Monthly Archives: January 2018

Some thoughts on “Identity is the new perimeter”

28 January 2018

With the increasing adoption of cloud services, the traditional perimeter security approach becomes less and less effective. The on-premise security layer, which protects users against cyber-attacks, is just no longer existent if users have direct access to a company’s cloud services from any location, at any time and, in the best case, from any device.

The four “A”s, Authentication, Authorization, Administration and Audit, become more and more important in a [hybrid] cloud based working environment.

“When identity and access management (IAM) works well, it means the right people have the right access to the right resources when they need them with appropriate governance in place from wherever the data or application is needed.” [1]

The magic word is “right”: With IAM we control the access of well-known groups of people to well-known resources. Unfortunately, cyber attackers do often not belong to these groups.

NIST NVD Statistics: Privileges Required

From the NIST NVD we learn, that 67% of the vulnerabilities published in 2017 need no privileges for exploitation.

Privileges None means: “The attacker is unauthorized prior to attack, and therefore does not require any access to settings or files to carry out an attack.” [2]

This holds e.g. for remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities. An RCE allows an attacker to get full control of the victim’s computer or service, in the worst case with administrative privileges. With this, the entire new perimeter is bypassed. For an RCE example see CVE-2017-11459. [3]

Identity becomes an important part of a new perimeter but can never replace the perimeter.

NIST NVD 2017 Statistics: User Interaction Required

The NIST NVD data give another important insight for shaping a company’s security strategy: In 41% (5958) of 14647 vulnerabilities the user must interact with the attacker for their exploitation.

This means that well-made user awareness training can prevent lots of cyber-attacks.

Have a great week.

[1] AusCERT 2017 – Identity is the new perimeter
Anthony Caruana, 05/30/2017, CSO Online
https://www.cso.com.au/article/619970/auscert-2017-identity-new-perimeter/
Last seen: 01/28/2018

[2] Common Vulnerability Scoring System v3.0: Specification Document
https://www.first.org/cvss/specification-document
Last seen: 01/28/2018

[3] CVE-2017-11459
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-11459
Last seen: 01/28/2018

Intel AMT flaw lets attackers take control of laptops in 30 seconds

20 January 2018

Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) offers impressive management features to company IT shops:

  • Asset discovery
  • Out-of-band management functions to fix systems even if the OS went down
  • Contain the impact of malware

As any other software, AMT has configuration issues and vulnerabilities. For example, in 2015 default factory settings could be leveraged by an attacker to gain full control over devices from the network. Last year, four vulnerabilities were published in the NVD Database.

The latest configuration issue published on January 12, 2018 by F-Secure researchers allows attackers with physical access to compromise systems easily:

Just press CTRL-P during boot and log into Intel Management Engine BIOS Extension (MEBx) using the default password “admin”. With this, an attacker can reconfigure the system to allow for example remote access once the system is booted and left unattended.

This type of attack is called Evil Maid Attack. It is used especially by cyber criminals and nation state actors to compromise systems.

Although Intel made recommendations to mitigate this issue, the F-Secure report makes clear, that the OEM’s did not implement them and that the system managers did not change the AMT password on delivery to the users.

With this, we have no choice but to set individual AMT and BIOS passwords on all laptops and mobile devices with AMT enabled. This is going to be a hard job in companies with some thousand devices.

A risk based approach makes sense: Start with the top management and employees which have access to business-critical information.

Have a great weekend.

Spectre and Meltdown – No need to enter Panic Mode

7 January 2018

Spectre Icon

Spectre

When I read about Meltdown and Spectre in the Reuters Technology News early on Wednesday morning I digged directly somewhat deeper to find details about the access vectors and severity. From a quick view of the published material I concluded that these vulnerabilities were only locally exploitable and would have medium to high impact. No need to panic.

Media coverage was very high the next morning. Even the German local radio stations brought details about Spectre and Meltdown in the news, although there was no ground for public panic.

The following table shows the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerability details:

Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerability Details, CVSS V3 Metrics

Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerability Details, CVSS V3 Metrics

Sources: [1] NIST NVD, [2] RedHat Customer Portal, [3] NIST NVD
Abbreviation list: AV: Access Vector, AC: Access Complexity, PR: Privileges Required, UI: User Interaction, C: Confidentiality, I: Integrity, A: Avaliability

To exploit these vulnerabilities an attacker must have either local access to a system on your network (Access Vector Local) or access to your local network (Access Vector Adjacent Network).

But why should an attacker, who got access to a system on your network, exploit e.g. Meltdown to extract passwords from the memory of a process? The access complexity is high; thus, the likelihood of early detection goes up.

We can expect that cyber criminals don’t behave irrationally. They choose the attack method with low chance of detection. And recent publications suggest this:

According to the Ponemon 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study the Mean Time to Identify (MTTI) a data breach in 2016 was 191 days, down from 201 days in 2015. If cyber criminals would behave irrationally, the MTTI would be much shorter.

Thus, there is no need for panic. Just apply the latest patches and check the performance of critical systems.

Have a great week.