DeaconBlues posted:

Nice thread topic!

I'd like an effective and relatively simple way of turning a short password into a hash type string to use as a passphrase for AES encryption please.

In the past I've used the MD5 of a simple string (such as a car license plate) and I know that people here will poo poo brix that I used something as insecure as MD5 but, hey, it's better than the original password!

I looked at PBKDF2, which seems ideal for stretching a simple password into an indecipherable string and then found out that there are better alternatives, such as bcrypt which has more expensive overheads if someone attempted to reverse the data.

The problem with bcrypt (and scrypt, I believe) is that they are geared toward storing passwords for web services and produce a more complicated output than I desire. I just wanna derive an encryption key from a simple string.

PBKDF2 looks the sort of thing I'm after but there doesn't seem to be a standardized implementation of it. I want to encrypt something with the knowledge that I can decrypt the file in maybe 5 years time, possibly using a different OS (it will still be Linux based, though) or platform. At least MD5 and SHA256 are both standardized algo's and produce the same result over all platforms.

What do you guys use to manually scramble your passwords?
Please don't suggest keepass2: I'm looking for simplicity. Thanks.

Theris posted:

What's wrong with MD5? I mean, it turns my street's name (why are you using license plate numbers instead of something easy to remember when you're stretching it into a good password anyway? We're trying to keep things simple here!) into "0904572d42fdd0ef1cd93fb1047fe2d0." That's a great password! Look how long and random it is! And without involving super complicated hard to learn software like Keepass.

Don't make this more difficult than it has to be, just use md5.

DeaconBlues posted:

It wasn't a joke post. Yep, I do use a password manager (LastPass) but I knew there'd be people recommending Keepass so I mentioned I don't want to use it.

In my case I want to stretch a simple, easy to remember password into a long key. Whoever suggested that I am using multiple instances of this technique are wrong. 99% of my passwords are unique and are stored in LastPass (with 2FA via YubiKey, so don't get smart on me and keep mentioning Keepass).

The point is that I want to stretch an easy to remember brain password into a long key for use with AES encryption which I will only use on a couple of files that are important to me.

Antillie posted:

Well Sourceforge is the official place to get Veracrypt and Veracrypt isn't abandoned so I don't think there is anything wrong with getting it from them. Sourceforge was never the official place to get GIMP. Also the results of the code audit of TrueCrypt prove that it and by extension its open source derivatives in fact can be trusted. Stop spreading FUD.

Antillie posted:

I was incorrect about VeraCrypt. It is in fact hosted at codeplex. However I did back up my claim about TrueCrypt with a link to a summary of the audit results.

So yes. I am loving serious.

quote:

Also the results of the code audit of TrueCrypt prove that it and by extension its open source derivatives in fact can be trusted. Stop spreading FUD.

Antillie posted:

Interesting. Still those are things that can be fixed. Serious flaws are found in software all the time. I don't see how finding OS level flaws in TrueCrypt makes it harder to trust than Firefox or Chrome. Even Bash has had serious issues over the years.

Inspector_666 posted:

Right but why is 9521, 9533 the last pair in that guy's code?

(Is it something hilarious like him using a variable type that can't handle 5-digit numbers or something?)

deep impact on vhs posted:

facebook refuses to pay out bug bounty based on arbitrary, unwritten rules: http://exfiltrated.com/research-Instagram-RCE.php

deep impact on vhs posted:

considering he didn't touch any user data, only confirm he was able to pivot to a bucket containing user data, i'd say he was fairly safely within scope

now, if he had downloaded, altered, accessed or otherwise gotten at user data instead of just the bucket it was hosted on, then i'd agree with you, but it's pretty clear that he didn't

also, the timeline didn't load for me initially so i was unaware that he got paid, but i'd still say that what he found is deserving of a fair bit more than what he got

deep impact on vhs posted:

http://forums.juniper.net/t5/Security-Incident-Response/Important-Announcement-about-ScreenOS/ba-p/285554

also it turns out juniper hosed up and their netscreen vpn can potentially be MITM'd, at least that's what i'm gleaning from what i've seen so far

Rakthar posted:

I seem to be able to understand that guy's question, and you seem to be struggling. Is there a reason for this?

Rakthar posted:

So by being able to parse a fairly simple question, I am taking shortcuts to avoid asking tough questions? Uhh, what?

Rakthar posted:

You can substitute the word "targeted attack" for APT when you see the term if you want to:

(A) get the gist of what the person is saying
(B) not make a giant production over the stupid "WHAT IS AN APT REALLY?" argument

Rakthar posted:

Like, if a guy comes into the infosec thread and asks a simple question about dns malware, such as whether using DNS callbacks for C2 communications is prevalent among commodity malware these days or whether it's generally the hallmark of targeted attacks, seems straightforward. Or can you guys not parse that simple of a question?

[edit]Really, my credentials on APT for a freaking acronym holy hell.

Rakthar posted:

Are you familiar with the term 'paraphrase'


I don't know what the gently caress you're saying to me in this exchange, and I have a feeling you don't either. A guy asked a pretty simple question and got told to gently caress off by someone who was too dumb to understand what he was asking. I pointed out that the question was simple and straightforward, then paraphrased the question when pressed. That's about it. Hopefully we are now on the same page and can return to the exciting topic of infosec and malware discussion.

Would either of you august gentlemen care to weigh on whether you think DNS based C2 communications are typically used in more targeted attacks as opposed to say malware that uses HTTPS based callbacks? What about malware that uses google blogs and fake webpages for C2? Or are we still ignoring that guy's question as if it can't possibly be answered?

wyoak posted:

It's a bad acronym, but I mean high level attacks that are aimed specifically at a certain target.

Actually just ignore that part completely, how common is communication over DNS these days?

cheese-cube posted:

Not very, assuming you're referring to "tunnelling" via udp/53 for the purpose of exfil/C&C. It's extremely easy to spot and there are far better methods available.

Rakthar posted:

So doesn't that seem like a really useless definition of APT? "The proper, empirical definition of APT is that this one company made up a specific term for state actors but you can only use it in their original, intended way." It was coined in a specific way, but it gets used generally.

When people use the term APT colloquially, they mean "An attack where a guy or organization is targeting me." Does that mean a guy in a chinese military center doing dumps of your dc / exchange server or does it mean a russian crimeware guy trying to put POS malware on some system, it doesn't matter. It means that a guy is spending effort and assigning an operator to accomplish a task.

And yes, in general, I do feel there is a correlation between the evasion techniques being used and whether an attack is targeted or not. "Good enough" is the motto for obfuscation and, in general, obfuscation techniques are not used where they will add unnecessary complexity or where they threaten to burn a technique through common usage that is not worth coming up with countermeasures for.

You should not expect to see any DNS based C2 communication with things like cryptolocker. If you are seeing DNS based C2 communication, you probably aren't dealing with cryptolocker.

This answer:


So I think this answer is worth clarifying. Using UDP 53 for large data transfers is basically unheard of, yes. However, using DNS queries to both send and receive commands to compromised hosts is quite common and effective, simply because there's so many DNS queries to hide in and most DNS servers do not (did not) log queries due to performance and disk issues.

Here's a writeup on DNS based C2:
https://zeltser.com/c2-dns-tunneling/

Inspector_666 posted:

I also only know of one "breach" that Lastpass has had, and all it did was release stuff that's already encrypted up the wazoo.

Alereon posted:

KeePass requires your own db management solution and 1password requires you to purchase a separate license for every platform, both of which are dealbreakers for most normal people. If you are a nerd and a local db works for you then not trusting anyone else with your data is obviously safest.

Alereon posted:

Lastpass isn't insecure, it just makes intelligent default choices to balance security and convenience for its users. Most people want features like trusted devices and offline access to their vault., and if you don't no one makes you keep them enabled.

Inspector_666 posted:

Isn't the entire draw of cloud-based password managers multi-platform support?

Alereon posted:

Yes, it says that if credentials are saved locally to your machine, then an attacker with access to your machine may be able to gain access to your Lastpass vault data and account. This is not the threat model most people care about, and anyone that does can mitigate it by making changes to their account settings. Honestly dude you are making mountains out of molehills, Lastpass is compellingly better than the alternatives for everyone that isn't an autist and doesn't want to buy an app once for every platform they own.

Alereon posted:

You are inventing fake concerns. The default configuration of Lastpass does not protect you from an attacker with access to your machine, because that is not a relevant threat for most users and changing the way the software works to protect against that would require usability compromises that are unacceptable to most users. Users for whom those compromises ARE acceptable can change their account settings, or hell just use KeePass if they care that much.

quote:

KeePass is worthless for average users because it requires you to roll your own db storage and synchronization solution. Saying "just use dropbox" is great for autists who want to live independently, but it's absolutely not a solution that Just Works in the way Lastpass does. You're a smart guy, you know all this, so I don't get why you won't accept that LastPass offers the best balance between security and usability for most people. Let's be real, features like offline access

Alereon posted:

Your post describes some very vague and not-at-all-compelling reasons why people should be cautious about trusting their data to Lastpass. And yes, any security professional (or someone who plays one on the Internet) is perfectly capable of setting up their own cloud-based db synch solution, but those security professionals aren't asking for advice on how to manage their passwords. Someone who asks security professionals what password management solution to use should be directed to Lastpass.

quote:

Here's the problem. Convenience is so vastly more important than your theoretical security concerns that I am stunned we are still having this discussion. This fact has been a foundational principle of information security practices for quite some time. This is because users will work around inconvenient practices with MUCH less secure practices, such as how users respond to strong password requirements by reusing passwords. This is why the priority when creating a process for users MUST be that the process be so convenient users will never be tempted to work around it.

wyoak posted:

How many people who had a friend recommend KeePass/Dropbox are going to upgrade KeePass if a vuln is discovered?

KeePass FAQ posted:

Why does KeePass try to connect to the Internet?

KeePass has an option to automatically check for updates on each program start. In order to check for updates, KeePass downloads a small version information file and compares the available version with the installed version. No personal information is sent to the KeePass web server.

Automatic update checks are performed unintrusively in the background. A notification is only displayed when an update is available. Updates are not downloaded or installed automatically.

The option is disabled by default. You can enable/disable it in 'Tools' -> 'Options' -> tab 'Advanced'.

Marinmo posted:

They won't, so in the end they'll end up less secure than Lastpass users since the latter are always running the latest version. Further, I'm not so sure he read the end of his gospel the very audit he posted [EDIT: sorry, that wasn't him, to be fair they kinda seem to agree though], the part where it says "To finish, we want to point out that the security team at LastPass responded very quickly to all our reports and lot of the issues were fixed in just a couple days. It was very easy to communicate and work with them.". That's professional - no system is 100 % secure and the response to the flaws discovered in it tells you a lot about how you can expect those and future issues to be addressed. Convenience and security will always be polar opposites, but too much of either will just tip the scale towards less security anyway. Lastpass generally strikes the perfect balance for everyone who doesn't fancy child pornography or work for the NSA.

Rufus Ping posted:

Same - I hadn't heard of Facebook before but after a quick poke around their home page they get my seal of approval

ItBurns posted:

Noted.

Edit:

You also ignored my post, especially why you should funnel your communications, encrypted or not, through fb's servers, when they have at the very least the ability to log them and tie them with other information.

Fake second edit: Also try to post your replies here and not in yospos so I don't have to hunt for them.

co199 posted:

I would qualify this by saying "you shouldn't be running antivirus as a primary line of defense in 2016". There are some use cases for it, but it's better supplemented with additional tools (on endpoints at least).

co199 posted:

I can point to a real world example with a customer I just finished working with that had no security software on approximately 1000 endpoints in a healthcare environment, even though they had a standing contract with a major AV vendor. They didn't replace AV with anything, they just didn't have anything on their systems. When they got hit by a 7-year-old worm and came screaming to us, we pointed out that the exact hashes they had would have been picked up by their AV solution and they really had no excuse as to why it hadn't been deployed.

co199 posted:

Traditional AV is on life support, but as a last line of defense (e.g. if AV detects something you're already hosed but maybe it might save you a little bit) it's worth having.

co199 posted:

EDIT: I should note that there were a lot of internal politics that led to that decision (due to acquisitions and such) but people are literally taking the saying "AV is dead" at face value and running with nothing, in the real world, in 2016. The security industry needs to be careful about what they soapbox.

Paul MaudDib posted:

If they have professional experience, why don't they do more than ask me how antivirus works? I explained it to them, and they said "nah" and asked again. I read the thread they told me to read and their explanation was that the NSA was gonna blast right through consumer antivirus and I guess their edge filtering was gonna stop the NSA in their tracks or something.

lol OK

Paul MaudDib posted:

e: Furthermore, security by infinitesimal user-base is not a viable defense mechanism. Seriously, this thread - "forget antivirus, just install gentoo on grandma's computer"

Subjunctive posted:

My company has > 10K end-user machines and we don't run AV.

But I'm curious: what would you do that would replace AV but be really expensive?

Paul MaudDib posted:

For real though I appreciate that antivirus is a layer that can have its own vulnerabilities, but the number of critical vulnerabilities in a given antivirus package is much less than the number of vulnerabilities in software that is corralled within an AV perimeter. There's been like what, 2 escalation or escape attacks within a year? Versus how many exploits of software installed on client endpoints? It's probably less than a half-dozen total.

There's what, that one Xen escape, and like one Norton escape that got posted a while back, or something? How many peripheral Windows escalation/escape exploits and poo poo have been discovered within the same timeframe? And how many exploits of random applications?

mAlfunkti0n posted:

Looks like LinkedIn database was leaked .. yay security!

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/another-day-another-hack-117-million-linkedin-emails-and-password

ItBurns posted:

Dylan16807 posted:

You can rowhammer from javascript, which is enough to keep it in mind as a threat.

Mostly I look at it as one more reason to hope it stops being such a pain to get ECC memory on desktops/laptops.

ultramiraculous posted:

No but, for real, is there a reason every endpoint shouldn't be implementing in-memory heuristics to catch this kind of behavior? If it affects VMs, should we be worried about our Mac users running MS Office images?

BangersInMyKnickers posted:

They're really glossing over that they're doing this on non-ECC DIMMs. I don't think they've managed anything beyond crashing the hypervisor on ECC memory, even DDR3.

Wiggly Wayne DDS posted:

If your password manager, by default, has an unencrypted key stored (dOTP) that can be used to authenticate, obtain the encrypted vault key, decrypt the vault key, bypass IP restrictions, bypass 2FA and relies on local storage being impenetrable then you've got a bit of a design flaw. We've seen the damage in the past when Lastpass had an XSS problem that let an attacker grab any plaintext passwords from a vault silently. You're not storing your vault on a single system by virtue of using Lastpass so that is not the only possible angle of attack, and based on prior issues I can't comfortably advise people to use it for secure password storage. Especially given their response to the issues presented.

NFX posted:

Is LessPass and LastPass the same thing?

CLAM DOWN posted:

Fair, but a software solution is far more flexible and powerful, because you can customize what you allow and what you don't on which system. However you're absolutely right, and only a physical block like glue would stop that.

CLAM DOWN posted:

Ok fine, the term "powerful" needs more meaning than that, but 100% it's more flexible, gluing a port shut is about as inflexible as you can get...


e: actually gently caress that, a software solution absolutely can be "powerful", you're being wrong by immediately dismissing any software option as "lax and vulnerable", I'm curious what products you've actually tried and used in production

quote:

Device Exemptions

Each device type supports both device instance and model exceptions. This means that a USB key which belongs to a given individual can be exempted from the removable storage block policy. It also means that all (for example) Verizon USB modems could be exempted by model type from the modem block policy. Exceptions can be commented so it’s easy to record who requested the exception and when.

Exceptions are made easy to manage using the device control event viewer. This is a new reporting tool available within Enterprise Console. It enables you to quickly filter events generated by the device control policy. Events generated by devices being blocked can then be used to authorize those devices.

Note: Exempting individual devices is based on the device having a unique device instance ID. See article 110566 for more information.

quote:

The extended use of portable devices has not only increased the efficiency and mobility of our daily work tasks but, at the same time has posed another significant threat to companies' data security. USB devices and other portable devices, although small and at a first glance harmless, are one of the top causes for security incidents with millions of dollars in losses for the business. The need for controlling the use of devices in corporate environments has become nowadays a must in order to keep up with latest security challenges.

The Device Control module allows monitoring, controlling or blocking USB storage devices and peripheral ports. It prevents data loss and data leaks, ensuring compliance, while also preventing the spread of USB malware and viruses. Being a cross-platform solution, it can be deployed into any type o network as a hardware appliance, virtual appliance or cloud-based solution, protecting Windows, Mac, and Linux endpoints.

While Device Control provides the first layer of security, the Content Aware Protection module is also available.

quote:

CoSoSys Endpoint Protector 4 appliance contains a predictable password for root-equivalent account vulnerability
...
According to the CoSoSys's website the Endpoint Protector 4 appliance is a DLP product used to prevent users from taking unauthorized data outside the company or bringing potential harmful files on USB devices, files which can have a significant impact on your network’s health. The CoSoSys Endpoint Protector 4 appliance contains a predictable password for root-equivalent accounts. The activation script sets the password to the EPProot account to a password based on the sum of each number in the appliance's serial number. The script cuts the serial number (10 numeric characters) out of a file and then adds each character together to populate the $SUMS variable. Then "eroot!00($SUM)RO" where $SUM is a number presumably from 0-90 (9*10) is set as the password for the epproot account. There are only 90 unique combinations so it can be brute-forced.

quote:

Vulnerability overview/description:
-----------------------------------
1) Unauthenticated access to statistics / information disclosure
Unauthenticated users can access server statistics. These statistics give
details about the webserver status (nginx_status) as well as system level
information (munin system monitoring).

2) Unauthenticated SQL injection
Unauthenticated users can execute arbitrary SQL statements via a vulnerability
in the device registration component. The statements will be executed with the
high-privileges of the MySQL user "root". This user has permissions to read and
write files from/to disk.

3) Backdoor accounts
Several undocumented operating system user accounts exist on the appliance.
They can be used to gain access to the appliance via the terminal but also
via SSH.