The third day is already over! Today the regular talks were scheduled split in three tracks: offensive, defensive and a specific one dedicated to SAP. The first slot at 09:00 was, as usual, a keynote. Enno Rey presented ten years of TROOPERS. What happened during all those editions? The main ideas behind TROOPERS have always been that everybody must learn something by attending the conference but… with fun and many interactions with other peers! The goal was to mix infosec people coming from different horizons. And, of course, to use the stuff learned to contribute back to the community. Things changed a lot during these ten years, some are better while others remain the same (or worse?). Enno reviewed all the keynotes presented and, for each of them, gave some comments – sometimes funny. The conference in itself also evolved with a SAP track, the Telco Sec Day, the NGI track and when they move to Heidelberg. Some famous vulnerabilities were covered like MS08-067 or the RSA hack. What we’ve seen:
- A move from theory to practice
- Some things/crap that stay the same (same shit, different day)
- A growing importance of the socio-economic context around security.
Has progress been made? Enno reviewed infosec in three dimensions:
- As a (scientific) discipline: From theory to practice. So yes, progress has been made
- In enterprise environments: Some issues on endpoints have been fixed but there is a fact: Windows security has become much better but now they use Android :). Security in Datacenter also improved but now there is the cloud. 🙂
- As a constituent for our society: Complexity is ever growing.
Are automated systems the solution? They are still technical and human factors that are important “Errare Humanum Est†said Enno. Information security is still in progress but we have to work for it. Again, the examples of the IoT crap was used. Education is key. So, yes, the TROOPERS motto is still valid: “Make the world a better placeâ€. Based on the applause from the audience, this was a great keynote by an affected Enno!
I started my day within the defensive track. Veronica Valeros presented “Hunting Them Allâ€. Why do we need hunting capabilities? A definition of threat hunting is “to help in spotting attacks that would pass our existing controls and make more damages to the business“.
People are constantly hit by threats (spam, phishing, malware, trojans, RATs, … you name them). Being always online also increases our surface attack. Attacks are very lucrative and attract a lot of bad guys. Sometimes, malware may change things. A good example comes with the ransomware plague: it made people aware that backups are critical. Threat hunting is not easy because when you are sitting on your network, you don’t always know what to search. And malicious activity does not always rely on top-notch technologies. Attackers are not all ‘l33t’. They just want to bypass controls and make their malicious code run. To achieve this, they have a lot of time, they abuse the weakest link and they hide in plain sight. To resume: they use the “less effort ruleâ€. Which sound legit, right? Veronica has access to a lot of data. Her team is performing hunting across hundreds of networks, millions of users and billions of web requests. How to process this? Machine learning came to the rescue. And Veronica’s job is to check and validate the output of the machine learning process they developed. But it’s not a magic tool that will solve all issues. The focus must be given on what’s important: from 10B of requests/day to 20K incidents/day using anomaly detection, trust modelling, event classification, entity & user modelling. Veronica gave an example. The botnet Sality is active since 2003 and still present. IOC’s exists but they generate a lot of false positives. Regular expressions are not flexible enough. Can we create algorithms to automatically track malicious behaviour. For some threats, it works, for others no. Veronica’s team is tracking +200 malicious behaviours and 60% is automated tracking. “Let the machine do the machine workâ€. As a good example, Veronica explained how referrers can be the source of important data leaks from corporate networks.
My next choice was “Securing Network Automation†by Ivan Peplnjak. In a previous talk, Ivan explained why Software Defined Networks failed but many vendors improved, which is good. So today, his new topic was about ways to improve the automation from a security perspective. Indeed, we must automate as much as possible but how to make it reliable and secure? If a process is well defined, it can be automated as said Ivan. Why automate? From a management perspective, the same reasons come always on the table: increase the flexibility while reducing costs, to have faster deployments and complete for public cloud offering. About the cloud, do we need to buy or to build? In all cases, you’ll have to build if you want to automate. The real challenge is to move quickly from development to test and production. To achieve this, instead of editing a device configuration live, create configuration text files, push them to a gitlab server. Then you can virtualise a lab, pull config and test them. Did it work? Then merge with the main branch. A lot can be automated: device provisioning, VLANs management, ACLs, firewall rules. But the challenge is to have strong controls to prevent issues upfront and troubleshoot if needed. A nice quote was:
“To make mistake is human, to automatically deploy mistake to all the servers use DevOpsâ€
You remember the amazon bad story? Be prepared to face issues. To automate, you need tools and such tool must be secure. An example was given with Ansible. The issues are that it gathers information from untrusted source:
- Scripts are executed on managed devices: what about data injection?
- Custom scripts are included in data gathering: More data injection?
- Returned data are not properly parsed: Risk of privilege escalation?
The usual controls to put in place are:
- OOB management
- Management network / VR
- Limit access to the management hosts
- SSH-based access
- Use SSH keys
- RBAC (commit scripts)
Keep in mind: Your network is critical so automatic (network programming) is too. Don’t write code yourself (hire a skilled Python programmer for this task) but you must know what the code should do. Test, test, test and once done, test again. As an example of control, you can perform a trace route before / after the change and compare the path. Ivan published a nice list of requirements for your vendor while looking for a new network device. If your current vendor cannot provide you basic requirements like an API, change it!
After the lunch, back to the defence & management track with “Vox Ex Machina†by Grame Neilson. The title looked interesting, was it more offensive of defensive content? Voice recognition is more and more used (example: Cortana, Siri, etc) but also on non-IT systems like banking or support system: “Press 1 for X or press 2 for Yâ€. But is it secure? Voice recognition is not a new hipe. There are references to the “Voder” already in 1939. Another system was the Vocoder a few years later. Voice recognition is based on two methods: phrase dependent or independent (the current talk will focus on the first method). The process is split in three phases:
- Enrolment: your record a phrase x times. It must be different and the analysis is stored as a voice print.
- Authentication: Based on feature extraction or MFCC (Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Correlation).
- Confidence: Returned as a percentage.
The next part of the talk focused on the tool developed by Grame. Written in Python, it tests a remote API. The different supported attacks are: replay, brute-force and voice print fixation. An important remark made by Grame: Event if some services pretend it, your voice is NOT a key! Every time you pronounce “word”, the generated file is different. That’s why the process of brute-forcing is completely different with voice recognition: You know when you are getting closer due to the returned confidence  (in %) instead of a password comparison which returns “0” or “1”. The tool developed by Grame is available here (or will be soon after the conference).
The next talk was presented by Matt Grabber and Casey Smith: “Architecting a Modern Defense using Device Guardâ€. The talk was scheduled on the defensive track but it covered both worlds. The question that interest many people is: Is whitelisting a good solution? Bad guys are trying to find bypass strategies (red teams). What are the mitigations available for the blue teams? The attacker’s goal is clear: execute HIS code on YOUR computer. They are two types of attackers: the one who knows what controls you have in place (enlightened) and the novices who aren’t equipped to handle your controls (ex: the massive phishing campaigns dropping Office documents with malicious macros). Device Guard offers the following protections:
- Prevents unauthorised code execution,
- Restricted scripting environment
- Prevents policy tempering and virtualisation based security
The speakers were honest: Device Guard does NOT protect against all the threats but it increases the noises (evidence). Bypasses are possible. how?
- Policy misconfiguration
- Misplaced trust
- Enlightened scripting environments
- Exploitation of vulnerable code
- Implementation flaws
The way you deploy your policy depends on your environment is a key but also depends on the security eco-system where we are living. Would you trust all code signed by Google? Probably yes. Do you trust any certificate issued by Symantec? Probably not. The next part o the talk was a review of the different bypass techniques (offensive) and them some countermeasures (defensive). A nice demo was performed with Powershell to bypass the language constraint mode. Keep in mind that some allowed applications might be vulnerable. Do you remember the VirtualBox signed driver vulnerability? Besides those problems, Device Guard offers many advantages:
- Uncomplicated deployment
- DLL enforcement implicit
- Supported across windows ecosystem
- Core system component
- Powershell integration
Conclusion: whitelisting is often a huge debate (pro/con). Despite the flaws, it forces the adversaries to reset their tactics. By doing this you disrupt the attackers’ economics: if it makes the system harder to compromise, it will cost the more time/money.
After the afternoon coffee break, I switched to the offensive track again to follow Florian Grunow and Niklaus Schuss who presented “Exploring North Korea’s Surveillance Technologyâ€. I had no idea about the content of the talk but it was really interesting and an eye-opener! It’s a fact:  If it’s locked down, it must be interesting. That’s why Florian and Niklaus performed a research on the systems provided to DPRK citizens (“Democratic People’s Republic of Korea“). The research was based on papers published by others and devices / operating systems leaked. They never went over there. The motivation behind the research was to get a clear view of the surveillance and censorship put in place by the government. It started with the Linux distribution called “Red Star OS”. It is based on Fedora/KDE via multiple version and looks like a modern Linux distribution but… First finding: certificates installed in the browser are all coming from the Korean authorities. Also, some suspicious processes cannot be killed. Integrity checks are performed on system files and downloaded files are changed on the fly by the OS (example: files transferred via an USB storage). The OS adds a watermark at the end of the file which helps to identify the computer which was used. If the file is transferred to another computer, a second watermark is added, etc. This is a nice method to track dissidents and to build a graph of relations between them. Note that this watermark is added only on data files and that it can easily be removed. An antivirus is installed but can also be used to deleted files based on their hash. Of course, the AV update servers are maintained by the government. After the desktop OS, the speakers reviewed some “features” installed on the “Woolim” tablet. This device is based on Android and does not have any connectivity onboard. You must use specific USB dongle for this (provided by the government of course). When you try to open some files, you get a warning message “This is not signed file”. Indeed, the tablet can only work with files signed by the government or locally (based on RSA signatures). The goal, here again, is to prevent the distribution of media files. From a network perspective, there is no direct Internet access and all the traffic is routed through proxies. An interesting application running on the tablet is called “TraceViewer”. It takes a screenshot of the tablet at regular interval. The user cannot delete the screenshots and random physical controls can be performed by authorities to keep the pressure on the citizens. This talk was really an eye-opener for me. Really crazy stuff!
Finally, my last choice was another defensive track: “Arming Small Security Programs†by Matthew Domko. The idea is to generate a network baseline, exactly like we do for applications on Windows. For many organizations, the problem is to detect malicious activity on your network. Using an IDS becomes quickly unuseful due to the amount and the limitation of signatures. Matthew’s idea was to:
- Build a baseline (all IPs, all ports)
- Write snort rules
- Monitor
- Profit
To achieve this, he used the tool Bro. Bro is some kind of Swiss army knife for IDS environments. Matthew made a quick introduction to the tool and, more precisely, focussed on the scripting capabilities of Bro. Logs produced by Bro are also easy to parse. The tool developed by Matthew implements a simple baseline script. It collects all connections to IP addresses / ports and logs what is NOT know. The tool is called Bropy and should be available soon after the conference. A nice demo was performed. I really liked the idea behind this tool but it should be improved and features added to be used on big environments. I would recommend having a look at it if you need to build a network activity baseline!
The day ended with the classic social event. Local food, drinks and nice conversations with friends, which is priceless. I have to apologize for the delay to publish this wrap-up. Complaints can be sent to Sn0rkY! 😉