Monday, August 17, 2009

justifying the focus on insider threat

Thank you to Mat Caughron at mat@phpconsulting.com for authoring this most excellent blog entry.

It is common to have the insider threat dismissed as a scare tactic or
worst-case-scenario and I believe this is a mistake.

We are all about the business value of risk.

Most enterprise companies have to protect themselves from malicious
insiders at all times and this affects the design of their software,
specifically the need for least privilege and generally all
requirements surrounding logging and internal controls.  My thinking
is that if you want to have a seat at the table during the beginning
phases of the software development life cycle, it is best to master
the concerns and business needs imposed by this type of risk.

Granted, our industry seems to generate snake oil by the barrel, which
is all the more reason for us to take these threats seriously and
calmly seek publicly documented data on real cases.

Indeed, one would hope the information security professional is
someone who helps to establish the boundaries of trust in systems
being built, not someone who vacuums up the pieces of broken projects,
however well such housekeeping pays.


Some references not yet mentioned in this thread:

Report from 1999 by NSTISSAM:
  
http://www.cnss.gov/Assets/pdf/nstissam_infosec_1-99.pdf
Focus is on mechanisms more than specific incidents though a few are mentioned.

U^S3 report with Carnegie Mellon on insider threat, focus on
infrastructure and financial services industries, dated 2004/05/08:
 
http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac/its_report_050516.pdf
 
http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac/its_report_040820.pdf
 
http://www.treasury.gov/usss/ntac/gov%20ExecSummary%202008_0108.pdf
Each sampling set is around 50 incidents or less.

Department of Energy is grappling with this as the disruptions from
insiders could be high impact:
 
http://www.cio.energy.gov/documents/Tues_1400_SalonII_Randall.pdf

Belani / Wilson web application incident response and forensics
considers insider threats with two great examples:
   
www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-06/BH-US-06-Willis.pdf
Also presented in Seattle at an OWASP chapter meeting.

None of these reports, however, can compare in detail to the data set
of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse' chronological list of data
breaches.
 
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm

Until about 2006, the PRC list identified inside threat incidents as
"Dishonest insider." After that, the number of employee instigated
events is described with greater detail but is therefore harder to
search.   A quick look here should be enough to convince most on this
webappsec list that the impact from insider threats is not
insignificant.

As software security professionals, we can help to mitigate insider
threat problems and our value in doing so should not be
underestimated.

The commonplace nature of OWASP-top-ten type flaws should not prevent
us from acknowledging their utility in the hands of a malicious
employee, developer, manager, etc.


Mat Caughron CISSP
(408) 910-1266

mat@phpconsulting.com

Sunday, August 9, 2009

When to use OWASP AntiSamy?

OWASP AntiSamy is a software engineering tool that allows a programmer to verify user-driven HTML/CSS input against a whitelist policy to ensure that is does not contain XSS.

But when do you use it?

1) If you accept "normal text data" from a user, then
a) (input validation) Use the ESAPI validator for input valiation (functions OTHER than getValidSafeHTML)
b) (output encoding) Use the ESAPI encoding library for contextual output encoding when displaying dynamic data in a web browser
1. encodeForHTML
2. encodeForJavascript
3. encodeForHTMLEntity
4. encodeForCSS

2) If you accept HTML from a user, you need to use AntiSamy
a) (input validation) You must validate and CHANGE (make it safer) HTML that you accept from a user with AntiSamy (which can be called via ESAPI - getValidSafeHTML)
b) (output translation) You can optionally use AntySamy for output translation (it does not encode; it only makes HTML "safer")
1. This is crucial when you have legacy HTML in your data storage mechanism that may still contain XSS

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Real world cookie length limits

Daniel Stenberg recently posted some interesting test code and browser results to http-state@ietf.org describing the maximum amount of data that can be stored in a cookie:

****

... I just went ahead and wrote a CGI script that redirects to itself and grows a
cookie and stores its length in a URL field like "cookie.cgi?len=200" until
the length in the URL and the actual cookie length no longer matches.

Here's a few results from various browsers:

Firefox 3.0.12: 4000
Firefox 3.5: 4000
curl 7.19.5: 4999
IE 8: 5000
Opera 10.00 beta: 4000
Android 1.5 browser: 4000
Chrome 3.0.195.6: 4000
Wget 1.11.4: 7000[*]
mobile safari (iphone): 8000
lynx 2.8.7dev.9: 4000

I think we can safely say that most browsers support at least 4000 characters
cookie contents.

[*] = this reports "500 Internal Server Error" on 8000, which I don't
understand why but haven't bothered much more about.

The test is live here: http://daniel.haxx.se/test/longcookie.cgi Feel free to
use it if you want to try out other browsers, without torturing it of course!

And the perl script that runs it looks like this:

require "CGI.pm";

$len = CGI::param('len');
$c = CGI::cookie('data');

print "Content-Type: text/html\n";

if($len == length($c)) {
$c .= "A" x 1000;
$len += 1000;
print "Set-Cookie: data=$c\n";

print "Location: longcookie.cgi?len=$len\n";
print "\nmoo\n";
}
else {
printf "\nMax cookie length: %d\n", length($c);
}