Analyzing the security of security software is one of my favorite research areas: it is always ironic to see software originally meant to protect your systems open a gaping door for the attackers. Earlier this year I stumbled upon the OfficeScan security suite by Trend Micro, a probably lesser known...
2014-06-06 — 11 minute readDuring a VPN testing project we looked a bit deeper into the security vulnerability caused by ISAKMP aggressive mode. To put things simple, the important fact for us is that assuming pre-shared key authentication and possession of a valid userid makes it possible to obtain the valid encrypted PSK. During...
2014-04-17 — 3 minute readLast week I had an Android application that I wanted to test in the Android emulator (the official one included in the SDK). I had the application installed from Play Store on a physical device, and as I’ve done many times, I just grabbed it using Drozer and issued the...
2014-04-04 — 4 minute readOWASP Top 10 doesn’t need an introduction: it’s certainly the most well-known project of the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), referenced by every single presentation, paper, brochure and blog post that is at least slightly related to web application security. But unfortunately, according to my experiences, most of the...
2014-03-31 — 6 minute readDuring one of our internal network penetration testings, I focused on the network devices. The customer had 3Com/HP switches. Little portscan with NSE revealed that the switches used default SNMP community strings (public and private)! I checked SNMP problems affecting 3Com/HP switches; there was a really interesting issue: 3Com, HP,...
2014-03-14 — 1 minute readSanitizing input (as in trying to remove a subset of user input so that the remaining parts become “safe”) is hard to get right in itself. However, many developers doom their protection in the first place by choosing the wrong tool to get it done, in this case, regular expressions...
2014-03-07 — 6 minute readSymantec (formerly Veritas) Backup Exec is one of my all-time favorites in pentest projects: it has a very nice list of vulnerabilities ranging form basic stack overflows through a hardcoded password to arbitrary file reads. Although most of these vulnerabilities aren’t new, some users tend to accept the risk of...
2014-02-27 — 7 minute readTesting a website is usually considered just another day at work, Burp Suite is usually the tool of our choice for automating some of the scans that apply in this field. Assessing the authenticated part of the site is also common, and since Burp can be used as an HTTP...
2014-02-20 — 3 minute read