SensePost Releases Squeeza SQL Injector, Updates Wikto

As referenced in my BlackHat wrap-up, SensePost has just released the squeeza tool and accompanying slide deck from their presentation.  Their work on timing-based attacks is really interesting, particularly what they have dubbed as "Cross-Site Request Timing": it's apparently possible to violate the same-origin policy by tracking page load times across multiple domains. They've also released an update to Wikto, bumping it to 2.0 - judging from the change log it's a pretty substantial re-write.

BlackHat Wrap-Up

I've returned and recovered from a fun week at BlackHat in Las Vegas.  The conference was a great experience and had an excellent selection of speakers.  As with other hacking conventions I've attended in the past, it was humbling to see how smart some of the presenters and attendees are.  I unfortunately couldn't make it to Defcon this year (damn client obligations!), but four days is just about the right length of time to stay in Vegas.  

To share a few random observations and cool things:

• At this point it should be clear that browser vulnerabilities are this "generation's" OS-level vulnerabilities.  Owning the client means you can do just about anything, including full-fledged attacks against internal networks.  David Byrne's anti-DNS pinning really drove this home, particularly when he used Java LiveConnect to proxy a full Nessus scan against an internal host through the browser. 
• Billy Hoffman's talk on "The Little Hybrid Web Worm That Could" was really interesting - he's always a good presenter.  He illustrated several pieces of proof-of-concept JavaScript code that can self-mutate, parse sites like Secunia to "learn" new vulnerabilities, and exploit web application vulnerabilities.  It won't be long before we see these kinds of worms in the wild, as the technology and research are already in place.  
• Errata security demo'd a tool called Ferret that combines WiFi sniffing and gathering sensitive information into somewhat of a point-and-click affair.  It works with a HTTP proxy component that lets you easily use session cookies hijacked from other users' browser sessions.  He used it to hop on to an attendee's GMail account while on stage, which really got the audience going.  There's nothing new here - we all know you can sniff and re-use cookies from non-SSL'd connections - but the tool is still a neat implementation.
• A presentation on extrusion detection systems by Matasano ended up being far more interesting than I expected.  While their research focused on vulnerabilities in agent-based tools designed to prevent information leakage, it conceptually applied to any agent-based product (I'm thinking of SIM tools in particular).  Through reverse engineering, they revealed how trivial it would be to take over agents, execute code at the Windows kernel level, spoof reporting data, and cause other havoc.  It made me really want to grab a copy of PaiMei and learn more about reversing and fuzzing.
• The Metasploit team gave a fantastic two-part presentation (available on their site) on tactical penetration testing.  Their message was one we've always preached to our clients: pen-testing should not just be vulnerability scanning and firing off exploits.  They covered some interesting new resources for footprinting targets and network discovery, such as DomainTools.com and Paterva.com.  
  
  The presentation also included a demo of a new Metasploit component that facilitates NTLM hijacking.  You basically capture the victim's NTLM hash through a man-in-the-middle attack (the WPAD proxy hijack technique works great for this), and can then re-use this hash to authenticate with the user's credentials.  There's no need to crack the NTLM hash!  I plan on testing this one out in our lab - although our rules of engagement unfortunately often forbid us from performing network redirection attacks against clients.   
• SensePost had a presentation on timing-based attacks that I wish I had not missed.   They demonstrated "SensePost-aTime", which leverages timing information to perform SQL injection and extract data.  I couldn't find it on their web-site yet, but will post as soon as a link is available.  Until then, you can check out a recent post on ha.ckers.org that covers a "res://" timing attack that enumerates a user's local files through the browser.
• My "Best Booth Gimmick" award goes to Fortify Software - their Borat-inspired "Discover Hackistan" promotion was pretty damn funny.

Personal goal for next year: to put together a presentation that I can at least attempt to submit for BlackHat or Defcon.

Oracle 9i/10g Views exploit

A quick one for the weekend: Rawlab released a nice little SQL exploit for a recently-patched Oracle 9i/10g vulnerability involving specially crafted Views. This flaw gives database users the ability to update/insert/delete records with SYSTEM privileges. The exploit updates a specified user account in SYS.USER$ with a new password; the code is straightforward enough to be easily modified if you wanted to mess with other records in system tables. I've hit a streak of insecure Oracle databases over the last few pen-tests, so this might be a useful tool to add to my collection.

Dangerous links: Mozilla URI handler exploits

There has been a lot of recent activity among security blogs covering serious new vulnerabilities in Mozilla's URI protocol handling.  This is a significant issue because it is easily exploitable and yields remote command execution on a victim's PC: an attacker only needs to lead the user to a maliciously crafted link.

The root of this flaw lies in how Mozilla handles URIs that are opened by other applications (such as mailto://, aim://, etc.).  These links are designed to pass specific parameters to the external application - for example, a mailto: link typically launches your e-mail client, and composes a new message with a specified "To: address.  Mozilla does not sufficiently parse these URIs; as a result, it is possible to inject characters and change the execution path.  

To make matters worse, the browser does not prompt the user before handling URIs for “mailto”, “news”, “nntp” and “snews”, so this attack can be launched without any interaction.  Yesterday, Billy Rios posted a simple exploit that executes commands through these URIs without any user warning.  However, it only works if the victim has no applications registered to the URIs, which is fairly uncommon (Outlook Express handles them by default, and is installed on most Windows systems).

The latest and most comprehensive vulnerability report was released today by Thor Larholm, and includes several proof-of-concept demos for Firefox, Thunderbird, and the mailto: protocol.  He goes into a lot of detail - it's a great read and a slick hack.

So an important moral to this story is that registering a URI handler really exposes an application to significant risk of attacks originating from the browser.  This is nothing new: for example, there have been numerous buffer overflows affecting AOL Instant Messenger that can be triggered by crafted URIs.  However, when you combine them with widespread cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and something like this URI handling flaw, you can see that a lot of interesting attack vectors are possible.  It is likely that we'll see variations on these theme affecting multiple browser platforms and used in a variety of exploit scenarios.

One last thing - a good post on ush.it details how you can disable unnecessary external protocol handlers to harden your browser. 

Firefox 2.0.0.5 and Thunderbird 2.0.0.4 are vulnerable; this will be patched in the soon-to-be-released Firefox 2.0.0.6.

More on Flash hacking

A quick follow-up to my previous post on testing Flash sites: Stefano Di Paola recently delivered a superbly comprehensive presentation on Flash application security during this year's OWASP conference in Milan. It goes into great detail on the ActionScript security model, how Flash applications are sandboxed, and a variety of client-side attack vectors. The resulting exploits include classic cross-site scripting issues, as well as a variation known as cross-site "flashing". Stefano also covers a few concepts for more advanced hacks, and plans to release testing tools and additional whitepapers soon. You can check out his web-log at Wisec.it.