Research and Development

auditing

Whilst there are some great examples of how to assess infrastructure as code dynamically with things like the Center for Internet Security‘s Docker benchmark and CoreOS‘s Clair, these kinda run a little too late in the pipeline for my liking. If we want to treat infrastructure as code then surely we ought to be performing code reviews and if we’re performing code reviews then perhaps we can perform a subset of these checks automatically pre-commit? Continue reading

By way of an introduction to our talk at Black Hat Europe, Security Advisory EMEAR would like to share the background on our recent research into some common Active Directory integration solutions. Just as with Windows, these solutions can be utilized to join UNIX infrastructure to enterprises’ Active Directory forests. Continue reading

In this post we look at at one of many security problems that pentesters and security auditors find in setUID programs. It’s fairly common for child processes to inherit any open file handles in the parent process (though there are ways to avoid this). In certain cases this can present a security flaw. This is what we’ll look at in the context of setUID programs on Linux. Continue reading

Lateral Movement is a method used by attackers (or malware) against a network Domain. After an initial device is compromised (typically, a user’s workstation), the attacker extracts passwords from memory, or obtains encrypted password hashes from the system for cracking or direct use (i.e. Pass the Hash). The attacker then attempts to login to other systems using those credentials to search for cached passwords of privileged Domain accounts. Usually, the local Administrator account is targeted as the password is often the same on all systems (due to the common practice of deploying systems from a master image), but service accounts, etc. can also be targeted. Continue reading

It is a topic that often comes up on client engagements, usually when running structured build reviews of Linux “gold builds”, but occasionally when trying to explain in detail how we used a Linux system to pivot internally.

SetUID and setGID files are inevitably a risk, potentially allowing attackers to elevate privileges to root from a basic user. When shared out on SMB or NFS shares they can spread the risk even further. Continue reading

At Portcullis, one of the more frequent assessments we perform are web application assessments. One of the main challenges we face during these assessments is to look for information that can either help escalate our privileges or allow us to gain access to different functionalities of the web application. Unauthorised access to functionality can often be considered an issue however, testing for this can also lead to information about the type of web server an application is running on, the underlying host and its version. Continue reading