DevelopSec

AppSec

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What is the difference between Brute Force and Credential Stuffing?

Many people get confused between brute force attacks and credentials stuffing. To help clear this up, here is a simple description of the two. These are both in regards to the login form only.

Brute Force
Brute force attacks on the login form consist of the attacker having a defined list (called a dictionary) of potential passwords. The attacker will then try each of these defined passwords with each username the attacker is trying to brute force. Put simply, this is a 1 (username) too many (password) attack.

A common mitigation to brute force attacks is the implementation of account lockout. In this case, after 3, or 5, or 10 failed attempts for a single username, the user account is locked to block any more attempts. This drastically reduces the number of passwords that may be tried in a short period of time.

Credential Stuffing
Credential Stuffing is another attack on the login form but it differs from a brute force attack in that the list used contains both a username and a password. This list is often obtained through a data breach at another organization. The purpose is to find accounts that are re-used across multiple sites. In this case, the attack is a 1 (username) to 1 (password) attack. For each username, only one password will be attempted.

Unlike with Brute Force, account lockout doesn’t have much affect on credential stuffing. Multi-factor authentication is a good mitigation as it will limit the use of valid credentials.

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Thinking about starting a bug bounty? Do this first.

Application security has become an important topic within our organizations. We have come to understand that the data that we deem sensitive and critical to our business is made available through these applications. With breaches happening all the time, it is critical to take reasonable steps to help protect that data by ensuring that our applications are implementing strong controls.

Over the years, testing has been the main avenue for “implementing” security into applications. We have seen a shift to the left more recently, leading to doing more throughout the entire development cycle, but we still have a ways to go. I am still a firm believer in embedding security into each of the phases as our main means of securing applications. Testing, however, is still a major component of any security program.

Typically, organizations rely on penetration testing to find the flaws in their applications. This is the de facto standard for understanding your risk. Unfortunately, penetration testing for applications has been watered down from what we think about with network testing. Many of the assessments we call penetration tests these days are just automated scans transposed into a custom report. These types of testing overlook one of the components a penetration test provides, which is the manual testing. Of course, there is much more to a penetration test, but that is not the focus of this post.

Internally, organizations may implement automated tools to help identify security flaws within their applications. These tools are good at finding certain types of flaws, and usually quite quickly. Like many current penetration tests, they lack the manual assessment side.

Not only does manual testing have the ability to find different types of flaws, such as authentication, authorization, CSRF, business logic, etc., it also has the ability to identify flaws that an automation tool overlooks. For example, a tool may not find every instance of cross-site scripting, depending on how that tool analyzes the system. Granted, manual testing is not guaranteed to find every instance either. With each type of testing, there is always a number of issues that will not be identified. The goal is to start reducing these numbers down over time.

Handling the results of all these res ports from the different assessments is critical to how well you start creating more resilient applications. In many organizations, vulnerabilities identified are handled as individual items and patched. In my opinion, the return on investment is when you can analyze these results to review your development process and see what improvements can be made to reduce the chance these types of flaws will be included in the future. Having an expert available to help review the issues and provide insight into how to use that information to improve your process is valuable.

Having a solid application development process in place is important before thinking about implementing a bug bounty program within your organization. If you are not already doing things consistently, there is a better chance the bounty program will fail.

Bug bounty programs have been becoming more prevalent over the last few years. This is especially true for newer technical startups. We have seen much slower adoption with most of the major corporations. There are many reasons for this, which are outside the scope of this post. There have been questions on whether bug bounties can replace penetration testing. The answer is no, because the goal of each of these is different. There are plenty of articles discussing the subject. A bug bounty program has also been seen by many as the evidence to show they are doing application security. Unfortunately, we can’t test ourselves secure. As I stated previously, testing is just a part of our solution for application security.

A key difference between our traditional testing and a bug bounty program is that bug bounties pay by the bug. Our traditional testing is provided at flat fees. For example, that automated tool is a set price for a month or year subscription. A penetration test is a set price per test. A bug bounty is priced per bug, which makes the cost very unpredictable. In addition, if you are not already doing many of the things previously discussed, there could be a lot of bugs to be found, leading to potentially high payouts.

As I have stated before, penetration testing has a different purpose and it can be very expensive. At Jardine Software we offer more budget friendly manual application security testing at a fixed cost. The goal is not necessarily to find every instance of every vulnerability or to exploit vulnerabilities in the way a penetration test would. The focus is on augmenting the automated testing you may already have in place and to provide that missing manual piece. The testing is performed manually by using the application in combination with Burp Suite, to look for weaknesses and provide those in a way that helps prioritize and then remediate them according to your organization’s needs.

The manual application security testing is typically performed over a week to two weeks and includes a broader scope than a typical bug bounty program. The reason for this is that we want to help identify risks that we see based on our years of experience to make you aware. This assessment can then help identify where you may have issues within your application before opening it up for a crowd sourced bounty program where each bug is priced individually.

If you are thinking about implementing a bug bounty program, reach out and lets chat first. Even if you are not considering a bug bounty program, do you have any manual application security testing implemented? We have the expertise to help provide the necessary testing or provide training for your internal teams to start applying manual testing techniques as part of your life cycle.

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Choosing Application Security Tools

There are lots of security tools available, so how do you know which one to pick?

If your security team is not including the application teams in the decision, you run a big risk of failure. The security team does get the ability to form relationships with vendors. We see them at conferences. We know people that work there. Because our focus is on security, we know the tools that exist in our space and we have an idea of which ones may be better than others. Of course, this is often due to what we hear from others, rather than our own experience with those tools.

Picking a tool in a vacuum is less than ideal. Sure, the tool may have five stars and has great detection rates. However, if the tool doesn’t fit into the development process and causes more overhead and friction, it will end up failing. A tool with 100% accuracy is still useless if it is not actually being used.

I have seen over and over where a security group acquires a tool, especially static analysis, and a few months later they realize it is just sitting on the shelf. Like all of us, we are excited when we get a new toy. We use it, learn it. Then, the newness wears off. Without the proper processes in place, this can happen with security tools as well. We don’t want this to happen to you.

The first step in determining which tools make sense is to understand the development process now and where it is going. Lets talk about static analysis for a moment. If your development process doesn’t make use of continuous integration and doesn’t plan to then that is not a high priority feature of the tool you receive. Have you considered what IDE the developers use?

I once had a situation where static analysis was about to be rolled out. The security team worked to pick a vendor and get the ball rolling. It was later in the process that the development team was brought on board with the conversation. They asked questions that were less of a priority to the security team, but more of a priority to them. For example, The tool provided a plugin for their IDE. However, when digging deeper, the plugin ran a few versions behind. So what had appeared to be a good setup, now looked a little less efficient since the plugin may not work. This isn’t a deal breaker, but depending on how you were planning on this solution working, it adds friction to the process. The more friction, the more pain.

The next step is understanding who will ultimately be using this tool? For those that listen to the podcast on a regular basis and follow my blogs, you know I am a huge fan of the application teams having direct access to these tools. In my opinion, static analysis is a developers tool. It is there to evaluate the source code and identify policy violations that only the developer can resolve. Giving them access and control over that function and embedding it into their process reduces that friction. Don’t confuse this with the idea that security is not getting the results. Security still needs to have insight into what is going on with security flaws within the application. But to be efficient, the results of these tools need to fit into the flow of how development works. Not be one-off reports under different processes.

This is no different, in my opinion, than dynamic analysis or interactive analysis. These are tools that should be used by the QA group. The group that is responsible for testing and most likely already has automated testing capabilities. They are trained in identifying bugs, reporting, and tracking them. Building these types of tools into their process just makes sense. How many listeners have their own stories of the security team exporting a thousand page report out of that dynamic scanner and sending it to the application team as a pdf? I have been there. Even I won’t read through that report.

The moral of the story here is that if we don’t understand how development works, what type of tools they already use, and what they can handle, we will probably pick a solution that will be ineffective, or at the very least, cause us a lot more work. The goal is not to just shove tools onto the development teams and say do this. As application security representatives, our goal is to help build better applications. That doesn’t mean that our job is to run all the tools and hound the application teams to fix items. By understanding the environments and processes we can pick tools that will fit much better, allowing us to focus our time on building out other solutions or processes for the organization. We are still relied upon to provide the expert advice and guidance to the issues that are identified.

If you are considering implementing these types of tools, take a moment to sit down with all involved parties to get everyone on board. A well laid out plan will go much further than a shotgun approach.

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Burp Extension – Juice Shop Routes

When it comes to testing for security within our web applications, we often look to creating simple tools to help speed things up. They also help provide a consistent way to help identify known patterns. For those that haven’t been following, I have been doing a few posts about getting the OWASP Juice Shop application up and running. In this post, I want to introduce a simple burp extension I created to help with a few of the challenges presented in the OWASP Juice Shop.

The Challenge

The OWASP Juice Shop has multiple challenges built into it to help guide the user along in finding web applications. The app is written as a single page app (SPA) and is a little different than your traditional applications. Rather than make a full page request for everything you click, instead the application just makes API calls. In short, the entire UI is returned on the first load of the application.

There are multiple challenges within the Juice Shop that require the user to access specific URLs that are not available via a menu or link. For example (and I don’t want to directly give away answers to the challenge here), imaging visiting the contact screen. If you click the menu item for contact us, it will update the URL in the address bar to be like /#/contact. So I don’t have to actually click a link to access the contact us page, I could just update that URL directly in the address bar.

Finding the Routes

So how do you find the URLs that are available to access? There are multiple ways of doing this. First, of course, you could try to just fuzz them. This is good if the URLs are not available anywhere for us to find. Fortunately, this Angular application embeds the different routes within the client-side code. It uses a RouteProvider object to do this.

With a little digging, you can find this information in the /dist/juice-shop.min.js file. This is a pretty large file and looking through it can be a little tough. Searching for RouteProvider will bring you to the route definitions.

A Burp Extension

As a professional web app tester, I spend a lot of time using Burp Suite as my web proxy. It allows me to easily view and intercept all the traffic my browser sends back and forth to the server. Another cool feature is it allows building your own extensions to solve just this type of problem. Of course, you probably wouldn’t just create an extension for this one piece or a specific app. Instead, the hope would be that it would become helpful for other applications that use angular’s route provider object. This way, when I go to test other sites, I may get this information right there in my scanner results.

I built a quick little burp extension that looks for the routeProvider object and then, if found, pulls out each route defined. The code can be found at https://github.com/jamesjardine/juiceshoproutes. The code that performs all the tasks are in the BurpExtender.java file.

Once the extension is built into a JAR file it can be added into Burp. Note that this only works for Burp Pro because it uses the passive scanner. To install it, just navigate to the “Extender” tab and click the Add button. Then select the Jar file you created:

Be 0

Here is a quick run down of what it does:

  • Looks to see if the response from the server contains the phrase $routeProvider. If it finds this phrase it then gets the start offset and the end of the object by identifying the next ] character.
  • It then loops through the specific body text looking for a match to e.when. This basically defines when the URL matches X, load a specific template.
  • Each route that is identified is then displayed in an unordered list.
  • When you visit the Target Tab and select your site, click on the Issues tab to look for Angular Routes.

This is just a quick example of how building custom burp extensions can help increase your efficiency or help provide some additional coverage for known patterns within applications.

————–POTENTIAL SPOILER INFO BELOW ——————–

IF YOU ARE WANTING TO TRY THIS OUT WITHOUT SEEING THE RESPONSE FIRST STOP READING HERE!!!

There is no interaction needed to trigger this scan except for just visiting the initial page of the Juice Shop site. The Issues tase will look like:

Be screen1

If you look at the response, you will see the following image:

Be 2

In the above image you can see the highlighted area showing where the RouteProvder routes are defined. In the following image, you can see the advisory screen which indicates the formatted list of routes that are available:

Be 3

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Installing OWASP JuiceShop with Heroku

I am often asked the question by clients and students where people can go to learn hacking techniques for application security. For years, we have had many purposely vulnerable applications available to us. These applications provide a safe environment for us to learn more about hacking applications and the vulnerabilities that are exposed without the legal ramifications.

In this post I want to show you how simple it is to install the OWASP Juice Shop application using Heroku. Juice Shop is a purposely vulnerable application written using NodeJS and Angular. It goes beyond just being an application with some vulnerabilities. It is set up to be a capture the flag (CTF) style application with its own scoreboard.

To learn more about the Juice Shop project, head over to https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Juice_Shop_Project. This is the main landing page and looks like the following:

Juice Shop

The first step in installing on Heroku is to make sure you are logged into your Heroku account. If you haven’t created one, do that first. Once you are logged in you should be in your dashboard that looks something like this:

HerokuInstall 1

Now that we are logged into Heroku, let’s head over to the Juice-shop GitHub page at https://github.com/bkimminich/juice-shop.

HerokuInstall 2

As you can see there is a button to “Deploy to Heroku”. Clicking this button will take you back to Heroku and ask for the app name as shown below:

HerokuInstall 3

Once you select a unique app name and the region clicking deploy starts the process. It doesn’t take very long (maybe 3-4 minutes) for the deploy to complete. While it is deploying you will see the build output as shown below:

HerokuInstall 4

Once the deployment is complete, you can click the button to View your new app. This will basically open a new tab at the location of your named instance which is the [name you picked].herokuapp.com as shown below:

HerokuInstall 5

The Juice Shop has a lot of vulnerabilities in it. It is a great way to learn more about how to exploit some of these vulnerabilities and test your skills. If you have little knowledge of application security vulnerabilities or the OWASP Top 10 check out our training courses we have available:

Please remember that hacking is illegal. If you want to learn more about application security and test your skills, do it responsibly and use great applications like the Juice Shop as your targets.

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Installing OWASP JuiceShop with Docker

I am often asked the question by clients and students where people can go to learn hacking techniques for application security. For years, we have had many purposely vulnerable applications available to us. These applications provide a safe environment for us to learn more about hacking applications and the vulnerabilities that are exposed without the legal ramifications.

In this post I want to show you how simple it is to install the OWASP Juice Shop application using a Docker container. Juice Shop is a purposely vulnerable application written using NodeJS and Angular. It goes beyond just being an application with some vulnerabilities. It is set up to be a capture the flag (CTF) style application with its own scoreboard.

To learn more about the Juice Shop project, head over to https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Juice_Shop_Project. This is the main landing page and looks like the following:

Juice Shop

On the right hadn’t side there are links to Installation instructions. Clicking on the Docker Link takes us to the following page (https://hub.docker.com/r/bkimminich/juice-shop/) (Scroll down to the section on docker):

Juice Shop Docker

As you can see, there are only 4 steps to getting up and running with Docker. The first step is to install Docker. I won’t cover that here, but make sure you do have it installed before continuing on.

The next step is to pull the Juice-Shop docker container. This container is all set up and configured to run the Juice-Shop. No configurations necessary. To do this enter the command: docker pull bkimminich/juice-shop

Docker Install Step 2

The next step is to run the container. It is performed by simply running the following command: docker run –rm -p 3000:3000 bkimminich/juice-shop

Docker Install Step 3

As you can see, the juice shop is up and running, listening on port 3000. Port 3000 was specified when we called run passing in the -p option. ** If you get an error about the container not being able to start up, try restarting docker. I ran into this a few different times and a docker restart resolved the issue.

If everything is running as expected, we should be able to browse to http://localhost:3000 and access the Juice Shop as shown below:

JuiceShop Running

The Juice Shop has a lot of vulnerabilities in it. It is a great way to learn more about how to exploit some of these vulnerabilities and test your skills. If you have little knowledge of application security vulnerabilities or the OWASP Top 10 check out our training courses we have available:

Please remember that hacking is illegal. If you want to learn more about application security and test your skills, do it responsibly and use great applications like the Juice Shop as your targets.