Pull to refresh
1083.92

Information Security *

Data protection

Show first
Rating limit
Level of difficulty

SOAP Routing Detours Vulnerability

Reading time2 min
Views1.5K

Description


The WS-Routing Protocol is a protocol for exchanging SOAP messages from an initial message sender to receiver, typically via a set of intermediaries. The WS-Routing protocol is implemented as a SOAP extension, and is embedded in the SOAP Header. «WS-Routing» is often used to provide a way to direct XML traffic through complex environments and transactions by allowing interim way stations in the XML path to assign routing instructions to an XML document.

Taking a minimalist approach, WS-Routing encapsulates a message path within a SOAP message, so that the message contains enough information to be sent across the Internet using transports like TCP and UDP while supporting:

  • The SOAP message path model,
  • Full-duplex, one-way message patterns,
  • Full-duplex, request-response message patterns, and
  • Message correlation.

Routing Detours are a type of «Man in the Middle» attack where Intermediaries can be injected or «hijacked» to route sensitive messages to an outside location. Routing information (either in the HTTP header or in WS-Routing header) can be modified en route and traces of the routing can be removed from the header and message such that the receiving application none the wiser that a routing detour has occurred. 
Read more →

How-to: Important Factors To Review When Choosing a Free VPN For Web Browsing

Reading time2 min
Views1.3K


Image credit: Unsplash

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are very good tools for online enhancement, censorship avoidance, anonymous file sharing, and more. But nowadays there are literally hundreds of such services, so it may be a bit tricky to pick the one that will suit you. Today we will share three practical tips that will help to solve this task.
Read more →

An Easy Way to Make Money on Bug Bounty

Reading time5 min
Views5.2K

Рисунок 2


Surely you've heard the expression «bug hunting» many times. I dare to assume, you won't mind earning one or two hundred (or even thousand) dollars by finding a potential vulnerability in someone's program. In this article, I'll tell you about a trick that will help analyzing open source projects in order to find such vulnerabilities.
Read more →

Security and censorship circumvention: 5 VPN and proxies for Google Chrome

Reading time2 min
Views3.2K
Nowadays, privacy and censorship are the top problems for internet users. There are hackers who want to steal your data, governments, and corporations, which imply block and restrict freedom. Here is the list of five tools to protect your web browsing and circumvent censorship.
Read more →

PVS-Studio Visits Apache Hive

Reading time12 min
Views1.2K
Рисунок 1

For the past ten years, the open-source movement has been one of the key drivers of the IT industry's development, and its crucial component. The role of open-source projects is becoming more and more prominent not only in terms of quantity but also in terms of quality, which changes the very concept of how they are positioned on the IT market in general. Our courageous PVS-Studio team is not sitting idly and is taking an active part in strengthening the presence of open-source software by finding hidden bugs in the enormous depths of codebases and offering free license options to the authors of such projects. This article is just another piece of that activity! Today we are going to talk about Apache Hive. I've got the report — and there are things worth looking at.
Read more →

Winning PHDays 9 The Standoff: The chronicle by the True0xA3 team

Reading time16 min
Views1.8K
This is an English-language summary of two absolutely outstanding articles written by Vitaliy Malkin from «Informzashita» whose team, True0xA3, became the winners of the prestigious black hat competition The Standoff during Positive Hack Days 9 in May of 2019.

Vitaliy has published three detailed articles on Habr, two of which were dedicated to the description of the strategies that True0xA3 team used before and during the competition to secure this team the title of the winners. I felt that the only thing that those two articles were lacking was a summary in English so that a wider audience of readers could enjoy them. So, below is the summary of two articles by Vitaliy Malkin, together with images Vitaliy published to clarify his points. Vitaliy has OKed me doing the translation and publishing it.
Read more →

What's the Use of Dynamic Analysis When You Have Static Analysis?

Reading time6 min
Views2.9K
In order to verify the quality of software, you have to use a lot of different tools, including static and dynamic analyzers. In this article, we'll try to figure out why only one type of analysis, whether static or dynamic, may not be enough for comprehensive software analysis and why it's preferable to use both.

Рисунок 1

Read more →

Security of mobile OAuth 2.0

Reading time12 min
Views15K
image

Popularity of mobile applications continues to grow. So does OAuth 2.0 protocol on mobile apps. It's not enough to implement standard as is to make OAuth 2.0 protocol secure there. One needs to consider the specifics of mobile applications and apply some additional security mechanisms.

In this article, I want to share the concepts of mobile OAuth 2.0 attacks and security mechanisms used to prevent such issues. Described concepts are not new but there is a lack of the structured information on this topic. The main aim of the article is to fill this gap.
Read more →

The Data Structures of the Plasma Cash Blockchain's State

Reading time7 min
Views1.6K


Hello, dear Habr users! This article is about Web 3.0 — the decentralized Internet. Web 3.0 introduces the concept of decentralization as the foundation of the modern Internet. Many computer systems and networks require security and decentralization features to meet their needs. A distributed registry using blockchain technology provides efficient solutions for decentralization.
Read more →

WAF through the eyes of hackers

Reading time21 min
Views32K
Today we’re going to talk about one of the modern security mechanism for web applications, namely Web Application Firewall (WAF). We’ll discuss modern WAFs and what they are based on, as well as bypass techniques, how to use them, and why you should never entirely rely on WAF. We’re speaking from the pentesters’ perspective; we’ve never developed WAFs and only collected data from open sources. Thus, we can only refer to our own experience and may be unaware of some peculiarities of WAFs.
Read more →

Long journey to Tox-rs. Part 1

Reading time7 min
Views3.7K
Tox logo

Hi everyone!


I like Tox and respect the participants of this project and their work. In an effort to help Tox developers and users, I looked into the code and noticed potential problems that could lead to a false sense of security. Since I originally published this article in 2016 (in Russian), many improvements have been made to Tox, and I lead a team that re-wrote secure Tox software from scratch using the Rust programming language (check out Tox-rs). I DO recommend using tox in 2019. Let's take a look what actually made us rewrite Tox in Rust.


Original article of 2016


There is an unhealthy tendency to overestimate the security of E2E systems only on the basis that they are E2E. I will present objective facts supplemented with my own comments for you to draw your own conclusions.


Spoiler: The Tox developers agree with my points and my source code pull request was accepted.

Here go facts:

What is going to happen on February 1, 2020?

Reading time4 min
Views8.3K
TL;DR: starting February 2020, DNS servers that don’t support DNS both over UDP and TCP may stop working.

Bangkok, in general, is a strange place to stay. Of course, it is warm there, rather cheap and some might find the cuisine interesting, along with the fact that about half of the world’s population does not need to apply for a visa in advance to get there. However, you still need to get acquainted with the smells, and the city streets are casting cyberpunk scenes more than anything else.

In particular, a photo to the left has been taken not far from the center of Thailand’ capital city, one street away from the Shangri-La hotel, where the 30th DNS-OARC organization meeting took place on May 12 and 13. It is a non-profit organization dedicated to security, stability, and overall development of the DNS — the Domain Name System.

Slides from the DNS-OARC 30 meeting are recommended for everyone interested in how the DNS works, though perhaps the most interesting is what is absent in those slides. Namely, a 45-minute round table with a discussion around the results of DNS Flag Day 2019, which occurred on February, 1, 2019.

And, the most impressive result of a round table is the decision to repeat DNS Flag Day once again.
Read more →

Even more secret Telegrams

Reading time6 min
Views5K

We used to think of Telegram as a reliable and secure transmission medium for messages of any sort. But under the hood it has a rather common combination of a- and symmetric encryptions. Where’s fun in that? And why would anyone trust their private messages to a third-party anyway?
Spy vs Spy by Antonio Prohías
TL;DR — inventing a private covert channel through users blacklisting each other.

Read more →

Legacy Outage

Reading time3 min
Views2.6K
Two days ago, May 5 of the year 2019 we saw a peculiar BGP outage, affecting autonomous systems in the customer cone of one very specific AS with the number 721.

Right at the beginning, we need to outline a couple of details for our readers:

  1. All Autonomous System Numbers under 1000 are called “lower ASNs,” as they are the first autonomous systems on the Internet, registered by IANA in the early days (the late 80’s) of the global network. Today they mostly represent government departments and organizations, that were somehow involved in Internet research and creation in 70-90s.
  2. Our readers should remember, that the Internet became public only after the United States’ Department of Defense, which funded the initial ARPANET, handed it over to the Defense Communication Agency and, later in 1981, connected it to the CSNET with the TCP (RFC675)/IP (RFC791) over X.25. A couple of years later, in 1986, NSF swapped the CSNET in favor of NSFNET, which grew so fast it made possible ARPANET decommission by 1990.
  3. IANA was established in 1988, and supposedly at that time, existing ASNs were registered by the RIRs. It is no surprise that the organization that funded the initial research and creation of the ARPANET, further transferring it to another department because of its operational size and growth, only after diversifying it into 4 different networks (Wiki mentions MILNET, NIPRNET, SIPRNET and JWICS, above which the military-only NIPRNET did not have controlled security gateways to the public Internet).
Read more →

Hack the JWT Token

Reading time4 min
Views64K

For Educational Purposes Only! Intended for Hackers Penetration testers.


Issue


The algorithm HS256 uses the secret key to sign and verify each message. The algorithm RS256 uses the private key to sign the message and uses the public key for authentication.

If you change the algorithm from RS256 to HS256, the backend code uses the public key as the secret key and then uses the HS256 algorithm to verify the signature. Asymmetric Cipher Algorithm => Symmetric Cipher Algorithm.

Because the public key can sometimes be obtained by the attacker, the attacker can modify the algorithm in the header to HS256 and then use the RSA public key to sign the data.
The backend code uses the RSA public key + HS256 algorithm for signature verification.

Example


Vulnerability appear when client side validation looks like this:

const decoded = jwt.verify(
   token,
   publickRSAKey,
   { algorithms: ['HS256'  , 'RS256'] }          //accepted both algorithms 
)

Lets assume we have initial token like presented below and " => " will explain modification that attacker can make:

//header 
{
alg: 'RS256'                         =>  'HS256'
}
//payload
{
sub: '123',
name: 'Oleh Khomaik',
admin: 'false'                       => 'true'
}

The backend code uses the public key as the secret key and then uses the HS256 algorithm to verify the signature.
Read more →

TLS 1.3 enabled, and why you should do the same

Reading time4 min
Views1.7K


As we wrote in the 2018-2019 Interconnected Networks Issues and Availability Report at the beginning of this year, TLS 1.3 arrival is inevitable. Some time ago we successfully deployed the 1.3 version of the Transport Layer Security protocol. After gathering and analyzing the data, we are now ready to highlight the most exciting parts of this transition.

As IETF TLS Working Group Chairs wrote in the article:
“In short, TLS 1.3 is poised to provide a foundation for a more secure and efficient Internet over the next 20 years and beyond.”

TLS 1.3 has arrived after 10 years of development. Qrator Labs, as well as the IT industry overall, watched the development process closely from the initial draft through each of the 28 versions while a balanced and manageable protocol was maturing that we are ready to support in 2019. The support is already evident among the market, and we want to keep pace in implementing this robust, proven security protocol.

Eric Rescorla, the lone author of TLS 1.3 and the Firefox CTO, told The Register that:
“It's a drop-in replacement for TLS 1.2, uses the same keys and certificates, and clients and servers can automatically negotiate TLS 1.3 when they both support it,” he said. “There's pretty good library support already, and Chrome and Firefox both have TLS 1.3 on by default.”
Read more →

Free Wireguard VPN service on AWS

Reading time9 min
Views67K

Free Wireguard VPN service on AWS


The reasoning


The increase of Internet censorship by authoritarian regimes expands the blockage of useful internet resources making impossible the use of the WEB and in essence violates the fundamental right to freedom of opinion and expression enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.


Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

The following is the detailed 6 steps instruction for non-IT people to deploy free* VPN service upon Wireguard technology in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure, using a 12 months free account, on an Instance (virtual machine) run by Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS.


I tried to make this walkthrough as friendly as possible to people far from IT. The only thing required is assiduity in repeating the steps described below.

Read more →