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ALPACA: Application Layer Protocol Confusion - Analyzing and Mitigating Cracks in TLS Authentication
(2021)
Vulnerabilities in private networks are difficult to detect for attackers outside of the network. While there are known methods for port scanning internal hosts that work by luring unwitting internal users to an external web page that hosts malicious JavaScript code, no such method for detailed and precise service identification is known. The reason is that the Same Origin Policy (SOP) prevents access to HTTP responses of other origins by default. We perform a structured analysis of loopholes in the SOP that can be used to identify web applications across network boundaries. For this, we analyze HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript features of standard-compliant web browsers that may leak sensitive information about cross-origin content. The results reveal several novel techniques, including leaking JavaScript function names or styles of cross-origin requests that are available in all common browsers. We implement and test these techniques in a tool called CORSICA. It can successfully identify 31 of 42 (74%) of web services running on different IoT devices as well as the version numbers of the four most widely used content management systems WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and TYPO3. CORSICA can also determine the patch level on average down to three versions (WordPress), six versions (Drupal), two versions (Joomla), and four versions (TYPO3) with only ten requests on average. Furthermore, CORSICA is able to identify 48 WordPress plugins containing 65 vulnerabilities. Finally, we analyze mitigation strategies and show that the proposed but not yet implemented strategies Cross-Origin Resource Policy (CORP)} and Sec-Metadata would prevent our identification techniques.
Due to the increasing connectivity of modern vehicles, collected data is no longer only stored in the vehicle itself but also transmitted to car manufacturers and vehicle assistant apps. This development opens up new possibilities for digital forensics in criminal investigations involving modern vehicles. This paper deals with the digital forensic analysis of vehicle assistant apps of eight car manufacturers. We reconstruct the driver’s activities based on the data stored on the smartphones and in the manufacturer’s backend.
For this purpose, data of the Android and iOS apps of the car manufacturers Audi, BMW, Ford, Mercedes, Opel, Seat, Tesla, and Volkswagen were extracted from the smartphone and examined using digital forensic methods following forensics guidelines. Additionally, manufacturer data was retrieved using Subject Access Requests. Using the extensive data gathered, we reconstruct trips and refueling processes, determine parking positions and duration, and track the locking and unlocking of the vehicle.
Our findings show that the digital forensic investigation of smartphone applications is a useful addition to vehicle forensics and should therefore be taken into account in the strategic preparation of future digital forensic investigations.
Reviewing Cyber Security Research of Implantable Medical Rhythm Devices regarding Patients’ Risk
(2020)
Introduction: The recent publication of several critical cyber security issues in cardiac implantable devices and the resulting press coverage upsets affected users and their trust in medical device producers. Reviewing the published security vulnerabilities regarding networked medical devices, it raises the question, if the reporting media, the responsible security researchers, and the producers handle security vulnerabilities appropriately. Are the media reports of security vulnerabilities in medical devices meaningful in a way that patients can assess their respective risk for an attack via the security vulnerability? The collaboration between IT-security experts and clinicians aims at reviewing published security vulnerabilities of rhythm devices, and evaluate overall patients risks.
Methodology: We performed a literature review on security vulnerabilities in implantable medical devices with a focus on cardiac devices. We analyzed (Fig. 1) the (1) requirements for an attacker and the (2) technical feasibility and clustered them in three different scenarios: The first scenario requires that the attacker physically approaches a victim with a programming device. The second scenario requires proximity to the victim, e.g., within a few meters. The third and strongest attacker scenario is a remote attack that doesn’t require any physical proximity to the victim. We then compare the attacker scenarios and (3) the overall patients’ risks with the press coverage (overhyped, adequate, underhyped). (4) The resulting overall patients’ risk was rated by clinicians (security vulnerability of patients’ data, dangerous programming possible).
Results: Out of the three analyzed incidents, we found one to be underhyped, one to be overhyped, and one was appropriate compared to the medial coverage (Fig. 2). The most occurring technical issues were based on the absence of basic security primitives. The patient damage for all of the analyzed incidents was fatal in the worst-case scenario. Further, the patient damage and the overall patient risks are disjunct due to the missing capability of performing large scale attacks.
Conclusion: The resulting overall patients’ risks may not adequately reflect the patient damage in the considered cases. Often, the overall patient risk is not as severe as the necessary attacker capabilities are high and it would require strongly motivated attackers to perform the attack. Therefore, most of the reviewed cases are considered with a smaller overall patient risk than implied by press reports. Reviewing the ongoing IT-Security trends regarding implantable medical devices shows an increasing focus on researching in the field of medical device security. Therefore, further findings in the near future are to be expected. To deal with this fact in a responsible way, proper proactive knowledge management is mandatory. We recommend medical staff to critically reflect reports in mass media due to possible sensationalism. Therefore, we propose a joint approach in combining the technical expertise of cyber security experts with clinical aspects of medical experts, to ensure a solid understanding of a newly published vulnerability. The combination of both communities promises to result in better predictions for patients’ risks from security vulnerabilities in implanted cardiac devices.
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is the standard technology to query information stored in directories. These directories can contain sensitive personal data such as usernames, email addresses, and passwords. LDAP is also used as a central, organization-wide storage of configuration data for other services. Hence, it is important to the security posture of many organizations, not least because it is also at the core of Microsoft’s Active Directory, and other identity management and authentication services.
We report on a large-scale security analysis of deployed LDAP servers on the Internet. We developed LanDscAPe, a scanning tool that analyzes security-relevant misconfigurations of LDAP servers and the security of their TLS configurations. Our Internet-wide analysis revealed more than 10k servers that appear susceptible to a range of threats, including insecure configurations, deprecated software with known vulnerabilities, and insecure TLS setups. 4.9k LDAP servers host personal data, and 1.8k even leak passwords. We document, classify, and discuss these and briefly describe our notification campaign to address these concerning issues.
OpenPGP is one of the two major standards for end-to-end email security. Several studies showed that serious usability issues exist with tools implementing this standard. However, a widespread assumption is that expert users can handle these tools and detect signature spoofing attacks. We present a user study investigating expert users' strategies to detect signature spoofing attacks in Thunderbird. We observed 25 expert users while they classified eight emails as either having a legitimate signature or not. Studying expert users explicitly gives us an upper bound of attack detection rates of all users dealing with PGP signatures. 52% of participants fell for at least one out of four signature spoofing attacks. Overall, participants did not have an established strategy for evaluating email signature legitimacy. We observed our participants apply 23 different types of checks when inspecting signed emails, but only 8 of these checks tended to be useful in identifying the spoofed or invalid signatures. In performing their checks, participants were frequently startled, confused, or annoyed with the user interface, which they found supported them little. All these results paint a clear picture: Even expert users struggle to verify email signatures, usability issues in email security are not limited to novice users, and developers may need proper guidance on implementing email signature GUIs correctly.