Analysis of encrypted databases with CryptDB

As part of a bachelor thesis we have taken a look at the latest version of CryptDB and compared its performance with a normal MySQL installation and adoption on different applications. In this blog post we would like to share our insights with you.
For further results and technical specifications please refer directly to the thesis 'Analysis of Encrypted Databases with CryptDB' that can be found at http://www.nds.rub.de/media/ei/arbeiten/2015/10/26/thesis.pdf.

EsPReSSO - A good morning starts with coffee!

In this posts I describe the tool, I wrote for my Bachelor thesis at the Chair for Network and Data Security, with support of Context Information Security Ltd.. EsPReSSO is a apronym for "Extension for Recognition and Processing of Single Sing on Protocols". The basic idea behind EsPReSSO is to automate standard tasks to detect and classify the Single Sign-On (SSO) Protocols OpenID, BrowserID, SAML, OAuth, OpenID-Connect, Facebook Connect and Microsoft Account. The tool is integrate with PortSwigger's HTTP Proxy, Burp Suite. Furthermore EsPReSSO integrates the WS-Attacker, to attack SAML services semi-automated or manually.

Playing with Certificates (from a Researcher's Perspective)

I often face a problem that I need to test several TLS servers. In order to make the tests consistent, I want to deploy the same keys and certificates on each server. However, this is not that easy, since there are several key formats and generation mechanisms. Deploying the same key to an OpenSSL and JSSE servers is thus a huge pain...
In the following, I will give a brief overview on basic certificate types and on few conversion possibilities.

Attacking OpenID Connect 1.0 - Malicious Endpoints Attack

In this post we show a novel attack on OpenID Connect 1.0, which compromises the security of the entire protocol - the Malicious Endpoints attack. The idea behind the attack is to influence the information flow in the Discovery and Dynamic Registration Phase in such a way that the attacker gains access to sensitive information.

Practical Invalid Curve Attacks

Next week at ESORICS, I am going to present our newest research paper on attacking elliptic curve implementations (it is a joint work with Tibor Jager and Jörg Schwenk). It might be of interest especially for people who like practical crypto attacks...or for anybody who hates Java, since the attacks were applicable to two out of eight analyzed libraries: Bouncy Castle and Java Crypto Extension (JCE). The result is quite interesting since the attacks allow an attacker to recover private EC keys from different applications, for example, TLS servers.

Not so Smart: On Smart TV Apps

One of the main characteristics of Smart TVs are apps. Apps extend the Smart TV behavior with various functionalities, ranging from usage of social networks or payed streaming services, to buying articles on Ebay. These actions demand usage of critical data like authentication tokens and passwords, and thus raise a question on new attack scenarios and general security of Smart TV apps.

These reasons make it interesting enough to do some research on smart TVs. We wrote a paper with the title "Not so Smart: On Smart TV Apps", which will be presented in a few days at the "International Workshop on Secure Internet of Things" (SIoT 2015). In this paper, we investigate attack models for Smart TVs and their apps, and systematically analyze security of Smart TV devices. We point out that some popular apps, including Facebook, Ebay or Watchever, send login data over unencrypted channels. Even worse, we show that an arbitrary app installed on devices of the market share leader Samsung can gain access to the credentials of a Samsung Single Sign-On account. Therefore, such an app can hijack a complete user account including all his devices like smartphones and tablets connected with it. Based on our findings, we provide recommendations that are of general importance and applicable to areas beyond Smart TVs.

OWASP AppSec EU 2015: my Three Favourite Talks

Two weeks ago, we visited the OWASP AppSec Europe 2015 conference. This conference is intended for security developers and penetration testers who want to get some new high-quality knowledge. Since the conference contains also research talks, according to me it is also well suited for security researchers working in academia.Thus, I am excited to present you my favourite three talks from the conference. *

I have to explicitly mention that I really enjoyed all the talks that I visited, not only the talks summarized here.

How to attack XML Encryption in IBM Datapower (and other Web Services) with WS-Attacker

WS-Attacker is a penetration testing tool, whose aim is to test Web Service specific attacks. It provides attacks, which are far beyond typical Web attacks like SQL injection and XSS. For example, in last blog post, WS-Attacker and its XML Signature wrapping attacks were introduced: http://web-in-security.blogspot.de/2015/04/introduction-to-ws-attacker-xml.html

Today, we released a new version of our WS-Attacker framework: https://github.com/RUB-NDS/WS-Attacker

The new version includes some additional features and bug fixes. For example, WS-Attacker now allows you to define an HTTP/HTTPS proxy for forwarding the generated XML attack messages. This gives you the opportunity to send all the WS-Attacker messages through BurpSuite or OWASP ZAP, and analyze their content or resend them to the Web Service.

However, most importantly, the newest WS-Attacker version includes a plugin for automatic XML Encryption attacks. The plugin was implemented by our student Dennis Kupser.

In this blog post, I am going to show you how to use the plugin to attack an IBM Datapower Web Service and decrypt an encrypted content. Please note that these attacks are also applicable to other services as well.

On the Security of SAML-based Identity Providers

In previous posts we described Single Sign-On (SSO) and the messages within the authentication flow in detail. Additionally, we showed implementation pitfalls on the Service Provider (SP) side resulting in critical vulnerabilities.

In 2012 we started a study about the security of SAML based Identity Provider (IdP). The motivation to make this study was very simple – if the Identity Provider is vulnerable, all Service Providers are affected. In other words – even if the Service Provider is implemented correctly, an attacker can successfully get illegitimate access to restricted resources, e.g. victim's account.

Introduction to WS-Attacker: XML Signature Wrapping (XSW) on Web services

This post introduces WS-Attacker. We start with how to build it from source. After that we setup an example Axis2 Web service and finally we perform an XSW Attack on it.

Save Your Cloud: Exploiting Eucalyptus 4.0.0 and 4.0.1

In a previous post of this series, we showed why a private cloud is not necessarily more secure than a public one and presented a vulnerability in OpenStack. This post focuses on XSS vulnerabilities we found in Eucalyptus, a well-known Cloud Management Platform. We also demonstrate an exploit for these vulnerabilities.

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform Eucalyptus emerged from a research project at the University of Santa Barbara and was commercialized in 2009 by Eucalyptus Systems Inc. Eucalyptus mimics Amazon Web Services (AWS), therefore Eucalyptus can manage either Amazon or Eucalyptus VMs.

Attacking SSO Part 2: Breaking OpenID in Drupal with Key Confusion

In this Post, we will describe a vulnerability in Drupal's OpenID SSO module that was shipped with Drupal Core prior Versions 6.30 and 7.26. The attack allows an attacker to login as an arbitrary user (even as an Admin), but does not require any interaction with the victim. The vulnerability was reported to the Drupal Security Team and they fixed it at the beginning of 2014 (SA-CORE-2014-001).
To detect the vulnerability, we developed a novel SSO attack technique called Key Confusion. We discovered the attack by setting up our own IdP for analyzing and attacking SSO, see Part 1 of our SSO attack series.