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Advanced Persistent Threats and Human Errors
In these days many people are asking me what they can do to stop an Advanced Persistent Threat. Although security firms are running fast to develop new technologies to thwart these attack vectors (sophisticated SIEMs and a new breed of network security devices, the so called Next Generation IPSs), unfortunately I am afraid the answer is not so easy. I might spend thousands of words to figure out the answer, but I would not be able to give a better representation than this cartoon I found a couple of days ago in the Imperva Blog.
Intentional or unintentional the human error is always the first vector an Advanced Persistent Threat exploits to enter the organization: as a matter of fact all the APT attacks recorded in 2011 (and unluckily examples abound in the news), have a point in common: the initial gate which allowed the attack to enter, that is the user.
The last resounding example is not an exception to this rule: on Friday November, the 17th Norway’s National Security Authority (NSM) confirmed that systems associated with the country’s oil, gas, and energy sectors were hit with a cyber attack, resulting in a loss of sensitive information. If we look at the information available for this attack, it is really easy to find all the ingredients of a typical APT Attack: virus spread via malware-infected emails sent to “selected individuals”, sophisticated malware designed to avoid detection by anti-virus solutions, and, last but not least, sophisticated malware designed to steal information from the victim’s computer: documents, drawings, username and password.
So at the end which is the key to face an APT, before the technology itself is able to catch it? The answer (and the technology) spins around the user which is the first firewall, IPS, anomaly detector, who can stop an APT. Of course exactly like security devices must be configured to stop the intrusion attempts, analogously users must be configured educated not to accept virtual candies from strangers, hence acting as unintentional gates for the threats to enter the organizations. This often happens because of shallow behaviors or also because of behaviors in clear contrast with the internal policy (yes the infamous AUP). I use to say that security is a mindset, quite similar to distrust: you have it since you are naturally born with it, or you may simply be educated to embrace it.
Keep in mind the central role of the user inside the security process since 2012 will be the year of APTs… Would you ever buy (and heavily pay) an armored door for your home and give the key to people you do not trust?
Related articles
- Are You Ready For The Next Generation IPS? (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
- Advanced Persistent Threats and Security Information Management (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
Are You Ready For The Next Generation IPS?
Advanced Persistent Threats are changing the information security paradigm and Next Generation IPS will probably be, together with SIEM, the new weapons in the hands of information security professionals for stopping this new category of threats that are proving to be the real nightmares for CISOs in this troubled 2011.
If you have just learned what a Next Generation Firewall is, you will probably be a little disappointed in knowing that it is not the last frontier of information security (as many security firms claim), instead the growing impact and influence of APTs, which are threats acting on different layers (user, network and applications), different timeframes and different portions of the network, are redesigning the network security paradigm, requiring additional intelligence at the perimeter, and shifting the game to a context-aware model in order to grant the holistic view that is necessary to stop them.
Traditional Firewall and IPS Technologies are rapidly shifting towards the Next Generation Firewall model, which is user aware and application aware. Unfortunately a Next-Gen Firewall is not enough to stop an APT, since, although focused on the application control, a NGF remains essentially user oriented, and consequently lacks the global vision necessary to stop a persistent threats acting on different layers besides user and application. At the same time traditional network security technologies (FW and IPS) are not enough since they are anchored to the old model: a Firewall enforces access control at the protocol level, which is useless for threats carried inside legitimate traffic, instead an IPS enforces a security model based on protocols and vulnerabilities, being completely unaware (and in certain sense blind unless complex integrations are put in place) of the context in terms of user activity, and user interaction with applications, directories, etc.
Now let us suppose to make a brand new information security recipe, taking the main features of a NGF (user awareness and application awareness), the main features of a Firewall (access control) and the main features of an IPS (protocol awareness and vulnerability awareness), blend them in a virtual pot and add a little bit of reputation (for instance obtained from a globally distributed network of sensors) and other features such as geo-location, application heuristics and, last but not least, an application anomaly detection engine (which is completely different from a traditional protocol anomaly engine). You will obtain a new information security dish: the Next Generation IPS, a new class of devices that likely represents the near future of network security.
NG-IPSs are characterized by two main features:
- They shift the enforcement of security policies from a content-based to a context-based model (where the context is defined by the interaction of user with applications);
- They leverage new technologies such as reputation and geo-location to provide the holistic view necessary to stop APTs.
So what do we have to expect at the perimeter? The traditional Firewall and IPS (or UTMs) will likely be replaced by NG-IPS, while specific “vertical” security devices, such as Web Application Firewall will remain in place in strategic portion of the netowork (just in front of Web Farms) to protect specifically Web (read HTTP and HTTPS) applications. As you may see from the following table a NG-IPS encompasses all the features of the “old” technologies plus new features allowed by a growing adoption of Reputation and Cloud-Based services.
Since WAF will follow a parallel and co-existing walk, meanwhile I reccomend you to read my Q&A on Next-Gen and Web Application Firewall.
Related articles
- Next Generation Firewalls and Web Applications Firewall Q&A (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
Some Random Thoughts On The Security Market
The intention by UK-headquartered company Sophos to acquire Astaro, the privately-held security company co-headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany and Wilmington, Massachusetts (USA) is simply the last effect of the process of vendor consolidation acting in the information security market. It is also the trigger for some random thoughts…
In the last two years a profound transformation of the market is in place, which has seen the birth (and subsequent growth) of several giants security vendors, which has been capable of gathering under their protective wings the different areas of information security.
The security model is rapidly converging toward a framework which tends to collect under a unified management function, the different domains of information security, which according to my personal end-to-end model, mat be summarized as follows: Endpoint Security, Network Security, Application Security, Identity & Access Management.
- Endpoint Security including the functions of Antivirus, Personal Firewall/Network Access Control, Host IPS, DLP, Encryption. This component of the model is rapidly converging toward a single concept of endpoint including alle the types of devices: server, desktop, laptop & mobile;
- Network & Contente Security including the functions of Firewall, IPS, Web and Email Protection;
- Application Security including areas of WEB/XML/Database Firewall and (why not) proactive code analysis;
- Compliance: including the functions of assessment e verification of devce and applications security posture;
- Identity & Access Management including the functions of authentication and secure data access;
- Management including the capability to manage from a single location, with an RBAC model, all the above quoted domains.
All the major players are moving quickly toward such a unified model, starting from their traditional battlefield: some vendors, such as McAfee and Symantec, initiallty moved from the endpoint domain which is their traditional strong point. Other vendors, such as Checkpoint, Fortinet, Cisco and Juniper moved from the network filling directly with their technology, or also by mean of dedicated acquisitions or tailored strategic alliances, all the domains of the model. A further third category is composed by the “generalist” vendors which were not initially focused on Information Security, but became focused by mean of specific acquisition. This is the case of HP, IBM and Microsoft (in rigorous alphabetical order) which come from a different technological culture but are trying to become key players by mean of strategic acquisitions.
It is clear that in similar complicated market the position and the role of the smaller, vertical, players is becoming harder and harder. They may “hope” to become prey of “bigger fishes” or just to make themselves acquisitions in order to reach the “critical mass” necessary to survive.
In this scenario should be viewed the acquisition of Astaro by Sophos: from a strategical perspective Sophos resides permanently among the leaders inside the Gartner Magic quadrant but two of three companions (Symantec and Mcafee, the third is Trend Micro) are rapidly expanding toward the other domains (meanwhile McAfee has been acquired by Intel). In any case all the competitors have a significant major size if compared with Sophos, which reflects in revenues, which in FY 2010 were respectively 6.05, 2.06 and 1.04 B$, pretty much bigger than Sophos, whose revenues in FY 2010 were approximately 260 M$, about one fourth of the smaller between the three above (Trend Micro which is, like Sophos, a privately-owned company).
In perspective the acquisition may be also more appealing and interesting for Astaro, which is considered one of the most visionary players in the UTM arena with a primary role in the European market. Its position with respect to the competition is also more complicated since the main competitors are firms such as Fortinet, Check Point and Sonicwall which all have much greater size (as an example Checkpoint revenues were about 1.13 B $ in FY 2010 which sound impressive if compared with the 56 M $ made by Astaro in the Same Fiscal Year).
In this scenario, the combined company aims to head for $500 million in 2012.
Last but not least both companies are based in Europe (respectively in England and Germany) and could rely on an US Headquarter in Massachusetts.
From a technological perspective, the two vendors are complementary, and the strategy of the acquisition is well summarized by the following phrase contained in the Acquisition FAQ:
Our strategy is to provide complete data and threat protection for IT, regardless of device type, user location, or network boundaries. Today, we [Sophos] offer solutions for endpoint security, data protection, and email and web security gateways. The combination of Sophos and Astaro can deliver a next generation set of endpoint and network security solutions to better meet growing customer needs […]. With the addition of Astaro’s network security, we will be the first provider to deliver truly coordinated threat protection, data protection and policy from any endpoint to any network boundary.
Sophos lacks of a network security solution in its portfolio, and the technology from Astaro could easily fill the gap. On the other hand, Astaro does not own an home-built antivirus technology for its products (so far it uses ClamAV and Avira engines to offer a double layer of protection), and the adoption of Sophos technologies (considered one of the best OEM Antivirus engine) could be ideal for its portfolio of UTM solutsions.
Moreover the two technologies fit well among themselves to build an end-to-end security model: as a matter of fact Information security is breaking the boundary between endpoint and network (as the threats already did). Being obliged to adapt themselves to the new blended threats, which often uses old traditional methods to exploit 0-day vulnerabilities on the Endpoint, some technologies like Intrusion prevention, DLP and Network Access Control, are typically cross among different elements of the infrastructure, and this explains the rush of several players (as Sophos did in this circumstance) to enrich their security portfolio with solutions capable of covering all the information Security Domains.
Just to have an idea, try to have a look to some acquisitions made by the main security players in the last years (sorry for the Italian comments). Meanwghile the other lonely dancers (that is the companies currently facing the market on their own), are advised…
Related articles
- Sophos to acquire Astaro – some reactions (nakedsecurity.sophos.com)
- Sophos Acquires Internet Security Appliance Maker Astaro (techcrunch.com)
- Application Security: What’s Next? (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
TCP Split Handshake Attack Explained
Update May 12: TCP Split Handshake: Why Cisco ASA is not susceptible
Update May 11: The Never Ending Story
Update April 21: Other Considerations on TCP Split Handshake
Few days ago, independent security research and testing NSS Labs, issued a comparative report among six network security technologies. The controversial results created a comprehensible turmoil among the security vendors involved in the tests, and more in general inside the infosec landscape. As a matter of fact it turned out that that five of the six tested platforms were susceptible to TCP Split handshake attack.
As a security professional, I am pretty much involved with at least five of the six tested technologies, consequently, although I never heard about TCP Split Handshake before, I must confess I was really curious to learn which was the only platform capable of surviving the test (the answer is indirectly provided by the vendor – Checkpoint – missing from the list contained on the remediation report subsequently released). Fortunately the scientific side of me took over and instead of making judgments and drawing conclusions about the results, I decided to learn more about TCP Split Handshake and the reasons why a security equipment may be vulnerable.
TCP Split Handshake in RFC 793
Since TCP is a connection-oriented protocol, every connection begins with a “handshake” defined in RFC 793. The handshake defines three well defined steps and for this reason it is called “TCP Three Way Handshake.”
The host initiating the connection, referred as the client, send to its peer, referred as the server, a synchronization packet, or SYN. In order to correctly identify the beginning (and the subsequent “state” of the session, the SYN packet contains an initial Sequence Number (ISN) which corresponds to a pseudo-random number.
Upon reception of the SYN packet, the server acknowledges that, and generates its own SYN. This “SYN/ACK” packet contains both the server’s Initial Sequence Number, as well as an acknowledgment number equal to the client’s Sequence Number plus 1. The fact that the server sends a single packet to initiate the connection on its side and to acknowledge the initial SYN sent from the client is known as piggy-backing and, as explained later, is the fundamental aspect in which TCP Split Handshake differs from Three Way Handshake.
At this point, in order to establish the session, the client concludes the Three Way Handshake and acknowledges the server’s SYN/ACK, sending a packet with its own ISN incremented by one, as well as its acknowledgement number equal to the server’s ISN plus 1.
As mentioned above, in the second phase of the handshake, the piggy-backing allows the server to use a single packet to send its own SYN and to acknowledge the SYN packet received from the client (ACK). However, let us assume that the server could decide to split the second phase of the handshake and send a dedicated ACK packet to acknowledge the client SYN, and a further dedicated packet with its own SYN. This is exactly what is stated at section 3.3, page 27, of RFC 793, which introduces an intriguing four-step process:
1) A --> B SYN my sequence number is X 2) A <-- B ACK your sequence number is X 3) A <-- B SYN my sequence number is Y 4) A --> B ACK your sequence number is Y
As a consequence, one might expect that an RFC 793 perfectly compliant client be capable to silently accept packet two, explicitly ACK packet 3, and hence complete the handshake more-or-less normally. At least in theory…
In reality, in such similar circumstances, NSS test have shown that some network security devices, with the sole firewall function enabled, get confused and behaves in a stateless manner. In few words, if even the client behaves as stated in the RFC, that is it is able to correctly establish the session even if it accepts separated ACK and SYN packets from the server, the network security device, on receiving the SYN from the server (packet 2), loses the awareness of the session and lets the traffic flow without enforcing any security control as if it belongs to an uncontrolled session (in theory an unknown or out-of-state session should be blocked). This means that a malicious payload conveyed through a TCP Split Handshake intiated session could go through the firewall and as a consequence, an attack scenario is quite straightforward: an attacker could think to use a server-side malicious script to establish the session by mean of a TCP Split Handshake and consequently install an executable on the client (a very fashionable event in the last days), for instance, by mean of an ActiveX Buffer Overflow on the target client browser.
The bad news is that this kind of attack is not new, and a similar attack scenario was reported for the first time approximately one year ago (with different behaviours reported for clients and security devices). The strange side of the story relies on the fact that this behaviour may not be considered a real vulnerability, but rather an occurrence covered by RFC not correctly implemented or not enabled on the default configuration by security vendors (please consider that RFC 793 also includes a further method for establishing a TCP connection dubbed “TCP Simultaneous Open” in which two TCP hosts simultaneously attempt to open a connection to each other via a SYN packet).
Last but not least…
For the record, as previously stated, NSS Labs released a remediation report containing the indications needed to mitigate (where necessary) the occurrence of the TCP Split Handshake for the affected technologies. Moreover two vendors (Cisco and Fortinet) added some indications as reported in the following:
- According to an official blog post, Cisco was not able to reproduce the issue occurred in NSS Labs Test and is further investigating the TCP Split Handshake attack on its devices.
- According to an official response in a blog post, Fortinet is not susceptible to TCP Split Handshake attack if IPS and Antivirus protections are enabled. A special IPS signature has been developed and a firmware update is scheduled for May in order to block TCP Split Handshake attack with only firewall enabled:
- For Juniper devices the line “set security flow tcp-session strict-syn-check” must be inserted into configuration (this option affects all the traffic, so it must be set with caution);
- Palo Alto is working to release an official fix between mid-April and early May;
- For Sonicwall devices, the option “Enforce Strict TCP Compliance” must be enabled (also in this case this option affects all the traffic and must be set with caution).
Related Articles
- Other Considerations On TCP Split Handshake (paulsparrows.wordpress.com)
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08/13/2011 - My Post on Android Malware Mentioned on Engadget.
04/14/2011 - The Article Smart Grid: L'ultima Frontiera del Cybercrime published on ICT Security Magazine May 2011.
03/14/2011 - Security Summit 2011: Paolo Passeri guest at Round Table "Mobile Security: Rischi, Tecnologie, Mercato"
02/14/2011 - The Article Gears of Cyberwar published on ICT Security Magazine January 2011.
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