I'm using racoon for that task. I've come to the point where the authentication works fine if I keep every link of the certificate chain on every host. My goal is to authenticate each other knowing only the Root CA. For example: for the hosts "Alice" and "Bob...
I would like to salt the pass phrase with the drive id in such a way that, if the disk were imaged to a new drive with a different id, (e.g. by a government forensics specialist) then the image would be unusable even with a correct pass phrase. NB: Which hard disk encryptions schemes are tied to the original hardware? ...
This issue is more political than technical. The organization has a lot of computers that connect via web browser to a central database. Customers are regularly left unattended with physical access to the terminals for over 15 minutes at a time. I reported that they are vulnerable to hardware keyloggers. The official I...
We've discovered today that our Joomla website has been hacked by a pharmacy trojan. It was difficult to discover because most users don't see it when visiting our website. One user reported about 2 weeks ago that our site contains viagra/pharmacy spam. We've looked into it, but found nothing. The conclusion was that t...
I have setup S/MIME encryption for my email address, and I'd like to allow people to download the public key from my website, rather than having to first receive an email from me. I want the public key next to the email address on my website's "contact me" page. Is there a file format/extension commonly supported by va...
After reading this article, I can see the benefits of password hashing as a second layer of defence, in the event of an intruder gaining access to a password database. What I still don't understand is this: Isn't password hashing only important if the system is weak enough to give an intruder access to the password da...
I am a student and working in the field of IT Security for 1 and a half year . I want to know about the best IT security companies for Internships and their general requirements in an intern ?
I recently read about the $subject. Q: Why does a programming language has built-in trivial insecurity? Or.. it was just in the old times? How could this be?
I want to render user uploaded HTML (consisting of possibly many files with images, custom css, custom js, all uploaded in a zip file) for preview purpose. The user that submits the html will be the only one to access it. I want the user's HTML to be isolated from the rest of my website (no access to javascript, no css...
We have an internal system and I am trying to determine if the system is in scope for the purposes of PCI-DSS compliance. The system is completely internal, no public access. The system hold user information that includes an account number. It is possible that this account number might be an PAN from a credit card, alt...
I have captured wifi traffic from a WPA network using Wireshark. I filtered the results for "eapol" packets and noted in the info column there are message type 3 and type 1. I believe this is two parts of the WPA four-way handshake. Within these packets I see things like 802.1X Authentication, where will I find the has...
I am storing multiple sensitive data on a server that I do not own. The data is encrypted using aes-256 using cbc mode. The keys are only with me, and are stored securely. I am worried about the data getting corrupted on the server via transfer (this I fix by doing an md5 hash after the ssh transfer is done). The other...
Does anyone know how ssl ciphers are nogitiated via the xmpp protocol. When I capture packets, I see: <starttls xmlns='urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-tls'/> There is no hello server/client or cipher negotiation, like http. Can anyone point to somewhere I can get more information
If I set up a Domain Controller server to be accessible from the internet via Remote Desktop Connection (through port forwarding in the router), how much of a threat would that be? and if I have a strong administrator password? and if there are users with weak passwords? Which mitigation steps could be taken? EDIT: ...
I was going through the logs of my application hosted on IIS 7.5. I found a request like the following: 2013-08-19 08:14:10 192.168.200... HEAD //DSL/ - 80 - 115.114.27... DirBuster-0.12+(http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_DirBuster_Project) 404 6 0 62 Is this some kind of attack? I have searched google fo...
Should we allow JSPs to change on a running application server on a production system? My gut feeling is no. However, I can't seem to find any information to justify it. From a performance end, having to detect and recompile the JSPs will cause slow down for the user. You also lose the capability of precompiling the ...
According to the Stripe FAQ, they are PCI-compliant. Also, in their API documentation, one of the parameters to create a new card is the CVC (although, granted, it is optional). So, I assume they store the CVC for subsequent credit card transactions. But the PCI DSS strictly forbids you to store CVV, CVC etc. So how c...
I recently read the Ars Technical Article about new features in ocl-Hashcat-plus. In light of questions like: Long Passwords: How are they more secure? and XKCD #936: Short complex password, or long dictionary passphrase? Are pass "phrases" like "correct horse battery staple" guessed by the new features in ocl-Hashcat-...
I am designing a simple online patient management system that is running on shared hosting. According to national regulation sensitive data should be encrypted when used online, so I have encrypted all sensitive fields such as name, phone, address and blood type. My problem is now how I should store the key? If the key...
So, I configure my VPN (let say which uses PPTP protocol), enter the server name, username and password. Then, I visit a website. Before that, my request is encrypted using AES with some key. That request is sent to the VPN. How does that VPN decrypt data? How can it know what the key is? How is that key obtained betwe...
i use the following password-generator (python) and would like to ask if the generated passwords (usually 32 characters and more) are random enough. def pwgen(l=32): from random import Random rng = Random() a = "qwertzuiopasdfghjklyxcvbnm" n = "1234567890" r = "23456qwertasdfgzxcvbQWERTASDFGZXCVOB"...
I guess you have heard of Edward Snowden. Papers around the world published that the NSA invests much time, money and effort for a »full take« of the communication around the world. Given this, it seems -- without too much knowledge of computers -- plausible, that people who invest large amounts of money in such action...
I have a hashed password and the plaintext password and i want to know the exact algorithm that's been used. I have the input and the output of the hash/encription algorithm. How would I know what algorithm is used?
I have recently discovered that a co-worker (who has sudo privileges on my machine) has installed dsniff, and it has been there for a while. I have no idea when they ran it (if at all), the only command I found in their bash_history with dsniff is apt-get install dsniff although bash_history doesn't show commands run w...
This strange site came up as the second result in a google search for itunes. http://download-new.com/apple-itunes/ (Although the url in the result read itunes.download-new.com.) Embarrassingly, I downloaded and ran the "iTunes_Setup.exe" from them (I was stupidly trying to work on two computers at once and was barely ...
In a large network if there is an Ethernet port in the wall, is it possible to tell if a switch or wireless adapter is plugged into it? (I'm talking about the cheap home routers - with the built in switch). In other words would packets appear different than those coming from a single computer?
We just completed functionality testing of our new e-commerce site and going to launch.We are accepting credit card payments. I'm really concerned about it's security.What are the precautions to be taken? I'm not so good at web security. Please advice.
If I bring the mouse pointer to a link, but not click on it, I can see in the left/bottom corner that it displays the URL of it. Q: Could this URL (in the left/bottom) be different from the one that my Web browser will go? (don't count that server side can be redirected with an eg.: HTTP 302) Question is just because ...
I am trying to view a https site (which worked perfectly fine till yesterday) and Chrome is showing me that the site's security certificate is not trusted. I am on a home network. How can I know if the certificate is a problem or my network ?
If on a Windows machine, an antivirus program has found a Win32:Rootkit in a file ...\Temp\...\xy.exe.part, could the file possibly already have caused damage or not given that it seems to be an "incomplete" file?
Does Tor have any protection against an adversary simply running a very large number of nodes? Someone with the necessary resources could just run thousands of relay nodes (including exit nodes). If they were an organization like the NSA, they could also make the major hosting companies running nodes turn over the priv...
I'm dealing with a 3rd party vendor that clearly does not understand security - to access their API from my back-end I have to supply the end user's ID/user/password for the 3rd party service with each batch of requests. I'm fighting with them to at least implement some sort of revocable token based authentication, but...
I'm looking forward to pass data from a node A to a node B using asymmetric cryptography, but with one (huge) constraint: When A sends data to B, it is possible that B is offline. I would like to be able to read the message as soon as B came online, even if A is not online any longer. It is not a problem to add other n...
I have several private keys that I use to ssh into AWS, dreamhost, github, etc. I have passphrases for all of these private keys that are too complex to remember. I have mysql passwords that my application and I both have to know. Whats a convenient and secure way to keep track of all of this? My initial thought is ...
I see that some product are shipped with a default server certificate. I guess that a lot of these installed products still use the default server certificate in a real environment. If your server certificate is known (eg. someone know which server certificate you are using and can download it), is your HTTPS still se...
Does SELinux support monitoring accesses to an object type? I would like to log all instances where sensitive files are accessed.
Dear Security Mavens (of which I am not), Your thoughts & suggestions regarding an application architecture for a mobile web application (e.g., HTML5 with Sencha Touch) are invited & welcomed. To what degree would/does the use of queues (e.g., Amazon AWS' SQS) increase/decrease/have no effect on mobile web app security...
I’m considering enabling WoL (Wake on LAN) on the workstations on my network. In order to boot a workstation using WoL I require its MAC address. I could store the MAC address in a database, however I’d much rather store it as an attribute of the computer object in AD. My intention is to write a startup script that wil...
It seems to me that if you were to use multiple hash functions, the "strongest link" would hold up the others. For example: HelloWorld --- md5 --> 68e109f0f40ca72a15e05cc22786f8e6 --- sha256 --> bdbf17386fbfd51980abdf024e236f5b4d9c2431b3102c0358db4afe2f188db6 MD5 is considered insecure, but since they still have t...
For the last few months I have been using the Firefox addon Certificate Patrol to watch for changes to sites' SSL certs - so as to know if I am being MTIMed, against which SSL otherwise provides no protection. However, almost every time I visit either Google or any site which uses Google Analytics or Google's CDN for s...
I'm looking for a low-cost Hardware Security module, and discovered that YubiKey has a HSM mode. I'm not entirely clear if this HSM mode is what I'm thinking, but I'd like to use it as the offline Root CA if possible. Given that I've never used a HSM before, and am lacking in concepts on how it's typically used, my eff...
The YubiKey personalization tool allows someone to configure a YubiKey for HOTP, challenge response, and a variety of other authentication formats. YubiKey offers a number of personalization tools for both logical slots of the hardware device. When I ran the personalization tool on OSX it appears I can view and edit th...
Correct me if I misunderstand the following quoted paragraphs, but basically to compress something it must be decrypted first. This seems to be the claim of the article but I don't see this as true. For example if a01 10b a01 is encryupted to ccc c02 ccc then compression can still happen e.g. substitute x for ccc Anywa...
If you are sent a program written by someone so that you have the complete source code, how would you go about scanning the source code for any potential viruses/malware? Note: While bugs and security risks in the program itself are also important to find, this relates specifically to malware written into the program....
I'm looking at the source code of some potentially hostile code. As usual, VS 2012 is giving me the security warning: "You should only open projects from a trustworthy source" ... "ask me for every project in this solution" If I press OK, without compiling and running the code, what could be done to my machine? Wha...
Suppose I run a book club, and each of the members sign into my website using an OAuth token from Google, Twitter, Live, or LinkedIn. When the book club becomes popular, we discover that 3rd party apps want to read data from our database. We store things like: the list of books each person has read, the queue, and wha...
I have a client that wants to protect access to a web app in case the employee leaves because the app gives access to clients, sales, etc. He wants to "hide" the login credentials to this app and asked us to write a login app that would need to be launched first, then the app would log the user in. This way the user wo...
Let's say two computers have the same decentralized chat program. Each user has to have an ip address and port number to send the message to another person. Each message is encrypted using, let's say, AES. The only problem is to know public keys. Is that it? If yes, why don't we have any popular decentralized chat syst...
Can malware change words that I have typed and then saved in the computer'? If so, how likely is this?
I'm learning about DEP implementations, now I'm trying to figure out how does the OS know which part of memory is intended to hold data only?
Microsoft Azure Mobile services exclusively uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication, and many other providers mention the use of OAuth 2.0 specifically when referring to mobile devices. Question What makes OAuth 2.0 more appealing than OpenID specifically for mobile devices? Is there a reason to use OAuth 2.0 that isn't exc...
What happens if I use VPN and then configure my firefox browser to use SOCKS proxy? Am I then behind both or just proxy?
First of all, my objective is to avoid storing the salt in the database as plain text. As far as this question is concerned, the salt is not stored in the database. After discussion in comments and in chat, I've come up with a theory: It appears that using domain_name + user ID alongside a pepper will provide a suffici...
I have installed Apache 2.4.6 on my server and have the following virtual host config: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost ServerName foobar1.com DocumentRoot /home/john/foobar1/foobar1.com <Directory /home/john/foobar1/foobar1.com> Options -Indexes +FollowSymLinks +MultiViews ...
There are cases of fonts being used for exploiting vulnerabilities (for ex: ThreatPost, SecureList and F-Secure). My question is if you ever get hands on such a font, how do you know that it is malicious?
I have an application I am trying to bring to market and I want to ensure that nothing in it is picked up by a virus scanner (since that would reflect badly on me). Since I only have a single scanner on my machine (MSE), I'm finding it hard to test it in as many different scanners as possible. I have found VirusTotal d...
What was SSL 1.0? SSL 2.0 and 3.0 are well-known and well-documented. But what did the SSL 1.0 protocol look like? Wikipedia says there was a SSL 1.0 but doesn't say anything about how it worked. Why was SSL 1.0 superseded/replaced? Did it have security flaws? If so, what were they?
A popular car insurance company in the US has an app that displays "digital car insurance" papers. In the commercials, these apps are opened, and the user gives the unlocked phone to police officers. It's not unreasonable to imagine what could happen in these situations when someone has unrestricted access to a phone...
We want to implement a feature similar to IIS in how it remembers user configured usernames and passwords. As I understand it, when you configure IIS to use a set of credentials for an app pool identity and run under the context of that identity using those credentials (username and password), it also then stores the...
As many of you probably do, I am not using my ISP DNS because of very low performance, and I am using Google's primary and secondary DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) which are good speed-wise but, knowing Google's ethics, probably not so much privacy-wise. So my question is: if somebody uses Google's DNS, do extensions like A...
Firstly, some important backstory. I'm producing a corporate version of an IM/VOIP/Screensharing client using the Open Source Jitsi. We are going to be using a central server and have already confirmed that TLS encryption is good to go and that the XMPP test messages are not being transmitted in plaintext (Wireshark). ...
Is it possible to recovery data from SSD, that was secure erased (https://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/ATA_Secure_Erase), by IT or professional data recovery company? Does this type of erasing reduce liftime of SSD?
Does anybody know of any packaging which measures elapsed time from the time of opening? I have conducted a great deal of research and have found packaging which monitors exposure to temprature and changes in temprature, light, humidity, etc. but not elapsed time. Thank you.
While doing a Risk Assessment, I found that in some old RA documents, after controls have been placed, the Impact in the forcasted value was changed that did not make sense to me. To me the impact never changes as the impact of a critical service being down is the same whether a control is in place or not. What changes...
FireWire has security issues. But what happens if there aren't any FireWire ports on the given machine, and the operating system doesn't support FireWire, like OpenBSD? I mean converters like: usb to firewire converter pcmcia to firewire converter etc. Are there any FireWire security issues when we are talking about...
I recently found Caja which looks like an effective way of preventing XSS. From their site: The Caja Compiler is a tool for making third party HTML, CSS and JavaScript safe to embed in your website. It enables rich interaction between the embedding page and the embedded applications. Caja uses an object-capabil...
Is it possible to execute xss under the following conditions? The following blocked characters and words are replaced with _. characters: > , : , ; , " , ' , # , ~ , \ , % , ( , ) , [ , ] , { , } , [space] keywords: alert, confirm, prompt, href, body, onload, src= The input into the get variable will be echoed back t...
I've recently been learning about how ASLR (address space randomization) works on Linux. At least on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there are two kinds of executable programs: Position Independent Executables (PIEs) receive strong address randomization. Apparently, the location of everything is randomized, sep...
When a system requires a password between say 6 and 20 characters in length, does it mean the password is stored without using a hashing function, and that the mysql-field (or similar) is 20 characters in length? Is there any reason to have a maximum length if a hashing function is used? I'm thinking maybe a DOS-vulner...

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