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I'm studying network and system security and I came across the phrase "web of trust". From Wikipedia: In cryptography, a web of trust is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to establish the authenticity of the binding between a public key and its owner. Its decentralized trust mode...
I've noticed that websites start to use 256-bit symmetric encryption, but often still end up using 2048-bit RSA keys. http://www.keylength.com/en/3/ The link above displays the ECRYPT II recommendations, which state that 128-bit symmetric and 3248-bit asymmetric encryption have a compareable strength. The NIST recommen...
During monitoring of webserver logs I've stumbled upon those standard probings for wordpress exploits etc, like No route found for "GET /wp-login.php" (uncaught exception) No route found for "GET /administrator/" (uncaught exception) No route found for "GET /admin.php" which I understand. However sometimes I get GET r...
How can I prevent a user on the domain from launching a denial-of-service attack against Active Directory by scripting bad password attempts against every user in the domain?
Assume I have a Root CA that I want to share with hostile untrusted 3rd parties. Then constrain this root using specific EKUs at the root. OID=1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.4 ; Secure Email Next, create a Policy CA (controlled by the root) to restrict the permissions granted to untrusted CAs using Path=1, and Name Constr...
If I click on a download link on a page that uses ssl, will the download also use ssl? If the answer is not (or: sometimes yes, sometimes not) - is there any way I can force it to be protected? I'm asking this because downloading a program, and having it being tampered on the way can be just as bad, if not worse, than ...
My wife and I run an online business. For a long time we would accept credit cards over our website, and cash or bank drafts in person. However, as time went on my wife picked up the Square to process credit card payments in person and our customers really like this. Due to the nature of our business (much of the furni...
Can anyone give me an idea? Assume the salt(s) is/are known. For example, if I have a $k$-character long password that is hashed in MD5 versus bcrypt, is there a way to estimate how much more time it would take to brute-force in bcrypt versus MD5? I know this is a vague question that depends on many factors, but feel f...
Are there known attacks that can intercept an ongoing Remote Assistance session, for example to take screenshots or even worse, impersonate the other computer and send arbitrary keystrokes, or to connect to an inactive session before the real person that is supposed to "assist" me connects ? Background : I often use Re...
Suppose somebody hijacks my session , say using Firesheep. Then what happens if I logout, does the hijacked session also end ? Also, does using LAN wire instead of WiFi prevents session hijacking ?
Imagine a CMS with authentication where the author of each article has to be stored in the database. Now I want to make it harder to analyze (by crawling or stealing the database) who has written which article, while at the same time keeping that information for each user, so each user can see which articles he has wri...
I have a web server running at example.com. The web server performs a server-side request to example.com which results in a loopback, so the request never passes over the network. Is this request susceptible to a MITM attack? If so, how?
I generally do all of my web browsing in a VM. I have one "safe" VM running Ubuntu that has guest services installed. I generally only go to sites I deem are trustworthy here. I also have an "unsafe" VM with Ubuntu that does not have the guest services installed. Tonight I was using the unsafe VM to browse some less th...
What are the steps to use an exploit on an OS vulnerability? I tried the popular ms08-067 on an XP machine, following a guide found on the internet, discovering Metasploit etc., but I can't figure out what to do with another OS in a different situation. How does one find remote/local vulnerabilities, and how to know wh...
I want to know how Facebook discovers the people who you know in real life or who know you. I tried the following to see if Facebook can still discover my acquaintances in real life and suggest them to me as a friend. I connected using a VPN (an anonymous VPN, not one of those free VPN services). I have confirmed tha...
How can i protect my Linux and Windows partitions from being wiped,from a windows installation CD,with password?
I am thinking about a log-in web service that would store a users username, password, and (optional) email address. If they forget their username or password, they can have their username and a reset-password-link, sent to their email address (if they entered one at sign up). I have no wish to contact users at any othe...
I need to choose a certification authority (CA), to get a certificate, but I noticed that there are several of these only present in some operating systems/platforms like windows. I need to choose one that is present also in Linux (the more distributions the best) and mac. Is there such a list/resoucer?
Or are they just an attempt to get you to pay more money to a CA because it tells your browser to show the address bar in green with your organization's name? Also, what are the technical details of EV certificates? What exactly makes a certificate contain EV in the certificate's details?
If I have software that's like TrueCrypt where security is very important, but unlike TrueCrypt because mine won't mysteriously go offline for seemingly no reason at all, how can I prove that my binaries that I post on the site match the source code that has been independently verified? In this question, it seems inde...
About a month and a half ago I got infected by a virus called MSIL.Bladabindi. I noticed the virus quite soon because google notified me that someone from Turkey tried to access my account (I'm in Italy). Then I looked for the access history and found out that 67.221.255.65 (which I think is a proxy, maybe related to s...
I'm rewriting a legacy PHP web application that makes heavy use of MCrypt. It's on a shared host and handles payment data as well as personally identifiable information. What is a suitable replacement, if any, besides OpenSSL?
I've been dealing with two separate banks for completing a 401k rollover (I do not have any other accounts with either of the two banks), and I've encountered something with both that I've never seen at any of the banks I usually work with. Both banks have asked for my website password over the phone, when requesting t...
Apache POI is a Java library for processing office documents. What are the risks associated with processing untrusted documents? For example, a web site that allows users to upload documents that are processed using POI. A potential risk I'm aware of in document parsing is that a document can reference a local resource...
Consider back in the 90s you're ahead of the curve, you hashed and salted your passwords with SHA, and you're a big site, millions of accounts, etc. Well the web evolves, and over time more advanced security measures become expected and common place. Key stretching, more advanced hardware, cheaper hardware, etc. Lets i...
I recently saw a film where the police were able to locate where the criminal was because the GSM network operator knew the name of the Wi-Fi access point the phone of the criminal was connected to when a SMS text message was sent from the phone. Is this realistic? Does a mobile phone broadcast the name of the Wi-Fi ac...
I'm studying network and system security and I came across the phrase Web of Trust: In cryptography, a web of trust is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to establish the authenticity of the binding between a public key and its owner. Its decentralized trust model is an alternativ...
The Web application I'm working on is 100% SSL secured (or rather TLS as it is called today...). The application recently has been audited by a security company. I mostly agree with their results but there was one thing that led to great debates: As part of the password change process for users, the user has to provide...
A fairly new concept in Malware, especially in the case of botnets, is the emergence of social botnets. These botnets are comprised of accounts (either a newly created account or an existing hijacked account) on social networking sites. Based on what I have researched, social botnets are currently active in social netw...
Assuming the use of bcrypt/scrypt: Would it be a good idea to "require" a password of at least 12 characters, also mentioning the possibility of using long passphrases, instead of your typical 8-character-minimum uppercase/lowercase/special char pass requirement? It seems like there is a tradeoff between ease of memory...
On the RFC 6101, about "Certificate Verify", I read that: "This message is used to provide explicit verification of a client certificate. This message is only sent following any client certificate that has signing capability (i.e., all certificates except those containing fixed Diffie-Hellman parameters)." Why fixed ...
Assuming the client supports different keys, what is some rationale that should be considered for signing and encryption keys? The encryption key needs to be present on each device that is used to read email all those copies means it has a greater risk of getting lost or stolen on mobile devices (and therefore should...
How exactly did the recent TweetDeck vulnerability work? It says here that it had something to do with the HTML heart character but I don't fully understand what the explanation means. From the link: " I was tweeting about the HTML-heart-symbol (♥), because I didn't know that this is possible," He told The Register ...
At my work, we've been using Network Solution eCommerce for many years now, and they have been working very well for us. However, as the years go on, their services become more and more outdated. As a web developer in 2014, working with a strictly table-based layout is frustrating. The constant need to us JavaScript to...
I'm a developer for a web site; we have a small blog powered by Movable Type that we added a few years ago. The blog doesn't get a lot of traffic or attention; we just noticed a couple of days ago that the links to the blog were broken, caused by several of the symlinks involved in our installation being missing; howev...
Is using something like bcrypt or scrypt necessary? The hashes are so much longer to store in a database. Can one get away with using salted MD5 or SHA and still be secure?
Due to past experiences, I have learned that when I'm contemplating purchasing a suitable domain name, I should NOT do so by searching on the websites of domain registrars (GoDaddy, name.com, etc.). This is because when I have done so in the past and did not immediately purchase the domain name, I attempt to purchase t...
How to determine what type of encoding/encryption has been used? This link discusses in the first answer a "128 bit" value. How do you know that it is 128-bit and what is a 128bit value? If I md5sum a string on Linux and then do it on the internet, I get different results. Why is this? Same with any other hash algorith...
If I as layman don't err, there are in banking controls, from both internal and national oversights, of the work done by the employees. These are apparently effective, since the details of transactions can be audited and verified from recordings. Are there essentially comparable controls of the work of the employees in...
Much in the same way compilers has the dragon book, algorithms has the Cormen, and graphics has Foley & van Dam I am wondering what the book on computer security is. Not the "best" book, or the most practical, or the "hacking handbook", but the classic book on the fundamental theoretical concepts behind information sec...
I've just read this piece of news that Android and Windows phones will get a 'killswitch', rendering them useless to potential thieves. However, since all devices have a unique identification number (IMEI), why haven't mobile operators been blacklisting phones designated as stolen? I've worked in telecommunications and...
I asked this question first on Stack Overflow but it was suggested that Information Security would be a better place for it (pretty obvious in hindsight). https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24304756/in-two-step-authentication-should-i-check-step-1-before-proceeding-to-step-2-or I have a typical web application forms a...
I have some VPS servers which I manage through ssh. However there are many ports which I want open during development, therefore I also have OpenVPN on them. Now I am wondering if it would make sense requiring a OpenVPN connection for ssh access. Is there any practical security advantage on a ssh connection through a ...
For example, on the user registration page, is it safe to tell people "Your password will be stored as a one-way hash using the (whatever) algorithm."
Am I being hacked? Firefox is displaying this warning to me: This site does not supply identity information. Connection with this site is not totally safe because it contains unencrypted elements (such as images). Permissions: open popup windows: allow. Clicking on "more info", on the "security" tab it says Sit...
On this page, it says the first thing sent is the SSL settings, such as version, and cipher settings. If the attacker, say, wanted to change the encryption method used, what makes this not possible?
I'm developing a personal web framework, nothing internetty, and probably not even anything that will ever go on my personal LAN. And looking for password advice people seem to only recommend those libraries in the title. I'm doing this to learn security from a development perspective, and again, I'm aware this isn't b...
This is all just for curiosity's sake, so discussion on which hashing algorithm is harder/better/faster/stronger is irrelevant. But my question/thought is this.. With regards to password storage, and to prevent hash collisions, I was thinking that one possibility would be to create one hash that is basically salted and...
IANA maintains a registry of TLS cipher suites at TLS Parameters. TLS provides TLS_RSA_WITH_AES_128_CBC_SHA, its value is {0x00, 0x2f}, and its available in TLS 1.0 and above. The AES cipher suites were added to TLS with RFC 3268, AES Ciphersuites for TLS in 2002. However, AES cipher suites were not added to SSLv3 beca...
I would like to start by saying I'm not looking for someone to write a script for me, or even tell me how to do so. I just want to have a good understanding as to how CBC-R works with Laravel cookies. I recently read an article(Cookie Forgery) regarding Laravel cookie forgery, decryption, and Remote Code Execution. In ...
What kind of attack surface is there for a site that only hosts static content: HTML, images, CSS? How can sites like this be successfully penetrated?
I want to set up an instance of Firefox to be used to access a strictly limited "white list" of websites (my bank's, my credit cards', etc.). How can I harden such an instance of Firefox to reduce (eliminate?) the possibility of straying outside of the white listed sites? Since this instance of FF will not be used for ...
I recently stumbled upon some password entries in LDAP marked with the {crypt} scheme. Since all recent entries are {CRYPT}, I was wondering what the differences between the hash algorithms are.
In Malaysia, our service providers are giving us a router with remote-admin available. It has come to my attention that with a simple line I'm able to find out the routers username and password. I'm wondering what could a hacker do if he had access to my router? my router does not show my external IP. It only shows my ...
I want to listen to my voicemails in a secure but convenient fashion. I plan do this by having my PBX encrypt the voicemail using openssl aes 256 cbc with salt and a single static password. The voicemail would be emailed to my Gmail address where I am creating an chrome app to decrypt it using the established static pa...
Do hidden networks send beacons? I have seen hidden networks in backtrack and Ubuntu using airodump-ng. The output is weird like the power is shown as -1. Why does this happen? As you can see here there are no beacons for a hidden network.
When I try to establish a Mutual authentication between server and client, I am getting the errors below. The timing between the server and client is exactly same and also the certs are proper in server and client. What is the cause for this error and what are the possible ways to occur this error? Thread-10, WRITE: ...
If I simply connect to an SSH server, get its key fingerprint, and immediately disconnect, does the SSH protocol ensure that the server also had the private key in order to get that far into the handshake? That is, could this entire connection have been spoofed by someone pretending to be the server, but did not posses...
I'm considering using SCEP to enroll iPads and other devices in my network. The iOS configuration profile allows me to configure a different password for each device. Is it valid, and safe for me to issue many different SCEP passwords, and upon submission of the request, that a server-side process cross-references tha...
My manager says we don't need to salt our passwords because people are not likely to use the same password because they all have different native languages, in addition to the websites they are active at. What is the best counter argument to this?
If no two users use the same password, then in theory salting the password hash is not needed. How often, in practice, do two users have the same password?
Where do browsers store HTTP Authentication credentials ? If I gain access to a browser, is there some place I can look where all HTTP Authentication details would be available? In most browsers, even after clearing all history, the credentials are not cleared. Only on closing the browser are these credentials cleared....
I want to allow any-sized passwords to be allowed to be submitted. I currently use bcrypt as a key derivation function for passwords, however I have realized that it has a maximum input length of 72. Because of this, I would like to sha512 passwords before passing them to bcrypt, allowing any-sized passwords to regist...
Is this recommended or a good/normal practice? I think not. Because I saw that OwnCloud stores all encryption keys in one directory on the server. One directory contains the private key(s) and one all public keys. But their documentation says about their encryption: "But you should make sure to never lose this passw...
If you had a very complex and important function in C that you wanted to protect, would it be worth it to put a 65K buffer at the top of the stack to protect from buffer overflows? You would put your important buffers below the 65K buffer so that the stack looks like this: [Saved EIP] // higher adddresses [ ... ] [...
I am trying to understand the concept of Boolean Based Blind SQL Injection. I have gone through OWASP Guide To SQLi to understand it. However I am confused with how exactly does it work. Below is what I understand from the article in the above link. Please let me know if my understanding is correct or if I am misunders...
I just noticed something today, and Now I am curious... I was on my shell server, an i was wondering who was on, so I gave the command $w and saw this: j0h@server:~$ w 22:06:02 up 18 days, 7:02, 3 users, load average: 0.71, 0.35, 0.17 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT j0h tt...
Wondering if there was a possible attack vector still around for LFI attacks that remove the file extension. Obviously the null byte was fixed in previous PHP versions and no longer works, along with file truncation. To clarify, is there a method of reading /etc/passwd with this code in PHP 5.4.4+ assuming worst case ...
I've a ssh host key login setup in a remote server, for some reason, the DNS of that host is mapped to another server. So assume the mistaken host cannot be trusted, should I change my key?
I am trying to generate RSA 1024 key pair (public/private) using the following command openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024 In the server.key file, only RSA private block is there, so where does the public key go ?
My computer won't let me log into my account. On the Windows sign in screen it has my account name, but when I put in my password, it always says my password is wrong. No Caps Lock. This happened just after I configured MadMACs to "Run on Startup" and rebooted Windows! Can MadMACs change/corrupt Windows' login passwor...
Disclaimer: I know I should use bcrypt to securely store user's passwords. Please, keep reading. I want to store credentials for several email services for each user. So if I log in with my username and password (which is properly hashed), then I can access several emails, including 2 @hotmail, 1 @gmail, my university ...
I am a staff member of a large fanfic site, but not the head administrator with control over the site itself. Recently, we had a security breach and the databases were copied, which included the users' usernames, emails, and password hashes. We put a notice on the front page telling people that we were hacked and that ...
I have just received an email from a close friend, which had "Pionee Red" as the subject, and the following body: you've a new private message from your friend Click To View The Full Message As I hovered over the link, the following address appeared: http://107.183.127.168/l/?gapaxobi=xayimasodo&batipikumemajojipo=&id...
I have been asked to compare "officially" some pentest certifications, namely: GIAC CEH OPST OSCP ...and if you have some more, they're welcome! Now, I have my points of view and I don't want to be biased by them, hence I would like to ask you if you have some references to benchmarks or comments around the netwo...
I am using the following iptables rules for port knocking. Everything works well, but it open the port for just a second and then close it. So how to improve this script to accept connection for a 30 seconds for example ? #!/bin/sh iptables -F iptables -X iptables -Z iptables -N STATE0 iptables -A STATE0 -p udp --dpo...
I'm learning that much of the security advice I come across under the "hardening" heading simply does not apply to a single-user home desktop box sitting in a private wireless IPv4 LAN behind a Comcast cable modem. Furthermore, FWIW, this system is Unix-based, and sudo is used whenever superuser privileges are needed....
I am to reinstall an old Windows XP installation. Before I format the drive, I have to backup some data (~200GB) like .doc files, pdfs, photos to an external hard drive. My concern is that this installation might be infected. My presumption, or rather fear, is that if it is infected, the infection might live on in the ...
I'm working on a small web service that provides some functionality that can be embedded in a web page with an iframe. As this is a subscription-based service, I'd like to be able to manage who can and cannot access the functionality in question via API keys. My understanding is that one popular approach is to embed a...
One of my friends rents a VPS on which he runs around 20 websites, some of them for small businesses. He has been having some security issues and has asked me to help assess the vulnerability of his box (I'm just an undergraduate interested in infosec). I have managed to gain root on the MariaDB database, and am now at...
The fact that carriers deploy the latest security updates to Android devices much later than Google does to Google Play Edition and Nexus devices, should we avoid using those devices altogether?
Someone sent me a Starbucks gift card. The email contained a redemption link, and that redemption link ended in a long secure hash, much like those on github secret gists. Clicking the redemption link took me to a page with a single form field, asking me to enter the email address the link was sent to. After entering...
The recent news item Chinese Star N9500 Android smartphone contains factory-installed Trojan, says security firm has prompted me to think about firmware security. The news mentions the spyware is part of the device's firmware. This makes me worry: How can I detect when firmware is stealing my information? What can I d...
We all can read news about "Hardware trojans" (it has grown in the recent few years..). But my question is: Besides the network card, could there be any HW trojan that can cause any real damage? If I would need to put a HW trojan in a server/computer, then I would put it in the NIC, since I can only reach the machine...
I'm quite new to this, so don't be too hard on me. I'm currently using the CipherMail MTA to generate e-mail encryption certificates. I created an own CA and public and private keys for our contact mail adress. I want to post the public key and the certificate on our website so that clients may encrypt mails toward us...
It seems that WordPress retrieves all the crypto constants remotely (via HTTPS): // setup-config.php $secret_keys = wp_remote_get( 'https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/' ); Are there any benefits to doing this instead of generating the keys locally? Is this completely unnecessary? Will it only provide anoth...
I have a peculiar case to work on. We are using a proprietary product which supports LDAP integration. However, it can be configured to use only one LDAP service. (most of the products are shipped that way). Now, our customers want to login to this product with their own authentication authority. So, the question is, ...
I was challenged by a friend to decrypt a piece of text that was somehow encrypted. The encrypted text is the following: LY3IoH5HWSnp9-efCfOH3jqmoGaXdURF4YAKgIh2KotjHLyFbLBgXr0uzPu1-K0sEGUogoTduKF1_eklAVzOlEfziqIvqtlhZeJPF8H2ER0jLc25jPC8_AOPlAvTHKdA8BVPFPwu1Ldaul4IPBVWJSJc5fhTGJAjfSL2Rum-pW8VCSJwnB3LZR1ACVR0KN0HCv7hIKJ...
I have a problem. I'm not sure, but I think that somebody found out a password to my Facebook account and sometimes logs in. Is there a way to find out whether it is true? There must be something like Facebook connects log but I'm not sure if it would be helpful in my situation.
I'm currently working on an Android app in which I want to authenticate someone against an REST API. I want to do this as secure as is (cost-)effective/possible/user friendly. I've been looking around and found that 2FA (two factor authentication) seems the most viable solution (after initiating the sign up process I'l...
In presence of 'trust certificates' & other attributes .. how important is this? Does OpenSSL implement it now & If not why does OpenSSL not implement? This is between non browser client & server.
Are there any tools for sandboxing Iceweasel (Firefox) on Debian systems? I'm mostly interested in tools distributed by Debian. (An equally trustworthy source would be second best.) (I suppose that installing VirtualBox and running Iceweasel (or Firefox) within it would effectively sandbox the browser, but VirtualBox...
How long would it take to crack passwords up to 10 letters long if you knew the hashes were MD5 with a salt (that you know)?
What protocols get encrypted and go through the VPN? Is it just port 80 and DNS traffic that does not go through the VPN? Does this impose any security risks by running a split tunnel? Making the assumption that maybe we connected to a rogue AP by mistake because it looked exactly like a public wifi spot. I know that r...
There are many programs available (like NSIS) that generate installers from a collection of files. One thing that I have noticed is, the installers produced by these programs have some kind of integrity checking built into them. For a moment I thought that this was perhaps meant not as a security measure, but only to p...
I am buying a new Thinkpad with an in-built GPS/Cellular modem. I am thinking what are the best practices for making the notebook secure in case of theft. I am planning to do full disk encryption and use ESET NOD anti-theft tracking option when somebody logs in to Windows in case of theft(don't know how useful that wil...
I have a server that communicates with clients over a .NET socket. I want the server to authenticate the connection in an SSO kind of style by checking that the current user is in a certain group. The naive way is to send System.Environment.UserName to the server and let it determine the user permissions in this way. H...
If ca's act in the interests of an eavesdropper, what is the worst they cold do? I guess they can decrypt traffic not using perfect forward secrecy and impersonate the server. Is this the case?
I use someone's wifi network. Is there anyway to stop him by getting my browsing information or can I somehow hide my browsing history from him?
I understand the utility in having one application remember a bunch of long, randomized passwords, but all you'd need is one well-placed phishing scam or a keylogger and they get all the keys to the kingdom. Has there been any progress in this area? I want to consider using a password manager but feel incredibly uncomf...

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