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I'm taking the Azure lab LoadBalancing with WCF and recognise what I have been told is bad from a security perspective, but am not sure if it applies here. Can someone look at this code and tell me if different certificates should be used in production code? public class RsaSessionSecurityTokenHandler : SessionSecurity...
Schneier's law (which should probably be called Babbage's Law). States that: Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break. I think its clear that this law can be applied to any security system, not just cryptography. What are some good m...
We have certain client data which must be encrypted at all times. The part we have been struggling with is encrypting files on network shares. Currently we have network folders encrypted using PGP Netshare. This works pretty well for file encryption but it sucks for files which need to be accessed by two or more peop...
I've been recommended Bruce Schneier's 1994 book Applied Cryptography as an introduction to the use and the inner workings of cryptography. Is this book still current and a good introduction?
As it is known, older versions of MSIE (before 8) have a nasty habit of treating images as HTML if they "look like" HTML, which can lead to nasty vulnerabilities for sites that allow people to upload images. Even though it is fixed in IE8, there's still a lot of IE7 and before around, so this needs to be addressed. So...
I'm currently being joejobbed, and want to sue the joejobber. Details: I have real damages: the joejob causes me to receive fake bounces, which: stop/delay my receipt of legitimate mail, since Gmail limits how much mail I can receive in a given period of time. uses up my time to delete these bounces. Gmail catche...
The password hash used for MySQL passwords prior to version 4.1 (now called OLD_PASSWORD()) seems like a very simple ad-hoc hash, without salts or iteration counts. See e.g an implementation in Python at Django snippets: Old MySQL Password Hash Has it by cryptanalyzed? Broken? All I see on the web is brute-force atta...
As I understand it, NIST approves crypto algorithms but doesn't cover specific implementations. I think I've read about IEEE approving hardware implementations of, e.g. AES, but I can't think of any organization that performs an analogous function for software implementations of crypto algorithms. Corollary/follow up ...
I was asked by a student how OWASP Top 10 are ranked, based on which indicators: is it severity? ease of exploit? ease of implementing their countermeasures? ... Knowing that each of these vulnerabilities is either severe or not based on the mise usecase possible. Furthermore, I would be interested in more Top 10 diff...
Is there any collision rate measure for popular hashing algorithms (md5, crc32, sha-*)? If that depends only from output size, it's quite trivial to measure, but I suppose that depends also of distribution and algorithm's internals (and it demands some kind of formal proof, i think).
I have prepared a paper to publish in a web security conference. How can I know the ranking of available conferences to know which conference is better? For example, should I look at their sponsors?
Some time ago there was a big fuzz over Firesheep: by listening to wifi traffic your login session can be stolen which is very bad because now somebody can e.g. send emails on your behalf. Some people said that using SSL for the whole site was the only solution. But I didn't think this was true: if you can keep the pas...
I'm referring to "remembered" password that the domain keeps so a user cannot reuse that password until it has expired in what was set at Password Policy on DC (W2003/W2008). Where is password history stored?
Let me clarify two methods of patching softwares and then I will go straight to the question: I am using both MAC OS X and Windows and different mechanisms of these two famous operating systems in handling software updates are interesting to me. When an update is available in OS X, usually a complete renewal of the ...
In certain jurisdictions, use of cryptography by the private sector is limited: e.g. there are reports that in the UAE and other countries not all of the encryption capabilities of the BlackBerry are permitted. Similarly, in the 1990s the U.S. government tried to force the use of Clipper, encryption hardware that would...
Nota bene: I'm aware that the good answer to secure password storage is either scrypt or bcrypt. This question isn't for implementation in actual software, it's for my own understanding. Let's say Joe Programmer is tasked with securely storing end user passwords in a database for a web application; or storing passwords...
Note: I've also posted a question for this issue on non-Windows systems. In NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 3, IA-5 is the control addressing "Authenticator Management". The requirements in this control include such things as enforcement of password length, complexity, lifetime, history, and proper storage/transmission of passwor...
In some environments, it is required that users change a certain number of characters every time they create a new password. This is of course to prevent passwords from being easily-guessable, especially with knowledge of old passwords such as a departed employee might have for a shared service account. I have separat...
I have a question posted already for this issue in Windows systems, and thought that non-Windows systems should perhaps be covered separately. In NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 3, IA-5 is the control addressing "Authenticator Management". The requirements in this control include such things as enforcement of password length, comp...
Most browsers allow users to view the source of a web-page quite easily and modern even provided detailed analysis. Often this code includes critical client side scripts in the form of JS/jQuery, which now days often contain methods and structures which can expose the internal architecture of the a web-service to a pos...
I understand that most NIPS these days have either rules or signatures built in to them and perhaps gathering information prior to deployment may help in fine-tuning the rules / signature once the IPS has been deployed, up and running. As such what sort of information do we need to gather prior to deploying an NIPS (e...
I know a lot of people run different security applications on their laptops/desktops. I use Little Snitch on my Macbook Pro. I like to know where my applications are sending data and where I am receiving data from. What are some of your security applications that you guys run on real-time to protect your computer?
As per my information, there is no hard and fast rule for doing a security code review but we all develop our own strategy for the same. I was wondering if we all can share the different strategies involved or used in security code review.
I am searching for a comprehensive book on wireless technology that covers in detail almost everything about wireless technology, including the related protocols, security, hacks, etc. I know it is not possible to cover this in a single book. Can you suggest a basic book to start with, and then books to go to the next ...
Target hardware is a rather low-powered MCU (ARM Cortex-M3 @72MHz, with just about 64KB SRAM and 256KB flash), so walking the thin line here. My board does have ethernet, and I will eventually get lwIP (lightweight TCP/IP FOSS suite) running on it (currently struggling). However, I also need some kind of super light-we...
I've just seen a talk about tunnelling TCP/IP over DNS requests, because port 53 UDP is usually open and unfiltered. What techniques exist to detect and block such tunnels, and have you ever seen that tunnelling on a real network? The technique uses base32-encoded requests for TXT records which result in base64-encoded...
Buffer overflows are nothing new. And yet they still appear often, especially in native (i.e. not managed) code... Part of the root cause, is usage of "unsafe" functions, including C++ staples such as memcpy, strcpy, strncpy, and more. These functions are considered unsafe since they directly handle unconstrained bu...
I've been researching disk/file system encryption, and on the surface it seems like a good idea for a lot of things. But as I dig further, the security it offers seems more mirage like than real. For example, it seems like there is little point in encrypting your file systems in a data center somewhere, because the em...
Is there a way for a consumer to report PCI non compliance?
Setting up a new company with ecommerce app, and looking at PCI compliance. What I need to know is if I need to use a pci security assessor to verify the answers to the self assessment questionnaire? The context in which we will be processing payments will be in one of the following scenarios: Option 1 PayPal pro - cre...
I'm planning to implement Tiny Encryption Algorithm and exchange data between two PHP sites. Specifically, using the code presented at PHP-einfach.de Does anyone have any experiences / thoughts / comments on using this algorithm? (other than why are you using it) Background: Its some code that i'm planning to put in a...
The place where I work was hit by the new Qakbot variant (3rd generation) a couple of days ago and it has been brutal. Unfortunately a lot of the documentation out there is from the 1st iteration of this virus. We've looked at a lot of the big antivirus sites (Symantec, McAffee, etc.) but unfortunately they are a littl...
Is there any research on how how a password complexity policy can increase or decrease the quality of passwords? If you don't have any requirements on the password then probably 90% of users will use their name or something just as insecure, but they will not be as prone to forget their password. But on the other hand ...
What setup do you recommend to protect data on a MacBook in the event of theft/loss of the device? I'm specifically interested in Macs here, rather than laptops generally, and in concrete recommendations rather than what's theoretically possible. In particular the new MBAs, as these don't seem to have a way to physical...
Many approaches exist to define security requirements. To keep it simple, i would say to define a security requirement, one need to model the threat encountered when building up misuse cases for specific use cases being worked out. Still, at the end, some security requirements are at architectural level while others ar...
I am creating an application which runs on a mobile node with Ubuntu, which does not generate enough entropy bytes to the /dev/random, and does not always stay connected on the Internet to use typical socket entropy-gathering solutions such as EGD. Are there any good tools for gathering the needed entropy in my situati...
On a recent scan using McAfee Foundstone Enterprise (newer versions are known as McAfee Vulnerability Manager), I ran into a "No Translation Available" error. It's rather frustrating that these errors leave me without any specific description or resolution details on the vulnerability. But I find the most aggravating ...
I'm self-studying for the CISSP exam and am having difficulty wrapping my mind around the practical side of the ★-property rule in the Bell-LaPadula Model. I understand the mechanics of it and that it protects against accidentally downgrading information. It makes sense for use-cases where a subject wants to write in...
Do you know any good approach for de-hashing/actually bruteforcing hashed passwords in the shadow file? On various operating systems, any good solutions/methods/programs. Or is it better to upload a hash to somewhere? A paying-or free site?
Please Note: I'm aware that the proper method for secure password storage hashing is either scrypt or bcrypt. This question isn't for implementation in actual software, it's for my own understanding. Related How to apply a pepper correctly to bcrypt? How to securely hash passwords? HMAC - Why not HMAC for password st...
My team is inspecting some MAC Spoofing events that are triggering in our corporate environment. After talking it over with the team, this is the information that we have that is relevant.... The events are being triggered by our client-side software firewalls. There are occurrences across the network, seeing that MA...
Consider an internet-facing host (the outer firewall). What should be done with undesired traffic: just drop it, or send back an ICMP error such as port unreachable? (In Linux terms: iptables -P DROP or iptables -j REJECT?) This isn't about the security of our network, the packets aren't getting in either way. It's abo...
When someone says "why do we need to spend so much money and effort on security, we need to focus on market share first and once someone finds a problem we will fix it", I would like to have a list of security breaches which involved severe financial or reputation loss - measured in dollars rather than bits and bytes ...
I'm planning to send across TWO pieces of information over the internet from machine A A site identifier which will be like: $SiteName = "EXAMPLE" (in plaintext) Encoded text which will be like: $Secret = encrypt($SiteName.'-'.time(), $key) When I get these two pieces of information on machine B, I lookup the $key b...
Is there a reason for sites to ask for another CAPTCHA verification when some other part of the registration form, e.g. the username, was invalid?
I need to start working with RESTfull Web Services. SOAP based web services have already so many standards to secure communication, establish trust etc. I am not aware of any for REST. What I would apreciate is answers to the following questions: My mobile app would be using X 509 certificates when sending REST reque...
Can anybody explain, in simple terms, how Feistal Block Ciphers work. I am not a math student so I do not understand the math behind it, just would like the principles.
I am not sure if it is pre-mature to ask such a question. The question is largely inspired by pondering over the question and discussions in the following link (In his answer, @Dad also raises similiar question there): Can we still provide confidentiality when cryptography is outlawed? Question: Are there any theoretic...
For work I often go to China, and there I met some dissidents I would like to help. I need to upload some videos to an ftp server in Europe. I will connect through a public hotspot without authentication. The problem is that I'm afraid that they might trace me back through the OS (Ubuntu) or cookies, or maybe the MAC ...
For fun, and in my spare time I'm creating a simple CMS for my own purposes (with hopes to release for wider use... later), using PHP. I'm currently working on the login scheme now, and have a few questions. Note: The end result is always passed through crypt using blowfish and a cost parameter of 15 (Generally hoping ...
IIS Express is a developer tool for Windows XP and higher which provides the full feature set of IIS, but without needing administrator rights. I've seen discussion by some developers who are considering bundling this with their application to make deployment consistent among versions. If you read the comments sectio...
I did a quick google before asking this, and came up with the following article, linked to from Schneier's blog back in 2005. It doesn't really answer my question though. As society has crossed into the internet age from the early 1990s until now, computer security has went from an obscure, almost irrelevant topic to s...
I have an encrypted HDD (dm_crypt). That's why I store my passwords in a simple text file. I usually copy/paste the passwords from it. Ok! Q: If I open this text file then it goes into the memory. So all my passwords in clear text format goes "there"..will the passwords be deleted from the memory if I close the text fi...
Regarding this: Are passwords in memory? So does someone have a good idea on how to securely store my passwords? The: "passwords.txt" -> ctrl+c; ctrl+v a passw is not very secure. I have passwords for various places, and they're very long random chars, which change too often. Are there any good password manager apps, ...
For those of you who are not familiar with the topic, a quick search will turn up a lot of hits, e.g. see the researcher's report at Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves - O'Reilly Radar and their application at petewarden/iPhoneTracker @ GitHub, and Fox News: Apple iPhones Track Your Location, Briti...
Given the recent spate of intrusions into various networks which have included compromise of subscriber identity and contact information, I figured it would be good for us to have a thread on how to spot and react to a "phishing" attempt. While the most common and prominent avenue for phishing is by e-mail, these socia...
For things like images or html documents, cache headers make sure that the data is deleted when the browser is closed. However as PDFs are opened in a plugin, the cache headers do not seem to have the intended purpose. PDFs are often left behind in the temp folder on windows machines. Are there any cross-browser ways o...
In many countries strong cryptography is outlawed. That means you must store the data of your users in such a way, that government of that country can always decrypt it. And if you don't, you are a criminal. Suppose, someone is an author of some security software (instant messenger, disk encryption, whatever), that uti...
can anyone give a realistic estimation, based on real-world experience, of how much biometric authentication techniques are being used in the IT field?
I am looking to an Cryptographically Generated Address (CGA) implementation in Java or in C++. Would be glad if someone can help.
I have been reading up on various password hashing schemes, for example the SHA-based Crypt proposed by Ulrich Drepper and used in some Linux versions. A recurring theme here is to 'strengthen' or 'stretch' the hashing function, by using many iterations of the same hash. The runtime of the hashing function can also be ...
Anyone with a brain cell knows that using a user that isn't root/dbo/etc adds a lot to security and how effective SQL injection attacks can be. I'm wondering if taking that idea a step further is a good idea. The basic idea is simple. For guest-like actions (viewing) use a 'guest' user on the database which only has th...
Are there any products / os that behave differently when an duplicate IP address is detected. This may indicate an IP spoof ? Can TCP stack 'shutdown' or stop in order to protect itself ?
Seeing the Sony Personal data kerfuffle unfold has gotten me thinking about the encryption and securing of personal data - obviously credit cards can (and should) be encrypted, making data breaches of this sort much less of an issue for the end user. That said even if customer credit card details are secure, the other...
I'm university student studying for my certification exam, and I was doing some reviewing today when I found a question that I can't find an answer to. Basically, in the CCNA3 2.4.1 Cisco Netacademy online materials, it talks about encrypting passwords in the config. To quote the materials: The encryption standard use...
Say that you call your bank and are able to start talking about your personal finances, without having given them any real proof of your identity. Well the first thing I'd think would be to change your bank. But it might not be as practical if company X is your university/college/school or government. Let's say you are...
Is there a way to monitor the way the SCADA systems behave 'during pen-testing or security audit', and find out the implications of just port scans and/or monitor the state of activity while sending a payload ? Is it possible for a device to get faulty because of a SCADA Security Audit ?
What is the "openssh-blacklist" package? Is it related to the Debians OpenSSL bug?
Is OpenSSH using OpenSSL to encrypt traffic? Or something else?
I have never used wireless networking at home, but am considering it. Does anyone make wireless hardware designed for single-room connectivity? Several sources have recommended WPA2, but I'd still rather not be broadcasting outside the walls. EDIT per AviD: My security concerns are that my broadcasting a greater dista...
Given that I have two pieces of data: A large piece of encrypted data. A small, fixed-size piece of random data. I want to be able to transmit both pieces of data together, but I don't want the second piece of data to be readily available to a third party, but easily retrievable at the other end, assuming they know h...
I'm working with custom software here, so don't worry about Microsoft whatever, Open anything, or something else. Let’s stick to theory of how this should go together. Let’s say I have a user system/database. The database has a table of users, and their associated user-groups (Admin, IT support, Manager, Secretary, cli...
I have to make a demonstration about firewalls in my class as a student(university). It should be implemented using iptables on Linux. I am reading all the theories around them but I can't figure out a good use case to present at class. I can show how to use add rules etc., but this isn't enough. Could I have 2 pcs in ...
I've been reading up about rainbow tables as I think they're quite interesting cause they're actually a pretty simple concept. Anyway, I was wondering, has anyone been involved in actually generating one? How is it possibly done? I just don't see how it is actually possible to generate every combination of every charac...
Is there a way for 2 parties to negotiate a shared secret (for example, a session key) without having a pre-shared knowledge? SSL does this by using asymmetric encryption. Is there any other way to achieve this without use of PKI?
I have always thought that you are not supposed to use a password manager but to keep your passwords in your head, but lately I have thought about the pros and cons of having a password manager. Some areas might be: password length, key logger prevention, entropy between passwords, accessibility. (I'm not asking how to...
Lets say I have one load balancer (HAProxy) and two web servers one gets hacked. Is the attacker able to make outgoing connections when the web servers have no direct internet access (only ubuntu update servers) and connections to the load balancer? How about a reverse proxy (nginx)? would this prevent outgoing direct ...
The source code is here: http://mxr.mozilla.org/services-central/source/fx-home/ What should I be looking/search for? Or even how to extract /ffhomeDB.sq3 and see what it contains.
I want to buy a domain name from a big registar (well known on the internet) but when I go to checkout I see that my link is going from full encrypted to “Connection Partially Encrypted” and I am asked to enter my credit card information. My question is, is it safe to enter my credit card and pay? If it's not fully en...
I have a cool tool that displays my syslog and kernellog on my mac's desktop. This has me concerned about what is written in them - I'm staring to feel like they are creating a hole in my privacy. I have seen filenames from when I was looking around in finder; someone was generating thumbnails and logging the full file...
How secure is the CentOS Linux distribution? I noticed there were times when there were no up-to-date patches for some version of CentOS (e.g., 5.6). I read this on some mailing list that I can't find now. I seem to recall the problem was that CentOS 6 was not stable yet, and the 5.6 users were left without updates, b...
In the CISSP books, SSL/TLS has been through the arguments and fell rest onto the transport layer 2 instead of the session. OK - Fine. Port security 802.1X and EAP is a data link layer 2 authentication mechanism. Since EAP is a framework, it consists of EAP-TLS (among others like EAP-TTLS, PEAP and LEAP). There maybe ...
Linked to: Encrypting a fixed format message? I need to communicate from Site A, a set of information that will be presented to users of Site A, which when they choose to submit, should travel to my Site B. At Site B, I need to validate that the request indeed came from Site A. Site A has a secret key that can be used ...
For a test project I have tried to implement the (famous) Diffie Hellman algorithm for safe key exchange. Now I have written this in C#: using System; using System.Collections; using System.Collections.Generic; namespace DiffieHellman.Cryptology { public static class CentralAuthority { private static r...
Does the OpenBSD LiveCD/LiveDVD get deeply audited like the original OpenBSD? Is it an official "port"? Experiences with it?
Being a long time VirtualBox user and having recently purchased a new laptop equipped with an intel i7 720QM I discovered that it supported vt-d. In the meantime I've found out that vt-d comes with TXT which is a kind of hardware security addition to the i386 architecture. I've got two questions: Why is vt-d coupled...
I recently had a call from BELL concerning a virus on our Linux ( Debian ) Server. Apparently Google emailed our client about an Italian Database found on our server that was doing phishing. They asked Bell to block our IP if we couldn't find it within an hour. The folder was called "Show" and inside it was an index.PH...
I have often seen that takes x amount of time to crack a certain length password. But this just seems to be the amount of time it takes to iterate through all the possibilities. What about the time it takes to check each iteration to see if it works? Wouldn't that make the process take far longer? I'm most interested i...
The use of Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol (CCMP) for WPA/WPA2 PSK is being attacked. This is a trivial attack (offline brute force) against the initial key exchange. It should be noted that the IEEE does not recognize this attack. The concern is that there is a tool call...
I'm currently doing research on cracking encrypted, compressed files (specifically: uif, zip, 7z, dmg). Looking at all the utilities out there, it seems the time it takes to crack something is greatly reduced when a better idea of password length/character set is known (this is obvious to me from prior experience in b...
I'm studying for CISSP certification and one of the video lectures I viewed (CBT Nuggets) really confused me. Here are some excerpts from the lecture: "Role Based Access Control doesn't always use the role for the basis for how it's going to divide information and access the information" "Now let's get into, I guess ...
If running X11 as root is not a very good idea, then can anyone mention a method/solution, how to still use a GUI, and not having X11 as root?
Can ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) be safely used without infringing on Certicom's patents? I would like to make use of ECC in an embedded system to establish a secure channel. But, I am concerned about patent infringement. Are there open source ECC implementations which are patent-free?
According to: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/IP_address_spoofing "this technique is mainly used when the attacker does not care about the response or the attacker has some way of guessing the response." My Question is: "or the attacker has some way of guessing the response" ?? How? not counting that...
I'd like to find a tool to assist with automated penetration testing of Silverlight applications, in a similar vein to AppScan for webapps. Specifically, I'm looking for a tool that can cope with sending requests to binary RIA service endpoints. Do such tools exist?
Looking for some nice text books in the field of network security as part of my course. Our course covers mainly tls, ssl, pgp, smime, vpn, md5, hmac ....
is it possible to use ip-fragmenation (for example with fragroute) to evade mod_security? the idea would be to split a sql-injection- or xss-string into little pieces so it s not recognised.
We have a integration arrangement to send content across the internet and the agreed protocol encrypts then sends it via sftp. What possible reason coould there be to encrypt the content twice? I can't see any good reason for it. The algorithm for encryption is AES with CBC mode for enhanced security The Hashing al...
I am interested to know what threats does it pose, if the source code of a security suite is leaked. It came to my mind after reading the following URLs: http://www.pentestit.com/2011/01/31/source-code-kaspersky-antivirus/ http://forum.kaspersky.com/index.php?showtopic=199598 What would be the threat if the source code...
There's a Facebook virus doing the rounds: Your face in 20 years (safe link, but don't follow the instructions). It clearly grabs some Javascript from a url (e.g. changeups.info/age/u.php?0.5069423061795533) and runs it on your page, which posts on the walls of all your friends. The problem is I can't access the scrip...

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