Hackito Ergo Sum 2011 - Day 3 (and last)

Day 3 was another great day: we had a couple of cybercrime talks, Ruby on rails, DNIe , USB autorun for Linux and the solution to the conference crackme. I want to take a chance to thank the organizers, I really enjoyed this conference, the people were great and the talks interesting and I hope to be back next year, maybe even to present a talk.

As usual I welcome comments, either here or directly to me - feel free to let me know anything constructive.

Raoul Chiesa / Keynote

Raoul's keynote focused on cybercrime and UNICRI and their hacker profiling project (HPP). Cool quote - "you got information, you got power". The talk was cool and included parts focusing on who's behind cybercrime that I won't recount here out of respect to the fact he asked not to record anything during these parts of the talk. He shared his views on why cybercrime works:

• New user every day = new fools every day
• Making money  (fits to the economical crisis)
• Technical know how is easy to get
• Back in the day we worked hard to get something
• Easy to recruit idiots ("mules")
• Psychological - "they will never find me/bust me"
• Psychological - Lack of violent actions

And how HPP classifies hackers:

• Amateur
• Wanna be lamer (9-16)
• Script kiddie (10-18)
• Hobbyist
• Cracker (17-30)
• Ethical hacker (15-50)
• Quiet, paranoid, skilled hacker (16-40)
• Pros
• Cyber warrior (18-50)
• Industrial spy (22-45)
• Gov agent (25-45)
• Military hacker (25-45)

He had a lot of interesting stuff to say and the talk actually went overtime. I can't possibly begin to recount even the public parts of the talk in a short summary but I highly advise you to listen to him if you get a chance.

Joernchen of Phenolit / Ruby on Rails form a code auditor's perspective

This talk focused on how to audit Ruby on Rails (RoR) code. Key points:

• 3 layers called MVC - Models, Views, Controllers - review them
• Start from the controllers
• Look at the database
• Look at the filters
• RoR has some fancy magic that can go wrong - for example: mass assignments (CCC.de had a vuln because of using this)

Nice talk and definitely someone you should talk to if you audit RoR, personally this isn't in my focus areas.

Gabriel Gonzalez Garcia / Man in the Remote: PKCS 11 for fun and profit

This talk focused on ways to defeat the DNIe which is the Spanish government system of digital IDs used for authentication and non-repudiation certificates. Basically he implemented an attack against the untrusted terminal problem that the PC is posing between the DNIe device and what it authenticates to. There are two ways to use DNIe for web auth: Java applet or SSL + client certificate. The device itself has an EAL 4+ certification and defends against most hardware tampering attacks. What he found were two practical attacks on the terminal:

1. Write a fake interface library that acts as an RPC server connecting his machine with a remote DNIe
2. Write a fake java applet that acts as the proxy and runs on the client machine (easier)

He proposed a solution that I personally disagree with to use "distance bounding" == measure response time and disallow slow responses.

Jon Larimer / USB autorun attacks against Linux

This talk focused on how to implement autorun attacks against Linux and showed one successful attack. To be exact it is successful against GNOME. So first of all the specs of freedesktop.org forbid systems from running code without asking the user. That being said a lot of processing is done when a new storage device is connected: file system drivers execute, file browsers read the contents and thumbnailers create thumbnails. These attacks are basically physical access which usually means "game over" because you can use DMA attacks using 1394 vulns and other attacks like cold boot attacks. However, assuming the latter is complicated for you and you are on a system where protections for against 1394 DMA attacks were implemented you need another way. From here on Jon described his processes of research which I will skip directly to the end - he decided to focus on Thumbnailers used by Nautilus (GNOME file manager). He found a vulnerability in the Evince thumbnailer for DVI files (among others). Luckily (or unfortunately, depending on you view) Evince uses AppArmor and compiles as PIE, in addition the kernel has ASLR enabled (but 32bit system). He worked on overcoming this:

• ASLR and PIE can be defeated by brute forcing -
• On a 32bit system there are only about 3000 addresses that the Linux kernel can load libc to.
• Using this we can just generate 3000 files - 1 for each address
• Loading will be slow (about 10 min), but success is almost sure
• Interesting result he found were that in his statistics around 10% of the addresses were used significantly more than others
• So you can create only about 300 files and have high chance of success
• He says he didn't research why is this. This is something that someone should really pay attention to.
• AppArmor can be worked around
• Doesn't protect against X11 library calls

He showed a demo of killing the lockscreen using a USB stick. Jon Oberhide added an interesting comment that there is a rather new layer for partition parsing in Linux that had a lot of bugs recently.

Yuval Vadim Polevoy / Money is in the eye of the beholder: new and exciting ways to steal you money

This talk again focused on Cybercrime, Yuval is from RSA research lab and really interesting to talk to. He focused on how cyber-criminals make money and the underground economy. I will recount some of the most interesting points, I'm not sure I can do justice to the details but that is the cost of summarizing...

• A cybercrime operation requires:
• Bots
• Campaign
• Drop point
• Bot plugins
• Hiring & managing mules
• Establishing covert channels
• Maintain fast-flux (optional)
• The skill set required for that is:
• Low level programmer
• Oday researcher
• Spammer
• Hosting owner
• JS programmer
• HR recruiter
• E-commerce export
• IT specialist

These are too many skills for most people, so the common solution nowadays is outsourcing parts of this effort to others.

For the end, he focused a bit on the future techniques that malware authors will use, in particular screen grabbing. Yuval showed a demo of two techniques that can be used for screen grabbing in Windows, thus defeating on screen keyboard and allowing other stuff like cheating in online poker…

Eloi Vanderbéken / Hackito Ergo Sum crackme

For the end Eloi talked about the crackme. I won't go into all the details but here are the highlights:

• Verification alg - based on modified RC4
• Obfuscation
• Inst. Mutation
• Control flow graph obfuscation
• Encryption layers
• Direct native API call
• Using sysenter (also uses a lot of random invalid syscalls) which is why the crackme only worked on 32bit systems
• Anti-X
• Anti debugger
• Anti-instrumentation
• This was especially interesting to me, in particular because Eloi used Pin as the example for instrumentation engine
• Detect hook on KiUserExceptionDispatcher nad KiUserCallbackDispatcher
• Detect stack reuse by instrumentation code: place a constant in esp-4, execute syscall, check constant
• Anti data-tainting

This is definitely a respectable set of protections. Only 3 solutions were submitted. I might try to write a PinTool that will be able to handle all these protections and post it here if I can.

Well, that's it for Hackito this year - I hope you will read my future posts.

Hackito Ergo Sum 2011 - Day 2

Day two of HES 2011 brought even more awesomeness. I will summarize the talks here:

Keynote - Rodrigo Branco (BSDaemon) / Behind the scenes: security research
First up was Rodrigo giving a keynote ( which shows he is old :P ) he focused on the state of the industry and mentioned several key points that might be debatable:

• there are a lot of snake-oil security experts, its really hard to find real experts
• 0days are nowadays spreading in minutes to all vulnerable hosts
• lots of "vulnerabilities" released are not exploitable or at best have an exploit that works only on the VM of the guy that developed it and nowhere else
• The new generation of hackers is not coming - most of us grew in a time where using a computer was a challange, now its just plug&play, GUI, etc...
• he went into security myths common in the industry

I'll settle for repeating two interesting points he made since this is a short summary:

1. What is the difference between rouge AV and a real AV?
1. both do not guarantee anything
2. both have "premium options" you can buy
3. both have a nice GUI (although rouge AVs usually havea nicer one)
4. both will slow your system
5. both will have false alarms
2. All companies benefit from having a security research team but you need to know how to build and work with one:
1. Researcher brings real understanding of threats and security awareness
2. when choosing a researcher, select carefully
3. researcher are lazy so define expectation not a specific target
1. if you know what you want you hire a developer, not researcher
4. your team has to travel
5. expect to buy tools

James Oakley and Sergey Bratus / Exploiting the Hard-Working DWARF
Due to circumstances I couldn't avoid I had to miss this talk which is really worthwhile. I have done some work on DWARF for instrumentation but was interested to see it from an exploitation point of view, especially since they say it is Turing complete.
Slides (from shmoocon actually): http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~electron/dwarf/



Jon Oberheide & Dan Rosenberg / Stackjacking Your Way to grsecurity or PaX Bypass
In this talk the authors showed how to exploit the Linux Kernel in spite of hardening mechanisms like GRSecurity or PaX. They took an interesting approach - not focusing on a specific vulnerability but making a minimal set of assumptions on the situation and showing any vulnerability and situation satisfying these assumptions can be exploited.

• Kernel protection Assumptions:
• Zero knowledge of kernel address space
• Fully randomized kernel text & data
• Cannot introduce new code into Kernel address space
• Cannot modify kernel control flow (e.g. data only - no ROP)
• Attacker assumptions:
• #1: can do arbitrary kmem write
• Requires some knowledge of some kernel layout information leak to exploit
• #2: Kernel stack memory leak
• AKA "the Dan Rosenberg" :P

taking this into account they developed a 3-stage exploitation technique: KSTACK leak --> stack groping --> overwrite a specific part of thread_info struct. Going into details will require a whole post at least so I will mention the highlights only, for more details try Oberhide's homepage (nothing up yet) or Dan's blog (seems abandoned). For now I will focus on two points:

• In order to get all the information needed from a Kernel stack leak they developed a library called "libkstack" - it works with a leak of 3-bytes and up.
• Stack grouping is a name to techniques they invented in order to actually exploit
• kernel_ds - invented by Dan R. focuses on using set_fs() to change addr_limit in the kernel
• Obergroupe - invented by Oberhide - uses a child process to clobber a process stack frame while it is inside a syscall (race condition)

Exploitation is pretty safe and takes about 1-2 minutes according to their demo.




Richard Johnson – A Castle Made of Sand: Adobe Reader X Sandbox
This talk went into detail regarding Adobe reader sandboxing and security, here are my takeaways:

• Adobe started using ASLR and DEP which is great, but only on new Windows systems. also seems implementaiton is partially lacking since some DLLs (e.g encryption) are loaded to a pre-defined address.
• Adobe works on sandboxing using Win process privileges and IPC limitations, a lot more work is required
• need to implement security features for non-Windows platforms as well
• need to compile to 64 bit - will reduce chances of spraying

Aaron Portnoy & Logan Brown / Concentrated Fire: Black Box Auditing Adobe Shockwave
The guys from TippingPoint gave a similar talk to the one from CanSecWest so no need to go deep here. Some cool stuff:

• They use a lot of Dynamic Binary Instrumentation to analyze SW
• Shockwave uses a private memory manager called SmartHeap
• they crowd-sourced the exploitation of the crashes they discovered during Recon
• If shockwave lacks a vulnerable component on your target don't worry - it will DL it for you :)
• ZDI will not buy any more shockwave bugs or touch shockwave from now on!

Kevin Redon & Ravishankar Borgaonkar / femtocells : inexpensive devices to test UMTS security
For those of you that don't know a femtocell is a small cellular base-station that works in a really limited range. Basically your phone connects to the femtocell that connects to your provider network over the internet. First part of the talk focused on taking control of the femtocell firmware, I will skip this except they used the recovery mode, which shows how careful you need to be with such features. you can buy a Femtocell in 12 countries, see femto-forum for details. Once you are in control you can do some cool stuff:

• MITM on UMTS 
• Calls are only encrypted between the phone and the femtocell, then sent in clear text
• showed a demo (that failed first time) of recording a call and capturing SMS messages
• Provider networks assume full trust in players so no firewalls, protections, etc... 
• seems like easy targets from their description, no actual details provided
• 3G / 4G phones can be attacked by the femtocell acting as the network provider
• again, no details were provided

This is still a research in progress, seems very promising. I recommend to follow.




Lightning Talks
There were 3 lightning talks today:

• First one was mine, I got manipulated into doing it while drinking beer over lunch but it was really fun.
• I talked about "Binary Instrumentation for Hackers" 
• I presented a few select slides form the talk I'm working on (see earlier posts) explaining what can you do with binary instrumentation and and example Pin based binary instrumentation tool.
• After me Alex talked about his Passive DNS work
• See the website
• He showed a cool demo how it worked on the recent Lizamoon attack
• Last talk for the day was joernchenon Distributed Ruby (dRuby) vulns
• to sum it up dRuby uses $SAFE which prevents you from calling arbitrary code (eval etc) by activating taint protection
• unfortunately this doesn't work so well becasue you can still use syscall()
• nice method to identify if you are one a 64bit or 32bit by using syscall(20)

Well that's it for today, I hope I can keep the pace and publish a summary tomorrow as well.