HeX 2.0 USB RC1 (4G)

Happy Thanksgiving, my gift to you.. HeX 2.0 LiveUSB RC1 (the 4G version)

Yes, I know, I can hardly believe what I am typing! I finally got it finished and uploaded. As noted above this is the 4G version... I am working on a 2G but it might now be squeezable into that small of a space.. so more to come! This 4G version has a decent amount of workable space so that you can store items etc...

You can obtain the image at the following US site, will be publishing to the site and full mirror list shortly.

Also, remember that to write the image, you simply use dd to the thumb drive itself (not a partition/slice/etc). i.e. on OSX if you have only that USB device connected that you want to write to: "dd bs=2048 if=/path/to/hex-i386-2.0-USB-4G.img.gz of=/dev/rdisk1" (you may need to run under sudo...)

Note this is a 1.4G file, I will also be publishing this to the Security Torrent Depot shortly!

http://us.rawpacket.org/image/hex-i386-2.0-USB-4G.img.gz
http://us.rawpacket.org/image/hex-i386-2.0-USB-4G.img.gz.md5
http://us.rawpacket.org/image/hex-i386-2.0-USB-4G.img.gz.sha256

Cheers,
JJC

HeX 2.0R Released!

After much adeau, HeX 2.0R is out... the improvements are numerous and include:


1. FreeBSD 7 Stable
2. Unionfs
3. NSM Console updates
4. Tons of analysis alias and scripts
5. Tons of NSM tools' signatures
6. Firefox - Useful websites bookmark
7. Liferea - Security rss feeds


For more info: http://us.rawpacket.org

Thanks to the rest of the HeX team for diligent and hard work on this.... more to come!

J

Slack @$$?

I apologize for my seemingly slacke-***edness of late... I have been extraordinarily busy performing some work for a new security firm and thus unavailable to post here. I do have quite a bit of material that I will be posting in the upcoming months and weeks so stay tuned, things are about to get exciting :-).

Also, as a side note, please pay close attention to the openpacket.org site, as we will be making some major changes shortly.

Cheers,
JJC

How are your "Debian" SSL certs doing

Last night, while interviewing with Paul and Larry on the pauldotcom.com podcast, I had an interesting thought whilst bashing Debian and the latest OpenSSL party that they have created.

How many root Certificate Authorities run debian and generate signed ssl keys?

Obviously the implications on this are substantial.. I get in the middle of an affected ecom server/application and grab credit card numbers and identity info for a day or so.. then meander on my way. Alarming because of course it does not produce any real auditable trail for analysts to follow... I mean, there was no real break in as with TJX or Advance Auto....

So, the moral of this story is that you need to check with your CA and see if they issued you any certs/keys from any affected systems. If that is the case then they of course need to re-issue a known good cert/key to you.

I *hope* but doubt that it will happen, that any affected CA would notify their customer base if they had issued anything from an affected system.

Cheers,
JJC

"Block the Bad" OSS IPS with Content Filtration and Transparent Proxy Acceleration pt 1.

In this two part series I will discuss and demonstrate the creation of an inline security and content filtration system built on FreeBSD 7.0R. What is a security and content filtration system you might ask? Simply put it is a system that has the capabilities of an IPS with the included benefit of advanced content filtration (things like blacklists, page content scoring "keywords etc", greylists, whitelists and so on...).

This first part, entitled "block the bad" will deal with the IPS aspect of the system that includes some new "or newly revisited" ways of utilizing snortsam with barnyard rather than directly patching snort. This is good for a variety of reasons that include the capability to keep your snort version updated without having to continually re-patch it for snortsam, and not having to load snort down with more work than what it was intended "SNIFFING J00r PAket F00".

Some things in the below documented barnyard snortsam plugin have been hacked together, and I am sure that more capable individuals "rotorhead, Obiwan..." will write a non-hacked-together plugin in the near future. But this will get you up and rolling for now.

A few assumptions are made before we get started... the first is that you have already built snort (2.8.1 is the latest as of the time I wrote this), and if not that you can follow the directions to do so on a previous posting of mine. The second assumes if you want to see output such as BASE, you read and followed that entire posting. The third assumption is that you know how to modify your kernel options and ultimately make and install a new kernel. The fourth and final assumption is that if any of the previous assumptions are not true, you know how to use google.

Now, to the heart of the subject at hand, we will be using the following for the remainder of the excercise:

1. Snort 2.8.1 (see above)
2. barnyard 0.20.0 (with a modified snortsam plugin)
3. snortsam 2.52
4. ipf
5. ipfw (this will come into play in the next part re: content filtering, but can also be used to block by entire source or destination *not protocol/port* hence ipf)

So, for our first step (since we have snort built/running) let's get our barnyard patched so that we have the snortsam plugin. If you previously built barnyard and still have all of the source, that's great... but remember to make clean before we do anything. For my purposes I'll be demonstrating with a freshly downloaded barnyard. You will need autotools "cd /usr/ports/devel/autotools/ && make install clean" to finish the patch work.

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ wget http://www.snort.org/dl/barnyard/barnyard-0.2.0.tar.gz

2008-04-13 18:14:39 (537 KB/s) - `barnyard-0.2.0.tar.gz' saved [161543/161543]

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ tar xvfz barnyard-0.2.0.tar.gz
x barnyard-0.2.0/

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ wget http://www.snortsam.net/files/barnyard-plugin/barnyard-snortsam-patch.gz

2008-04-13 18:16:37 (148 KB/s) - `barnyard-snortsam-patch.gz' saved [27149/27149]

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ gunzip barnyard-snortsam-patch.gz
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ cd barnyard-0.2.0
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/barnyard-0.2.0]$ patch -p1 < ../barnyard-snortsam-patch
Hmm... Looks like a unified diff to me...
...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 1.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 33.
Hunk #3 succeeded at 54.
...
done
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/barnyard-0.2.0]$ ./autojunk.sh
configure.in:147: warning: underquoted definition of SN_CHECK_DECL
configure.in:147: run info '(automake)Extending aclocal'
configure.in:147: or see http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html#Extending-aclocal
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: Using auxiliary files such as `acconfig.h', `config.h.bot'
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: and `config.h.top', to define templates for `config.h.in'
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: is deprecated and discouraged.
autoheader-2.61:
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: Using the third argument of `AC_DEFINE' and
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: `AC_DEFINE_UNQUOTED' allows one to define a template without
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: `acconfig.h':
autoheader-2.61:
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: AC_DEFINE([NEED_FUNC_MAIN], 1,
autoheader-2.61: [Define if a function `main' is needed.])
autoheader-2.61:
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: More sophisticated templates can also be produced, see the
autoheader-2.61: WARNING: documentation.
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/barnyard-0.2.0]$

Now that we have the main part of the patch completed we need to make a few quick modifications to "src/output-plugins/op_alert_fwsam.c" so that it handles the barnyard output properly and loads the sid-msg.map file via a hard coded path (line 191). I threw a patch out there so that you don't need to do this manually, located here: http://www.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/patches/barnyard-snortsam-hack.gz.

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ wget http://www.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/patches/barnyard-snortsam-hack.gz

2008-04-13 18:52:54 (1.15 MB/s) - `barnyard-snortsam-hack.gz' saved [641/641]

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ gunzip barnyard-snortsam-hack.gz
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ cd barnyard-0.2.0
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/barnyard-0.2.0]$ patch -p1 < ../barnyard-snortsam-hack Hmm... Looks like a unified diff to me... The text leading up to this was: ...
Patching file src/output-plugins/op_alert_fwsam.c using Plan A...
Hunk #1 succeeded at 188.
Hunk #2 succeeded at 815.
done
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/barnyard-0.2.0]$

This patch or "hack" has assumed that the location of your sid-msg.map is at /usr/local/etc/snort/sid-msg.map if this is not the case, you will need to edit /src/output-plugins/op_alert_fwsam.c around line 191 and specify the correct path. At this point you can configure barnyard and build as you normally would.

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/barnyard-0.2.0]$./configure --enable-mysql
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/barnyard-0.2.0]$make
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/barnyard-0.2.0]$sudo make install

Your barnyard is now ready and we will cover the config file and startup after we get ipf and snortsam up and running.

The next step is to add the following to our Kernel so that we have ipf and ipfw enabled and running by default at boot.

# IPFW support

options IPFIREWALL #Enable IPFW directly in the kernel
options IPFIREWALL_FORWARD #Enable the Ip Forwarding function of IPFW
options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE
options IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT
options IPDIVERT #allow this host to divert packets to/through different ints and routes

# IPF Support - default is to accept
options IPFILTER
options IPFILTER_LOG

Once these have been added please build your kernel, install and reboot. At this point we are ready to fetch and make snortsam.

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ wget http://www.snortsam.net/files/snortsam/snortsam-src-2.52.tar.gz

2008-04-13 19:17:28 (497 KB/s) - `snortsam-src-2.52.tar.gz' saved [1075606/1075606]

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ tar xvfz snortsam-src-2.52.tar.gz
x snortsam
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ cd snortsam
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/snortsam]$ sh ./makesnortsam.sh
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Building SnortSam (release)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Building SnortSam (debug)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Done.
[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj/snortsam]$sudo cp snortsam* /usr/local/bin/

That's it for the snortsam build, now we are ready to configure everything and fire it up for a test! The first thing that we will configure is our snortsam. There is a good amount of documentation under snortsam/docs/README.conf that covers basic configuration. For our purposes we will create the file /etc/snortsam.conf and place the following in it.

defaultkey secrets
port 6783
accept 192.168.1.0/24
keyinterval 30 minutes
ipf bge0

This configuration specifies a default key of "secrets" and that the snortsam daemon should listen on port 6783 for connectoins from the 192.168.1.0/24 network. The configuration also specifies that the connection between the client (barnyard) and snortsam daemon will be rekeyed every 30 minutes and that ipf will be used on bge0 locally.

On to the barnyard configuration, this file will be barnyard-snortsam.conf located at /usr/local/etc/. The only line that needs to be in this file is the one that calls the snortsam plugin for barnyard and specifies the host:port/password

output alert_fwsam: 192.168.1.7:6783/secrets

The barnyard snortsam plugin uses a sid-block.map file to define what sids will be blocked, how they will be blocked and for how long they will be blocked. The format is quite simple "sid: where[option],duration;" and to test we will put the file at /usr/local/etc/snort/sid-block.map with the following entry

9999999: src[conn], 15 seconds;

I chose sid 9999999 so that I could create a custom rule in my local.rules to test my configuration.

alert icmp any any -> 1.2.3.4 any (msg:"test"; sid:9999999;)

Assuming you were able to add that rule, we are now at the point to fire things up and give it a good old fashioned roll (all in debugging verbose mode of course)!

Restart your snort so that it sees the new SID if you have not done so... -HUP FTW!@!!
Start snortsam (must be as root right now to have access to ipf)

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ sudo snortsam-debug

Start barnyard with the new config file (even if you have a previosly running barnyard from the previous security appliance article... this will run at the same time, we have specified a new waldo file and pid file). Note that the following is ALL ONE LINE... no line breaks or crs! Note that this uses the snort.alert and not the snort.log just like the syslog facility.

[jj@Azazel /usr/home/jj]$ sudo /usr/local/bin/barnyard -c /usr/local/etc/barnyard-snortsam.conf -g /usr/local/etc/snort/gen-msg.map -s /usr/local/etc/snort/sid-msg.map -d /var/log/snort/ -f snort.alert -w /var/log/snort/barnyard-snortsam.waldo -p /usr/local/etc/snort/classification.config -X /var/barnyard-snortsam.pid -vvv

After starting barnyard you should see the following debug output from your snortsam-debug:

Debug: Connection from: 192.168.1.7.
Debug: Received Packet: CHECKIN
Debug: Snort SeqNo: cbb9
Debug: Mgmt SeqNo : 7000
Debug: Status : 1
Debug: Version : 14

Now that everything is up and running we can test. The best way to test all aspects is to point a separate system at the IP of this box (default router/gateway) or on my system as evident by the above config "192.168.1.7" and ping 1.2.3.4 with that separate system. The ipfw options that we previously set in the kernel will allow this host to simply route the traffic to the proper destination. You should see debug output from your snortsam-debug as such:

Blocking host 192.168.1.43 in connection 192.168.1.43->1.2.3.4:0 (icmp) for 60 seconds (Sig_ID: 9999999).
Debug: [ipf][28201600] Plugin Blocking...
Debug: [ipf][28201600] command /bin/echo "@1 block in log level local7.info quick on bge0 proto 1 from 192.168.1.43/32 to 1.2.3.4/32"|/sbin/ipf -f -

We can see from the output that it is blocking the source address of 192.168.1.43 and proto 1 (ICMP) only. This means that this host can still browse the internet and do everything (other than send icmp to 1.2.3.4 for 60 seconds), this is a function of the [conn] option in the sid-block.map file.

Wonderful, we now have a functioning version of snortsam running off of the snort output and not snort directly. This means that we can upgrade / change our snort instance itself and not have to re-patch and mess with that... (this of course assumes that the version you use can output unified so that your patched version of barnyard can read it). The final step in this process is to add the sids that you want to block to the sid-msg.map file. I have modified the create-sidmap.pl file to create a sid-block.map compatible output by reading all of the .rules files in a directory and dumping "sid: src[conn], 30min;" output. This output blocks the service by source that the alert was generated from for 30 minutes. The file can be obtained at http://www.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/patches/create-sidblock.pl.gz. Usage is simple and as follows (again, note that it's one line):

[root@Azazel /home/jj]# ./create-sidblock.pl /usr/local/etc/snort/rules/ > /usr/local/etc/snort/sid-block.map
[root@Azazel /home/jj]# tail -n 3 /usr/local/etc/snort/sid-block.map
2500000: src[conn],30min;
2510000: src[conn],30min;
9999999: src[conn],30min;

I suggest that you not put ALL sids in this file, but rather take a subset from rules files that you know are bad news. To do this simply copy the .rules files into a directory of your choice and run the script against that directory (note that the sid-block.map must always live in /usr/local/etc/snort at this time). Other suggestions include daemonizing your barnyard instance (-D) rather than -vvv. The rest you can figure out.

The next part of this series will cover adding content filtration and a transparent squid instance into the mix on this box.

Cheers,
JJC

Cisco Acquires Sguil!

In many of my past writings I have mentioned using Sguil and have been an avid user of the solution. On that front, I would like to extend my congratulations to the core members of the team for their great success! It will be exciting to see it running on IOS!

Cisco Announces Agreement to Acquire Sguil™ Open Source Security Monitoring Project

Acquisition Furthers Cisco’s Vision for Integrated Security Products

SAN JOSE, Calif., and LONGMONT, Color., April 1st, 2008 – Cisco and the Sguil™ project today announced an agreement for Cisco to acquire the Sguil™ project, a leading Open Source network security solution. With hundreds of installations world-wide, Sguil™ is the de facto reference implementation for the Network Security Monitoring (NSM) model. Sguil™-based NSM will enable Cisco’s customer base to more efficiently collect and analyze security-related information as it traverses their enterprise networks. This acquisition will help Cisco to cement its reputation as a leader in the Open Source movement while at the same time furthering its long-held vision of integrating security into the network infrastructure.

Under terms of the transaction, Cisco has acquired the Sguil™ project and related trademarks, as well as the copyrights held by the five principal members of the Sguil™ team, including project founder Robert "Bamm" Visscher. Cisco will assume control of the open source Sguil™ project including the Sguil.net domain, web site and web site content and the Sguil™ Sourceforge project page. In addition, the Sguil™ team will remain dedicated to the project as Cisco employees, continuing their management of the project on a day-to-day basis.

To date, Sguil™ has been developed primarily in the Tcl scripting language, support for which is already present inside many of Cisco’s routers and switches. The new product, to be known as “Cisco Embedded Monitoring Solution (CEMS)”, will be made available first in Cisco’s carrier-grade products in 3Q08, with support being phased into the rest of the Cisco product line by 4Q09. Linksys-branded device will follow thereafter, though the exact deployment schedule has yet to be announced.

“We’re extremely pleased to announce this deal,” said Cisco’s Chief Security Product Manager Cletus F. Simmons. “For some time, our customers have told us that our existing security monitoring products did not extend far enough into their network infrastructure layer. Not only was it sometimes difficult to intercept and monitor the traffic, but there were often political problems at the customer site with deploying our Intrusion Detection Systems, as management had heard several years ago that they ere ‘dead’. Now, with Sguil™ integrated into all their network devices, they’ll have no choice!”

Although the financial details of the agreement have not been announced, Sguil™ developer Robert Visscher will become the new VP of Cisco Rapid Analysis Products for Security. “This deal means a lot to the Sguil™ project and to me personally,” Visscher explains. “Previously, we had to be content with simply being the best technical solution to enable intrusion analysts to collect and analyze large amounts of data in an extraordinarily efficient manner. But now, we’ll have the additional advantage of the world’s largest manufacturer of networking gear shoving it down their customers’ throats! We will no longer have to concern ourselves with mere technical excellence. Instead, I can worry more about which tropical island to visit next, and which flavor daiquiri to order. You know, the important things.”

About Cisco Systems

Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

About Sguil™

Sguil™ is the leading Network Security Monitoring (NSM) framework. It is built for network security analysts by network security analysts. Sguil’s main component is an intuitive GUI that provides access to a wide variety of security related information, including real-time IDS alerts, network session database and full packet captures. Sguil™ was written by Robert “Bamm” Visscher, who was apparently too cheap to buy a book on Java or C.

Again, congrats to the team... if you get a chance, please stop in at #snort-gui on freenode and say hi / congratulate the team.

Cheers,
JJC

Oh noes, can't has document drops!!

It's not much for me to post, but I can't stop laughing!

dakrone++

http://writequit.org/blog/?p=158

Kthxbye,
JJC

pauldotcommunity.blogspot.com

I will be contributing to the pauldotcommunity blog site moving forward. You will find posts in both this blog and global-security. Hopefully we will be able to publish some useful information in at least one of these locations :-P




Cheers,
JJC

FreeBSD USB Booting Issues (BTX)

Since we have been building LiveUSB tools that were based on FreeBSD there has historically been an issue with several makes of laptop/hardware on boot. This problem has manifested in many ways but always yields the same result; a non-working LiveUSB tool for the system owner. This problem had to do with the BTX Loader not playing well with the specific hardware in question and not loading/running properly via USB.

The good news is that recently a patch was released that should rectify this issue! I will be applying this patch to all FreeBSD based LiveUSB releases going forward. Thanks for all of the community feedback and support on all of this.

For those that may be curious, here is the patch: http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_real.patch. Moving forward (post 7.0R) all releases will be patched from the freebsd folks direclty.

Cheers,
JJC

HeX 1.0.3 LiveUSB Final (Bug Fixes)

I just finished the bugfix version of the HeX 1.0.3 Live (CNY Release) image.

You can get it (in torrent form) from the Security Torrent Depot at http://www.redsphereglobal.com:88/torrent.html?info_hash=77f31dbc8d641500530760e62f17d1a08e433b96 or you can get it from the below direct download site.

USA Site
MD5 (HeX-i386-1.0.3-final-usb.img.gz) = 5fb1498b3437fada0b38602324d8f5e0

Usage instructions are simple:

dd if=/path/to/HeX-i386-1.0.3-final-usb.img of=/path/to/usbstick/device bs=1M

Look for the new HeX 2.0 to be out soon, all based on FreeBSD 7.0R!

Note that some usb sticks will be smaller than others (even if it's "2G") and that even if you write it and dd produces an error saying that not enough space is available... this is OK and your HeX LiveUSB will still work fine.

Cheers,
JJC

Security Torrents

To fill the need to host and download multiple large security related torrents, I have put a tracker online at http://www.redsphereglobal.com:88. You will primarily find items on this site in the following categories:

Toolkits
Anything that I or various other contributing members find useful, relevant or fun with respect to security. Current items that will go into this category are the various HeX (all) releases and InProtect LiveUSB releases.

Distros
Any custom distributions that have been designed to fit security needs and/or perform specific tasks.

Packet-Captures
Any large packet captures or trace files that are obviously not going to fit on the www.openpacket.org site. There is one up there now, it is the malicious traffic that Richard Bejlich captured at the 2007 Shmoocon. This torrent was created and added by giovani...so a shout out goes to him!

Having said all of that, we will (as with all trackers) need seeders. So if you have a little extra bandwidth and/or want to contribute in any way please let us know!

Cheers,
JJC

FreeBSD 7.0 Released

I am pleased to announce (a few days late) that FreeBSD 7.0R has been released as of Feb 27, 2008! More info here on the release.

You might (I hope not) wonder why this is exciting? Really, aside from the dramatic and significant enhancements to the overall functionality and stability of the operating system, it means that several OSS projects will be moving forward with new development work based on the 7.0 Release. Specifically, we will now begin work on HeX 2.0 with new nifty features to suit your packet loving needs! I also suspect that we will see some additional traction from the freesbie folks.

Further, I will be releasing a new version of the InProtect LiveUSB that will be based on FreeBSD 7.0 Release as soon as the build finishes!

Shmoocon 4 in review

For those that have not attended or are not familiar with shmoocon, it's an annual hacker con. The event is held in Washington DC and additional event info can be found on their site at http://shmoocon.org.

Tickets are released on a timed basis and come in three classes... the early bird ticket for $75, the normal ticket for $150, and the I pissed around and didn't get a less expensive ticket for $300. When I say "timed basis", they have specific dates and times that they will make a certain number of each ticket class available. Needless to say, on the ticket release dates the shmoo ticketing server was quite loaded but luckily I was able to obtain one of the early bird special tickets.

Day One:

The con kicked off on Friday Feb-15 with a single track of talks. I missed the first few talks (schedule here) and caught a little more than the last half. Unfortunately I don't really recall the first talks, so they must not have been altogether that interesting for me. I primarily payed attention to the last three talks:

• Hacking the Samurai Spirit - Isaac Mathis
• New Countermeasures to the Bump Key Attack - Deviant Ollam
• Keynote Address - J. Alex Halderman
  

Hacking the Samurai Spirit:

The premise of this talk was to discuss the current cultural differences, history and mindset of the Japanese as related to Information Security. While this talk was humerus I did not find it terribly technically relevant. The speaker seemed to more be giving a history of security related events over the past 60 years in Japan, though there were some good and interesting points in the end that did relate to Information Security. Specifically, the speaker detailed how there are several scams occurring concerning the uneducated internet user in Japan. A simple example of this type of scam would be a pr0n site that requires the user to click on an I Agree, Enter type link prior to gaining access to the goods. Once this action has been completed, the user is then told that they have just agreed to paying X amount of money to access the site and that if they do not pay said money they will be sued. The people in Japan are afraid of reprise of any type and typically will pay this immediately. So overall I would rate this talk somewhere in the middle due to it's humerus nature.

New Countermeasures to the Bump Key Attack

Having just sat through the history lesson re: Japan, I was certainly ready for something different and more exciting. New Countermeasures to the Bump Key Attack certainly delivered this for me. I (as many in the security community) have been aware for years about the gross weaknesses that exist in the physical lock world. Thanks to the consistent pounding and education of the world by people such as Deviant Ollam. This talk covered the basics of lock-picking using bump keys and modified bump keys then detailed how may lock manufacturers are dealing with this issue. The media for the presentation itself was well done and clear, further the presenter did a great job at getting the point across.

A challenge was also issued during this talk, the title "Gringo Warrior". The setting for Gringo Warrior is simple, you are a Gringo that got a little blitzed in Tijuana and woke up in a Mexican jail cell with no recollection of the night before. In walks the corrupt policia and tells you that you have to pay a fine, the cost of that fine is whatever money you have in your bank account. He tells you that he will leave you for an hour to consider this. Luckily while they were emptying your pockets they missed your lock-picking tools. Your challenge is to pick the handcuffs that you are in, pick the cell door, disable the cell guard and pick a lock cabinet that has your passport in it. At this point, you have a choice; you must either pick the front door lock to leave, or you can pick an additional locked door in the cabinet to obtain a handgun and shoot out a surveillance camera to sneak out a window. This was a timed event, the event winner took under a minute:30 to complete the entire course and received a social engineering kit (hardhat and several vendor specific polos)!

Keynote

This talk was concerning the new electronic voting systems and their MANY security flaws. It was both interesting and somewhat technical but more detailing the process that they took to obtain their first voting machine to test (somewhat clandestine in nature and humerus). The short of it is, as we all now know, that these devices have historically been easily compromised both electronically and physically. One key point of humor is that diebold (the primary manufacturer) had a high resolution picture of the actual keys used to access the IO ports of the system on their website, from this picture they were able to successfully create a working keyset.

Day Two and Three:

I am bundling these days together and only writing about the talks that I found interesting for the remainder of this posting.

• VoIP Penetration Testing: Lessons Learned -John Kindervag and Jason Ostrom
• Got Citrix? Hack It! - Shanit Gupta
• Advanced Protocol Fuzzing - What We Learned when Bringing Layer2 Logic to "SPIKE Land" - Enno Rey and Daniel Mende

VoIP Penetration Testing

This talk primarly dealt with using the voiphopper tool to jump onto voice vlans and conduct your activities as needed there. The fun part would be to jump onto the voice vlan and do a little fuzzing using spike or the like ;-). Overall a fairly interesting talk and there were demonstrations that made it a bit more exciting.

Got Citrix? Hack It!

I found this talk to be fairly basic, but that said quite technically relevant. I think that we often do not consider the most simple way to get into something and that is why this was a good talk. The premise of this was hacking Citrix and primarily focused on using the Kiosk mode. The speaker pointed out that often while the kiosk has a limited set of initial applications available to be run, or force-ran that they hotkeys are still often active. Examples include cntl+n to open a new Internet Explorer Browser instance that now has the address bar in it, you can therefore browse wherever you want and grab a payload to further break into your mom's kiosk. Other examples are cntl+h (history) cntl + F1 (shortcut for cntl+alt+del) and so on.

Advanced Protocol Fuzzing

Probably the best talk of the con in my opinion, this talk focused on the steps that some German researches took to fuzz several layer 2 protocols. They worked though creating the protocol definitions in SPIKE and Sulley and their various reverse engineering processes from various sources including Wireshark. This talk also included a live demo of crashing a medium sized Cisco Cat using LLDP fuzzing techniques.

All the other talks...

I am sure that there were several other good talks, unfortunately due to the nature of three being scheduled at the same time, I was not able to see everything. Shmoocon does post videos of the talks on their site, so keep an eye out. Unfortunately I did attend several talks that were presented by fairly well known people, and I believe that this was the only reason that these talks were approved as they contained really no new or relevant information.

Overall I would rate shmoocon as a good time with decent material and good speakers. I mean, for $75 I can't complain, I certainly feel like I got my moneys worth. Perhaps next year or at an upcoming con I will present on HeX with the team, so keep an eye out!

Cheers,
JJC

InProtect LiveUSB 0.80.3 Beta!

Though the InProtect project has not made a large number of public postings lately (beta releases and the like...) we have been quite busy. We will soon be releasing a tarball of the latest 0.80.3RC1. That is not, however, the purpose of this article but rather I am releasing a liveUSB image that is an entirely self-contained and functioning installation of InProtect on a FreeBSD 6.3-Current system.

I came up with the idea to create the InProtect LiveUSB when someone requested that I build one for another project that I am an active member of (HeX). Unfortunately it has taken me several months to get the time put together to actually build this tool. Having said that, I am quite pleased with the outcome and functionality of the tool. Placing this tool onto a USB thumb drive gives the user extreme versatility from the perspective of security. Obviously the nature of a USB thumb drive is not terribly secure; we can put them in our pocket and have them fall out in a parking lot where anyone could conceivably pick it up and snag the data off of it and multiple other scenarios. I am more talking about the security of the location or client that may have a sensitive environment with sensitive data and the like. In this scenario the USB device could be taken in and left with the organization, post scan, that has such sensitive data. Again though, the primary purpose of this build is to allow for a solid demo of the InProtect system.

As I said earlier, the system was built using FreeBSD 6.3-Current, ontop of this I built fluxbox (and several applications such as firefox), mysql51, apache22, php5 and several perl modules that are InProtect dependencies. I manually configured all of the components to work with InProtect, the installer currently does not work on freebsd though I am in the process of building a port. In-short, and as stated earlier, this is a fully functional InProtect scanner with a few things that need to be completed by the end-user; Nessus 3.0.x install and jpgraph for php5 install.

The Nessus and jpgraph items are not included in this image due to their licensing restrictions (not GPL). It is for this reason they must be manually installed.

First you will need to download the InProtect LiveUSB 0.80.3 image here:

http://www.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/inprotect-i386-0.80.3-beta.usb.img.gz
MD5 (inprotect-i386-0.80.3-beta.usb.img.gz) = 605a5b20d754ea7e6305922695f301ba
SHA256 (inprotect-i386-0.80.3-beta.usb.img.gz) = 1d562d17db0ef4e3afefcca18fd40932b7faecdddd673910c3ad11a4aab4434b

After obtaining the image and gunzipping it you will want to use dd to write it to a 2G or larger USB thumb drive. NOTE that you want to write it to the device itself and NOT to a specific partition on the device. Also, if you didn't figure it out... this will overwrite anything that you may currently have on your thumb drive.

dd if=/path/to/foo/inprotect-i386-0.80.3-beta.usb.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M

Your output file path may be different than /dev/da0 (this is mine on a freebsd boxen). The key is that you are writing directly to the device address and NOT to a partition, that will NOT work. Assuming that you have a thumb drive and computer capable of USB2.0 this process should take around 10 minutes to write all of the data.

At this point you should be able to boot from your new shiny LiveUSB thumbdrive. The initial login details are simple (these ARE case sensitive so pay attention!):

Username: InProtect
Password: inprotect

Once logged in type startx to get into fluxbox. From here, if you are not familiar suggest playing around just a little bit. A few tips, this isn't windoze, you access the main menuwith fluxbox, I by right clicking anywhere on the desktop. The image to the right shows the menu of the InProtect LiveUSB. The highlighted option will take you to the Nessus and jpgraph installation instructions.

Even before you install Nessus or jpgraph you will be able to login to the local instance of InProtect by selecting the InProtect menu option as displayed below. Once you have selected the InProtect menu item, you will be able to use admin / admin for the login and password to access the local instance of InProtect.

Note that until you install Nessus you will not be able to run any scans.

In this image I have already created a default scan zone and default scanner so that once Nessus is installed and the Nessus user created, as noted in the instructions contained on the image, the system is fully functional and scans can be immediately created and executed.

As always please feel free to contact me or leave any comments, criticisms, suggestions or otherwise that you might have.

Cheers,
JJC

HeX 1.0.3 LiveUSB (CNY Release)

After much adeau, here it is! Instructions for usage are quite simple, dd it to your usb thumb drive (the drive, not a partition or it will NOT work). This image includes all of the same features as our mainline HeX 1.0.3 release but is on USB not CD, the filesystem is therefore also writable. You will need a minimum of a 2G Thumb Drive or Memory Stick to write this. I say "Memory Stick" because I have heard rumor of some people using SD rather than USB Thumb Drives to use this tool.

So for example on my freebsd system I would dd as follows:

dd if=/path/to/foo/hex-i386-1.0.3.usb.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M

command is simple... if is the Input File, output is the Output File (in this case it is the da0 device) and bs=1M is setting the block size to 1mb - this helps to speed up the write process.

Downloads:
USA Site (521MB)
USA MD5 Verification
USA SHA256 Verification

Malaysia Mirrors to be populated soon, I'll post them when they are.

Cheers,
JJC

Shmoocon Starts Tomorrow

I trust that we are all prepared for absurdities and enjoyable semi-sober technical security banter? In any event, shmoocon DC 2008 starts tomorrow afternoon and I look forward to seeing you there. You can find the schedule on the shmoocon site itself.

I wanted to comment that if you do not currently have a ticket, there are several for sale on Ebay:

• http://cgi.ebay.com/2008-ShmooCon-ticket_W0QQitemZ190198292963QQihZ009QQcategoryZ16122QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
• http://cgi.ebay.com/Shmoocon-ticket-February-15-18-Marriott-Wardman-DC_W0QQitemZ120222483342QQihZ002QQcategoryZ16122QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I suspect that there may even be some hockers outside ;-)

Cheers,
JJC

HeX 1.0.3, the CNY Release

I am pleased to announce the release of HeX 1.0.3, release info is below. Thanks to the entire development team for their dedication and hard work. This release has been dubbed the CNY, or Chinese New Year release.

With the recent release of FreeBSD 7.0 RC2, we anticipate an actual 7.0 release in the near future. When the Release version of 7.0 becomes available we will begin working on the new HeX 2.0 project.

Get HeX 1.0.3 Here:
US Mirrors:
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/hex-i386-1.0.3.iso
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/hex-i386-1.0.3.iso.md5
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/hex-i386-1.0.3.iso.sha256

Malaysia Mirrors:
http://bsd.ipv6.la/hex-i386-1.0.3.iso
http://bsd.ipv6.la/hex-i386-1.0.3.iso.md5
http://bsd.ipv6.la/hex-i386-1.0.3.iso.sha256

Fixed:
- pkg_info works after installation
- ping works without sudo
- procfs is correctly mounted on /proc at boot

Upgraded:
1. NSM Console 0.6-DEVEL
Features:
- 'dump' command added, you can now dump packet payloads into a binary
file for later analysis
- Significant speedups in the harimau module and 'checkip' command if
wget is installed
- tcpxtract configuration file changed to extract more types of files
- Added foremost module
- Added clamscan module (Thanks JohnQPublic)
- Argus and tcptrace have reverse dns turned off by default now, it
was causing the module to hang for extremely large pcap files. Can be
switched on by changed the module options
- rot13 encoding and decoding added :)
Bugfixes:
- alias command
- urlescape (en|de)coding
- file existence check
- many other things
All the other enhancements, bugfixes and additions since the 0.2
release (there have been many!)

New Application Packages:
- xplot
- uni2ascii
- vnc
- vsftpd
- samplicator
- sflowtool
- pmacct
- ming
- ploticus
- tcpick
- bvi
- elinks
- feh
- tftpgrab
- arpwatch

Misc:
- New wallpapers with different color schemes

The LiveUSB image will be out shortly, it is undergoing a quick regression test currently.

Cheers,
JJC

Column Update - Global Security

I apologize for my lax postings lately but have been largely unavailable to write due to several family matters that required travel and immediate attention.

Note that we are now back on-track for continued analysis of security tools and how-to direction, possibly even some rants and noob bashing ;-).

Cheers,
JJC

HeX and NSM-Console Writeup in ISSA Journal

Russ McRee has written a nice piece about the HeX Live project and the included NSM-Console in his 'toolsmith' section of the ISSA Journal. This 3.5 page writeup has clearly captured our intent behind HeX and the NSM-Console created by Mathew Lee Hinman.

If you are not an ISSA subscriber, you can access the writeup at Russ McRee's column or here in the form of pdf.

I would like to thank the community for their continued support and feedback on this project.

Cheers,
JJC

How do I know if my Snort implementation is working?

How do I test Snort? How do I know if Snort is sniffing packets? How do I know if Snort is running properly? How do I generate a test alert with Snort? Recently, and over the years, I have regularly seen people join the #snort channel on freenode and post these very questions to the snort mailing lists. Perhaps this little article will index properly in the search engines and end their questions, this is of course assuming that they know how to use a search engine ;-).

There are really several ways of testing snort, some much more complex than others. Probably the most simple way is to define a custom rule that you can easily produce the traffic to trigger the alert. This can be done by creating a simple rule that looks for traffic of a certain type, to a certain address or many other ways but for the purposes of this article we will be looking for traffic to a certain address (as this tends to be the most easily produced). We begin by creating a custom rule either in a new rules file or by adding the rule into an existing rules file. To simplify this you can download the rule from the url below:

https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/snort/rules/snort-test.rules

Once you have downloaded this rule file and added it to your snort.conf so that Snort has loaded it, simply generate traffic from the monitored network to one or more of the following hosts: 121.175.169.102,193.71.199.6,200.123.165.130. This traffic can be of almost any type. I will typically browse via browser or telnet to a standard IRC port (at the time that I wrote this, these hosts were on the known C&C list) such as 6666, 6667 ....

Once this is done you will see the alerts being generated by snort (assuming that everything is configured properly).

As a second method, you can attempt to generate traffic that an existing snort rule can detect and alert on. To do this, I suggest using a tool such as Metasploit to generate actual attack traffic. You will want to test it against a host that you own, I certainly am not advocating attacking someones network with Metasploit from your network, this host should either be intended to be a test host, and/ or be immune to the attack. A simple example would be to enable the web-iis.rules from snort.org and launch an attack against one of your patched webservers from metasploit in an attempt to exploit MS01-23 using the Metasploit Framework Exploit. This will in-turn generate the WEB-IIS ISAPI .printer access alert to fire.

Either of those two methods should allow you to test your Snort installation, there are some other tcpreplay type tools that you can generate traffic from some signatures with, but by and large they are not effective tests.

Regards,
JJC

HeX Virtual Appliance Image: 1.0.2R

While I have not yet had time to create images for multiple Virtualization technologies, I did finish the image for VMware. Please obtain it at the below URL.

This image is 825M in size and will decompress to a 3G VM.

https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX_1.0.2_VMware.tar.gz
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX_1.0.2_VMware.tar.gz.md5
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX_1.0.2_VMware.tar.gz.sha256

Enjoy,
JJC

HeX 1.0.2 LiveUSB Update

Unfortunately, the previous HeX 1.0.2 LiveUSB image was not the proper release, thanks to those that pointed this out. This has since been remediated, the original links are still valid, I will re-post here for your downloading pleasure.

For additional information on the project, please read my earlier post at: http://global-security.blogspot.com/2008/01/hex-102r-liveusb-release.html

https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX-i386-1.0.2.img.gz
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX-i386-1.0.2.img.gz.md5
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX-i386-1.0.2.img.gz.sha256

Cheers,
JJC

Screencast: An Introduction to NSM-Console

Dakrone has created a useful screencast of his new tool, read / see more on his blog

http://thnetos.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/screencast-an-introduction-to-nsm-console/

Cheers,
JJC

HeX 1.0.2R LiveUSB Release

As I have been away on holiday, I have been unable to release the next iteration of the HeX LiveUSB tool. Let this post serve to remediate that (albeit a bit late). Without further adeau, the download is located at the following URLs:

https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX-i386-1.0.2.img.gz
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX-i386-1.0.2.img.gz.md5
https://secure.redsphereglobal.com/data/tools/security/live/HeX-i386-1.0.2.img.gz.sha256

For those that are not familiar with the HeX project, please read further at rawpacket.org. The LiveUSB project is a subset of the overall HeX project and adds a bit of functionality to suit your portable packet monkeying needs. Essentially it gives you a slightly larger (and writable) filesystem to do with what you please; i.e. update signatures, modify configurations, store data and the like.

To use the LiveUSB; simply download decompress and dd onto your device (example on fbsd: dd if=/path/to/HeX-i386-1.0.2.img of=/dev/da0 bs=1M). Note that for speed purposes it is important to increase your default block size in fbsd, the value of 1M takes about 200 seconds for my system to write the entire 2G image.

This release contains the NSM Console as described below.

Matthew(Dakrone) is the main developer of NSM Console, here’s the short description about it -

NSM Console (Network Security Monitoring Console) is a framework for performing analysis on packet capture files. It implements a modular structure to allow for an analyst to quickly write modules of their own without any programming language experience which means you can quickly integrate all the other NSM based tools to it. Using these modules a large amount of pcap analysis can be performed quickly using a set of global (as well as per-module) options. NSM Console also aims to be simple to run and easy to understand without lots of learning time.

If you want more information about what it is (and what it does), check out this introductory post -

http://thnetos.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/nsm-console-a-framework-for-running-things/

You can access NSM Console by clicking the menu -> NSM-Tools -> NSM Console

There are also several bug fixes in this release, as well as new nifty wallpapers (for the holiday season hah).

http://www.rawpacket.org/projects/hex/artwork

1. unicornscan run time error
2. svn run time error
3. lsof run time error
4. firefox startup issue
5. pidgin and liferea dbus issue
6. CDROM-Mount.sh syntax error
7. script command issue
8. ping setuid issue

Other known major or minor issues in the Base System are fixed, thanks to chfl4gs_.

Cheers,
JJC

Happy New Year!

Greetings all, and Happy New Year!

I have been traveling for roughly the past three weeks and have therefore been unable to publish any updates to this site. Rest assured though that I have some good new material for the 2008 security and noob thrashing season ;-)

That said, I trust that everyone had a fantastic holiday and New Year celebration! I want to thank you all for the support and feedback that I continually receive.

Regards,
JJC