Tin-Foil-Hat
(Re)Evaluating Qubes OS as a pentesting platform
Intro Laptop hardening is difficult at the best of times, and it’s made worse by the conflicting requirements we have for our workstations. With one laptop, we need to have work email and chat set up, we need to be able to spin up lab environments to test cool stuff we’re interested in, and we need to be able to run various tools on client engagements that may require us to lower the security of our laptop to run properly. The go-to solution to squaring these requirements is to use something like VMWare or docker containers to keep things separate, but after trying out Qubes for a while, I’ve found that it’s improved my workflow significantly. However, no linux setup is perfect out the box, and in this post I want to note the biggest changes I’ve made to make the OS more usable as a daily driver.
Not-quite-triangulation using the who’s near me feature in location-aware web apps
When assessing web applications, we typically look for vulnerabilities such as SQLi and XSS, which are generally a result of poor input validation. However, logical input validation is just as important, and you can get tons of interesting info if it’s not done properly.
Take the plethora of mobile apps that let you find people that are using the same app nearby. Logical validation on the coordinates you send should check that
The proof of the pudding ?
Royal pingdom did a quick check on what was running at some of the more popular sites on the Internet and end up with the following table:
Its intersting for a whole bunch of reasons that im currently too sleep y to write about.. (sleepy??? must be old age?)(or the flu pills im taking)
The first thing that was interesting to me was the suprising lack of BSD ? i like linux and have used it as a desktop machine forever (before becoming a macfanboy) but have always defaulted to FreeBSD for servers.. im not sure what this means and ill do a little netcraft digging tomorrow to see if its a general trend..
2 Un-related thoughts.. on Echelon and the recent Skype Outage..
I suspect somewhere there exist cardinal rules of blogging which would state that using a single post to make 2 completely un-related posts is a no-no.. I will now promptly ignore it 2 push out 2 random thoughts that came up..
Echelon and Echelon spam..
While watching the Bourne Ultimatum the other night the usual “echelon“esque scene played out.. Guy on phone says keyword.. pan to NSA/CIA type building.. computer drone type person screams something like “we have a hot one”..
Another blow for privacy? A small price for your 15 minutes of fame..
Spock have just opened up beyond their private beta and promise to be the most comprehensive people search tool on the interwebs.. Their model is interesting because they aim to combine wikipedia style editing with a single focus.. people..
Roelof and i had long discussions in the past, around someway to get people to update information on people while growing the db and still having people contribute.. Interestingly, spocks simple sounding approach might be perfect.. in a day when everybody vanity googles themselves, and when the facebook/myspace/twitter generation have 0 qualms about informing the world what they are doing 24/7, the simplest way to populate a db with information about people, might just be to let them fill the info in themselves..
Google Cookies.. Finally a saner expiry date…
Google have finally revised their cookie expiration policy, which will have user cookies expiring after 2 years. (For those of you who think this is too long, it needs to be kept in mind that this used to be set to expire in 2038!).
Of course, the tin-foil hat wearers amongst us are going to find it difficult to convince the “keep-your-stinkin-privacy-i-want-my-15-minutes” facebook generation that privacy actually matters, but we can probably chalk this, and their earlier anouncement to sanitize search server logs after 18 months as a tiny victory..
Adam Shostack on Biometrics..
hmmm… i have heard this somewhere before….
” However, in cases where your finger is used to identify or authenticate you, it’s much harder to change your password. ”
/mh
Have a (one) care sir….
Someone in the office was discussing Microsoft’s recent horrible foray into the anti-virus market. Apparently an online source held one-care as faring worse than a simple man with a perl script. A quick scan shows that they have indeed faired pretty poorly in independent tests:
“(BBC News) OneCare was the only failure among 17 anti-virus programs tested by the AV Comparatives organisation.”
Now the obvious question was: How could Microsoft possibly get it so wrong? (Cue the drum roll, bring out your tin foil hats)
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