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March 19, 2022 by James Jardine Leave a Comment

Is encoding really encoding if it is escaping?

The title might be confusing, let’s see if we can clear it up.

I saw an article the other day that was giving a comparison between encoding, encryption and hashing. There was a statement made that basically said:

Encoding has no security purpose.

I thought this was interesting because when training on security topics we mention encoding for specific use cases. For example, when we discuss Cross-Site Scripting, the answer is output encoding.

I want to clarify that I agree with the statement in the article in that encoding does not provide any type of protections regarding confidentiality or anything like that. There is no data protection there. It does start me thinkng about encoding vs. escaping.

In the example above, regarding XSS, we really are talking about escaping, right? For SQL Injection we would say to escape the data, not encode it. For XSS we are trying to achieve the same goal: Ensure that control characters are not interpreted, but read as data.

The difference is that for SQL we would escape something like a single quote (‘) with two single quotes (”). This tells the Interpreter to treat the single quote as data (like O’Reilly) instead of treating it like a delimiter around data.

However, in the browser we typically encode characters rather than escape them. Instead of returning a (<) character, I would return (&lt;). This tells the browser to display a (<) character on the page rather than treat it as the beginning of an HTML tag.

This leads to some confusion when you are following the rules of the interpreter that uses encoding to escape.

When I teach classes I always use the different terminology when I cover these vulnerabilities. SQL Injection uses escaping. XSS is focused on encoding. In the end, the goal is escaping even though one uses encoding.

This becomes confusing when you want to discuss encoding at a pure level as it tends to have a different meaning depending on the context that you use it.

While encoding and escaping are technically different things, their terms are used almost as one when it comes to things like cross-site scripting. In that context, the encoding actually does provide a security purpose even though it is based on the interpreter the data is being sent to.

Security can be confusing at times. If you have questions or thoughts about application security, I would love to have a conversation around them. Feel free to reach out to me. Let me know what struggles you have when it comes to appsec.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: application security, AppSec, cross-site scripting, developer training, training, vulnerability, xss

December 15, 2021 by James Jardine Leave a Comment

Log4J – Reflection and Progression

Open any social media platform or pull up any mainstream media and undoubtably, you have seen many posts/articles talking about the log4j vulnerability. If you haven’t seen this, here is a quick link to catch up https://snyk.io/blog/log4j-rce-log4shell-vulnerability-cve-2021-4428/.

This post is not going to be about log4j, nor is it going to go into any of the details the thousands of others articles out there would go through. Instead, I want to discuss this at a higher level. Log4j is just an example of the risks of using 3rd party components and should be pushing a broader discussion within your organization and team.

The use of Vulnerable and Outdated Components – https://owasp.org/Top10/A06_2021-Vulnerable_and_Outdated_Components/ – Is ranked 6th on the OWASP Top 10.

If you have already started dealing with this (and if you haven’t, you should be), you have probably had similar questions as others out there. The biggest question probably every organization and security team had was “Am I vulnerable?”.

This is a great question, but how easy is it to answer?

Am I vulnerable?

If you had one application with minimal dependencies, maybe this is a quick answer. Maybe it is not a quick answer. As a developer, you may just have responsibility for your application. You also might be able to quickly answer to what version of what dependencies exist in your application. Well, maybe high level dependencies.

As an organization, it may not just be custom in-house applications that we are worried about. What about other applications you use within your organization that could be vulnerable to this. Are you using Software as a Service that could be vulnerable? As we start to pull on these different strings, they start to get tangled together.

[Read more…] about Log4J – Reflection and Progression

Filed Under: General, Take-Aways Tagged With: 3rd party component, application security, AppSec, awareness, components, exploit, log4j, owasp, secure code, training, vulnerability, vulnerable component

January 4, 2019 by James Jardine Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Questions Tagged With: application security, AppSec, brute force, credential stuffing, developsec, pen testing, penetration test, pentest, secure development, secure testing, secure training, vulnerability

June 26, 2018 by James Jardine Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: app sec, application program, application security, application security program, AppSec, consulting, developer, developer awareness, development, hacking, hiring, pen test, pen testing, penetration testing, qa, quality, quality assurance, ransomware, secure code, secure program, security testing, security training, testing, vulnerability, vulnerability assessment, vulnerability disclosure

May 15, 2018 by James Jardine Leave a Comment

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:

  • Security Fundamentals for Application Teams (CBT) – Save $100 on registration with COUPON Code: spring2018
  • Fundamentals of Application Security (Live-Remote) – New classes starting in August/September 2018.

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.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: application security, AppSec, developer, heroku, juice shop, owasp, secure development, security, security awareness, testing, vulnerability

May 10, 2018 by James Jardine Leave a Comment

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:

  • Security Fundamentals for Application Teams (CBT) – Save $100 on registration with COUPON Code: spring2018
  • Fundamentals of Application Security (Live-Remote) – New classes starting in August/September 2018.

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.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: application security, AppSec, developer, juice shop, owasp, secure development, security, security awareness, testing, vulnerability

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