Items tagged security in 2008
Filters: Year: 2008 × security × Sorted by date
Researchers Show How to Forge Site Certificates. Use an MD5 collision to create two certificates with the same hash, one for a domain you own and another for amazon.com. Get Equifax CA to sign your domain’s certificate using the outdated “MD5 with RSA” signing method. Copy that signature on to your home-made amazon.com certificate to create a fake certificate for Amazon that will be accepted by any browser. # 30th December 2008, 3:27 pm
Microsoft: Big Security Hole in All IE Versions. Looks like a 0-day that’s being actively exploited. # 16th December 2008, 8:26 pm
Yahoo! yesterday launched their new development platform for My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Mail, which uses Caja to protect users from malicious gadgets. This means Caja suddenly got 275,000,000 users. Wow! I guess this makes Caja the most widely used capability language ever.
— Ben Laurie # 16th December 2008, 4:33 pm
Now You Can Sign Into Friend Connect Sites With Your Twitter ID. Great. Now even Google is asking me for my Twitter password. Slow clap. How’s that Twitter OAuth beta coming along? # 15th December 2008, 5:20 pm
Warcraft account security. Apparently Blizzard have been selling two factor authentication key fobs for World of Warcraft for about six months. # 6th December 2008, 9:52 am
Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web. Wired’s take on the story of Dan Kaminsky’s breaking-the-internet DNS vulnerability. Horrible headline. # 3rd December 2008, 11:10 am
The March of Access Control. The W3C Access Control specification is set to become a key technology in enabling secure cross-domain APIs within browsers, and since it addresses a legitimate security issue on the web I hope and expect it will be rolled out a lot faster than most other specs. # 19th November 2008, 8:40 am
Worst. Bug. Ever. Android phones were executing every keystroke typed in to the phone in an invisible root shell! Text “reboot” to a friend and your phone rebooted. Wow. # 10th November 2008, 10:51 pm
When visiting any Web page, the site owner is easily able to ascertain what websites you’ve visited (CSS color hacks) or places you’re logged-in (JavaScript errors / IMG loading behavior). They can also automatically exploit your online bank, social network, and webmail accounts (XSS). Additionally, the browser could be instructed to hack devices on the intranet, including DSL routers and printers. And, if that’s not enough, they could turn you into a felon by forcing requests to illegal content or hack other sites (CSRF).
— Jeremiah Grossman # 3rd November 2008, 12:43 pm
.. yet another ridiculous data breach: this time, people’s passwords to the Government Gateway on a memory stick dropped in the road. Perhaps it is uncouth to point this out, but... if the system had been designed by people with any security clue whatsoever there would have been no passwords to put on a memory stick in the first place.
— Ben Laurie # 2nd November 2008, 1:04 pm
Yahoo, Caja, OpenSocial. Yahoo!’s new application platform uses OpenSocial, and protects itself from malicious JavaScript using Google’s Caja secure JavaScript engine. I hadn’t realised that Caja was ready for production use—this is excellent news. # 30th October 2008, 5:14 pm
Web Security Horror Stories: The Director’s Cut. Slides from the talk on web application security I gave this morning at <head>, the worldwide online conference. I just about managed to resist the temptation to present in my boxers. Topics include XSS, CSRF, Login CSRF and Clickjacking. # 26th October 2008, 12:15 pm
From Scandinavia with Love. Finnish security company F-Secure conduct testing of wireless cell phone viruses in a walk-in Faraday cage. # 20th October 2008, 11:47 pm
Response Splitting Risk. Important reminder that you should always ensure strings used in HTTP headers don’t contain newlines. # 19th October 2008, 11:58 pm
Clickjacking and NoScript (via) NoScript CAN protect against clickjacking, but only if you enable the “Plugins|Forbid IFRAME” option. # 7th October 2008, 11:05 am
Dealing with UI redress vulnerabilities inherent to the current web (via) The best explanation of clickjacking I’ve seen yet, complete with discussion of a number of non-ideal potential solutions. It looks like frame busting JavaScript will defeat it, but only for users who have JavaScript enabled—which means that in this case extensions like NoScript actually make you less safe. UPDATE: NoScript is smarter than I thought; see the comments. # 7th October 2008, 9:59 am
FB App Canvas Pages: I Think I’d Use IFrames. Facebook’s Charlie Cheever explains the difference between FBML canvas pages, iframe pages and XFBML when building Facebook apps. I’m always surprised at APIs that load untrusted content in an iframe, as it seems like an invitation for frame-busting phishing attacks. # 2nd October 2008, 2:39 pm
This Week in HTML 5—Episode 7: Clickjacking. Clickjacking is when a third party site is embedded in an iframe with opacity 0 and positioned such that a click on the page actually hits a button on the now invisible third party site. Mark Pilgrim explains how the NoScript site uses this in a non malicious way to for the “install now!” button. # 1st October 2008, 1:48 am
We’ve found CSRF vulnerabilities in sites that have a huge incentive to do security correctly. If you’re in charge of a website and haven’t specifically protected against CSRF, chances are you’re vulnerable.
— Bill Zeller # 29th September 2008, 1:11 pm
Popular Websites Vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery Attacks. Ed Felten and Bill Zeller announce four CSRF holes, in ING Direct, YouTube, MetaFilter and the New York Times. The ING Direct hole allowed transfer of funds out of a user’s bank accounts! The first three were fixed before publication; the New York Times hole still exists (despite being reported a year ago), and allows you to silently steal e-mail addresses by CSRFing the “E-mail this” feature. # 29th September 2008, 1:08 pm
html-whitelist (via) DeWitt Clinton’s web service wrapper aroud the html5lib HTML sanitiser, hosted on AppEngine. # 24th September 2008, 11:54 pm
Logout/Login CSRF. Alf Eaton built an example page (this link goes to his description, not the page itself) that uses a login CSRF attack to log you in to Google using an account he has created. Scary. # 24th September 2008, 10:18 pm
Secure mashups with dojox.secure (via) dojox.secure is brilliant and terrifying at the same time. It provides a full featured API for running untrusted JavaScript in a sandbox, by parsing and validating that code against a variant of Douglas Crockford’s ADsafe JavaScript subset. It could be fantastically useful, but it’s difficult to judge how secure this approach really is. # 24th September 2008, 4:08 pm
csrf_protect.php. A PHP class for applying CSRF protection to existing PHP applications, using output buffering to rewrite any POST forms on a page. Heavily inspired by Django’s CSRF middleware. Tell me if you spot any bugs! # 24th September 2008, 2:52 pm
Robust Defenses for Cross-Site Request Forgery [PDF]. Fascinating report which introduces the “login CSRF” attack, where an attacker uses CSRF to log a user in to a site (e.g. PayPal) using the attacker’s credentials, then waits for them to submit sensitive information or bind the account to their credit card. The paper also includes an in-depth study of potential protection measures, including research that shows that 3-11% of HTTP requests to a popular ad network have had their referer header stripped. Around 0.05%-0.10% of requests have custom HTTP headers such as X-Requested-By stripped. # 24th September 2008, 9:40 am
Is your Rails application safe? (via) update_attributes(params[:foo]) in ActiveRecord is an anti-pattern. # 22nd September 2008, 8:28 pm
Yahoo could also have followed Gmail’s lead, and disabled the security-question mechanism unless no logged-in user had accessed the account for five days. This clever trick prevents password “recovery” when there is evidence that somebody who knows the password is actively using the account.
— Ed Felten # 22nd September 2008, 4:21 pm
When Ajax Attacks! Web application security fundamentals. Slides and notes from my talk on web application security at @media Ajax last Tuesday. # 20th September 2008, 4:16 pm
The Palin hack didn’t require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin’s password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse—the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.
— Kim Zetter, Wired # 18th September 2008, 10:23 pm
Frame-Busting Gadgets. I’ve always been slightly suspicious of the Google Gadgets / OpenSocial idea of sandboxing untrusted third party content in an iframe. Sure enough, it turns out iframe busting scripts work in Gadgets, meaning a seemingly harmless gadget could potentially launch a phishing attack. # 17th September 2008, 11:23 pm