Blackhat USA 08

The presentation materials are now available for the Blackhat USA 2008 conference, go and read them all :-)

Sorry for the lack of posts, I'm moving house in 2 days so its all very hectic at the moment!

Dave

PCI DSS version 1.2

I have come across a document from the PCI DSS Council today which has a summary of the changes that will be included in the next version of the standard.

I will reserve my full opinion on the changes until I see the final version of the standard. I will say I'm a bit disappointed if the document lists all of the changes to the standard as it doesn't even update requirement 6.5 to the latest OWASP top ten...

I will post more when the final version of the standard is released.

Application Security Testing Tools

I have been asked a few times recently to tell people what tools I use when I'm testing web applications for security issues.

I always find that a mixture of tools can be used to find potential security issues in applications but to exploit these issues it always seems to be a manual effort. I don't mind that, I get a good feeling when I hack things!

I will list the tools I use along with a short description, I'm not writing this post as a tutorial - if anyone wants tutorials then let me know and I will see what I can do.

My favourite tool would be the Burp Suite from Portswigger. We have recently purchased a site license at work - I think that says a lot for this tool. Burp Suite offers many different modules that can help you test application security. I like the intruder module the most, this allows me to input the strings I would use in manual tests very quickly and in a few different ways. My test inputs file is nearly 400 different inputs so the intruder module is a lifesaver. The Burp Suite is available as a free or commercial tool, I recommend that anyone interested in web application security testing grabs a copy and has a play with it.

The Burp Suite can also be extended using the IBurpExtender, if any developers reading this want to collaborate on a project then drop me a line. I have a few ideas that I would love to implement using the Burp Extender.

I have recently started playing with the Exploit Me Firefox plugins and I have been impressed by them. I have put SQL Inject me and XSS me into my testing tool box. The plugins allow you to "point and click" test web applications for XSS and SQL Injection issues. They are quick and efficient and I would recommend them to anyone wanting to test for these issues.

I have recently started to try some fuzz testing tools when I have been testing web applications. This approach has found a lot of bugs in high profile software in the past so I felt it was worth a try.

I had started using Spike Proxy for fuzzing but if I'm honest I'm not that impressed with the tool. I felt the initial character set that is hardcoded into the tool wasn't as big as I would like. I extended this significantly but I'm still not likely to stick with this tool. I wanted the fuzzer to put random data into fields with random lengths and this tool didn't deliver that for me. Perhaps I'm using it incorrectly, if so drop me a line and enlighten me :-)

So to fulfill my desire for a fuzzing tool I have begun playing with Jmeter for this purpose. I think if I write some Java which has a predefined character set (could even pull from a "random" source - /dev/random?) and an upper and lower length for the input I can use BeanShell with Jmeter and input this fuzz type data into fields which I submit to the web application. I can't take all of the credit for that idea, if the person who helped with this idea is reading this now then thank you very much! That idea is still very much in the "does it actually work?" stage so I will let you all know how it goes.

Thats my main set of testing tools at the moment but I'm always playing with new things. I have a few tools listed below that I think are going to be squeezing into my testing tool box soon (not all of these are new tools):

Grendel-Scan

Nikto

Wikto

Try them and find out what works for you.

Dave

Up in the clouds......

With all the discussion of cloud computing recently I have decided to give it a go. I'm going to sign up with the Amazon cloud service.

Since I created this blog I'm finding I need bigger and better labs to test out things like the Dan Kaminsky DNS flaw, Evilgrade and a multitude of reverse engineering tasks. I have decided that doing all of this up in the Amazon cloud gives me a huge amount of computing power for a very small price.

I'm going to get myself set up in the next few days - expect some good lab work to appear on the blog in the coming months!

Dave

Security/Hacking conferences

With all the talk of Blackhat USA and Defcon at the moment it makes me wish I would have gone along! I have a lot of friends over in Las Vegas at the moment telling me about the fun they are having. I look forward to reading the presentations from the conferences.

Next year I will be going! I will also being making my usual journey to Blackhat Europe in 2009. It seems like a long way off but Blackhat Europe will be hosted in Amsterdam as usual. It will run from April 14th through to the 17th next year. Details will be posted on this page.

I also plan on visiting the Chaos Communication Congress in December this year, the Chaos Congress will be held on the traditional days of 27th - 30th December. I think I really need to pick my time carefully when I tell my girlfriend I plan on going! More details can be found here.

I will post more about Blackhat nearer the time but if anyone else is planning on going to CCC give me a shout.

Dave