Cloud

using a cloud mac with a local ios device

Doing iOS mobile assessments without macOS around is not exactly fun. This can be for many reasons that include code signing and app deployment to name a few. Alternatives exist for some of these tasks (like the amazing libimobiledevice project or more recently an attempt to get code signing to work without macOS), but nothing beats using a real macOS device for most of those tasks. Be it to patch mobile apps with a Frida gadget, or to deploy an application from Xcode, whatever your reason for needing this, in this short post I’ll show you how to use @CorelliumHQ‘s usbfluxd project or a simple SSH tunnel to make a locally connected iOS device (eg. your Linux laptop) available to a remote macOS device such that you could expose it to Xcode, in the cloud.

Memcached talk update

Wow. At some point our talk hit HackerNews and then SlashDot after swirling around the Twitters for a few days. The attention is quite astounding given the relative lack of technical sexiness to this; explanations for the interest are welcome! We wanted to highlight a few points that didn’t make the slides but were mentioned in the talk: Bit.ly and GoWalla repaired the flaws extremely quickly, prior to the talk. PBS didn’t get back to us. GlobWorld is in beta and isn’t publicly available yet. For those blaming admins or developers, I think the criticism is overly harsh (certainly I’m not much of a dev as the “go-derper” source will show). The issues we found were in cloud-based systems and an important differentiating factor between deploying apps on local systems as opposed to in the cloud is that developers become responsible for security issues that were never within their job descriptions; network-level security is oftentimes a foreign language to developers who are more familiar with app-level controls. With cloud deployments (such as those found in small startups without dedicated network-security people) the devs have to figure all this out.

BlackHat Write-up: go-derper and mining memcaches

[Update: Disclosure and other points discussed in a little more detail here.] Why memcached? At BlackHat USA last year we spoke about attacking cloud systems, while the thinking was broadly applicable, we focused on specific providers (overview). This year, we continued in the same vein except we focused on a particular piece of software used in numerous large-scale application including many cloud services. In the realm of “software that enables cloud services”, there appears to be a handful of “go to” applications that are consistently re-used, and it’s curious that a security practitioner’s perspective has not as yet been applied to them (disclaimer: I’m not aware of parallel work).

SensePost at BlackHat USA 2010

A brief update from South Africa on some recent talks as well as the upcoming BH USA: our talk proposal has been accepted for BH USA 2010 which makes it the ninth year running that SensePost is talking in Las Vegas. One more and we qualify for free milkshakes at the Peppermill. This year we’ll be discussing caching in large scale web apps and why exposing caches to the interwebs is a Very Bad Thing. We’ll also be looking at caching services, an idea whose time should never come.

We are famous (almost!)

Last week had two “cloud-security” related articles hit the inter-webs.. After our Vegas09 talk on “clobbering the cloud” we had a brief chat to Rob Lemos, who called us up again, so we ended up adding the soundbyte to his piece in Technology review along with guys like Moxie Marlinspike and Danny MacPherson [here] We also showed up on Read/Write Web, where we were called “security nerds” and “black hats” Ahhh.. roll on 2010!

BlackHat presentation demo vids: MobileMe

[part 5 in a series of 5 video write-ups from our BlackHat 09 talk, summary here] Goal The final installment of our BlackHat video series showcases weaknesses in the password reset feature for Apple’s MobileMe service as well as publicizing an XSS vulnerability in the application. At first glance the choice of MobileMe may seem arbitrary, but it was useful for a number of reasons. MobileMe is one of the more popular consumer-focused cloud services and it’s a good example of the feature-creep that’s a hallmark of cloud systems. By compromising a user’s MobileMe account an attacker has access to much more than just the user’s mail. With each new feature addition the user is sucked into the service a little more until most of their data is stored within MobileMe, and a compromise of the account becomes serious for the user.

BlackHat presentation demo vids: Amazon

[part 4 in a series of 5 video write-ups from our BlackHat 09 talk, summary here] Goal In the fourth installment of our BlackHat video series, we turned our attention to Amazon’s cloud platform and focused on their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service specifically. Theft of resources is the red-headed step-child of attack classes and doesn’t get much attention, but on cloud platforms where resources are shared amongst many users these attacks can have a very real impact. With this in mind, we wanted to show how EC2 was vulnerable to a number of resource theft attacks and the videos below demonstrate three separate attacks against EC2 that permit an attacker to boot up massive numbers of machines, steal computing time/bandwidth from other users and steal paid-for AMIs.

BlackHat presentation demo vids: SalesForce Sifto

[part 3 in a series of 5 video write-ups from our BlackHat 09 talk, summary here] Goal Our third video write-up covers abuse of cloud services. By signing up for free accounts, it is possible to gain access to small amounts of free resources, specifically processing time and bandwidth. However these resources are tightly controlled to maintain fairness across the many thousands of users who share the same platform. We aim to circumvent some of these controls in order to access more resources than should be allowed, and we demonstrate this on the Force.com platform which supports the ability for a developer to upload and execute custom code. Our proof-of-concept was to port Nikto into a Force.com application, and we named it Sifto.

BlackHat presentation demo vids: SalesForce ClickJacking

[part 2 in a series of 5 video write-ups from our BlackHat 09 talk, summary here] Goal The premise behind this video was that while we are migrating more and more services into the cloud, the front-end through which the services are accessed as well as managed is (in many cases) a web application and we still have not figured out how to write secure web applications reliably. The implication is that business-critical services and infrastructure maybe at risk due to a web developer’s mistake.

BlackHat presentation demo vids: SugarSync

[part 1 in a series of 5 video write-ups from our BlackHat 09 talk, summary here] Goal We wanted to demonstrate how access to cloud resources can bring certain attack classes within reach of regular users. Instead of focusing on brute-forcing regular user credentials such as usernames and passwords, we decided to look at less noisy options since failed logins would typically be a closely watched metric. To this end, different types of session identifiers were examined. The thinking was that by bruting session IDs instead of credentials the monitoring systems might be less likely to pickup the attack, and the cloud gives the attacker vast amounts of bandwidth and processing power that was not previously available. However even with access to cloud resources, most “strong” session IDs would still be large enough to avoid this attack (think 128-bit sessions such as those stored in ASP.NET cookies).