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Category Archives: Penetration Testing

Introduction to Cross-Site Scripting

Google offers an application security education page about XSS.  If you’re new to it, or just want to get more in-depth and determine how to mitigate it, give it a read.

https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/learning/xss/

BSides Charlotte CTF

BSides Charlotte was a great time and the people were fantastic. The CTF was awesome, because we (Mother Russia) won and had a blast with the Network King of the Hill-style competition.

Mother Russia of Great Victorious

Great #1 Victory

Technical Details

So, I feel a little bit ashamed, but I spent the first hour and a half thinking that I was in netsec hell and was hitting a firewall or something, because NMAP was running extremely slowly (57 minutes for a /24), but it turned out that I was scanning an entirely wrong network.

After getting some good targets, I saw a lot of port 80.  Most only had to default Apache pages, but one had a Drupal instance installed.  The scoring mechanism required for teams to deface the front page of the web servers with <team>TeamName</team> tags, so this looked promising.  My teammate pointed out that a Metasploit module existed for that version of Drupal (Drupalgeddon).  In our case, it created an admin user and popped a meterpreter session with low privilege.

After logging in to the Drupal instance, it became clear that there was a lot of competition for the front page, but we used a secret weapon to swing the competition in our favor.  Many teams were outright banning and blocking the other teams’ admin users, which I found to be a silly idea, because they would just create a new user and it would be a game of whack-a-mole.  Instead of blocking or banning users, I simply removed their admin privileges, posted our flag and babysat the users page to remove new users’ permissions.  After a while, even the facilitator of the CTF was asking how we were blocking access and assumed that we had rooted the box and were using IP Tables.  Because it allowed for users to still browse all of the pages, many assumed that it was simply a network glitch when their posts didn’t work. As a result, they didn’t create new users and moved on the other targets, giving us a WIDE lead.  The network was a target-rich environment, with quite a few open ports, but MS08-067 actually saved the day on quite a few of them.  There were many boxes, but the Drupal incident was really my highlight of it all.

It was a fun CTF and a wonderful conference, so I want to give greetz to @th3mojo, @c0ncealed, and everyone who helped run @BsidesCLT.

Arizona Cyber Warfare Range

I just want to take this moment to point out what an awesome site Arizona Cyber Warfare Range is.  They allow aspiring netsec students and hacker jedi alike to register on any of their hacking “live-fire ranges” and learn valuable skills.  With servers for Beginners, Intermediate, Advanced and Real World skill levels, this is an excellent resource for anyone interested in infosec or hacking.  They are a non-profit organization, so please drop them a donation if you can spare.

USB Armory Released

Using crowdfunding and open-sourced hardware design, the USB Armory (which is now for sale here (no affiliate links here) for $130), has been successfully funding and released.  Featuring a smaller form-factor than an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, the Armory is a USB stick-sized computer that can be used for any number of projects. The little stick sports of lot of power, as seen in the specifications (taken from the crowdfunding page):

Hardware

Software

The USB Armory hardware is supported by standard software environments and requires very little customization effort. In fact, vanilla Linux kernels and standard distributions run seamlessly on the tiny USB Armory board:

Connectivity

  • High Speed USB 2.0 On-The-Go (OTG) with full device emulation
  • full TCP/IP connection to/from USB Armory via USB CDC Ethernet emulation
  • flash drive functionality via USB mass storage device emulation
  • serial communication over USB or physical UART

Security

The ability to emulate arbitrary USB devices in combination with the i.MX53 SoC speed and fully customizable operating environment makes the USB Armory an ideal platform for all kinds of personal security applications. Not only is the USB Armory an excellent tool for testing the security of other devices, but it also has great security features itself:

  • ARM® TrustZone®
  • secure boot + storage + RAM
  • user-fused keys for running only trusted firmware
  • optional secure mode detection LED indicator
  • minimal design limits scope of supply chain attacks
  • great auditability due to open hardware and software

The support for ARM® TrustZone®, in contrast to conventional trusted platform modules (TPMs), allows developers to engineer custom TPMs by enforcing domain separation between the “secure” and “normal” worlds that propagates throughout all SoC components, as opposed to limited only to the CPU core.

At such a low price-point and with this many options, this could become a must-have for any cyber security practitioner. I plan to pick one up at some point and will hopefully write a review.