AppSec Israel 2016

The once uncommon application-level protection mechanisms are EVERYWHERE these days, and sooner or later, you'll have to face them.
Web Application Firewalls (WAF) and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), Filters and RASP Modules, all common and widespread countermeasures you have to face on a regular basis, with the power to turn a typical assessment into a nightmare, and make automated tools practically useless.
While the attack vectors are well covered in CWE, CAPEC, TECAPI RvR, WASC, OWASP Top 10 and Testing Guide, all you have to cover evasion techniques is a couple of cheat sheets focused on a limited set of attacks.
Sure, there are numerous XSS and SQL Injection evasion cheat sheets, but what about Path Traversal, Remote File Inclusion, OS Command Injection? What about Forced Browsing? What about other attacks?
Formalizing evasion techniques and methods for the REST of the common attack vectors makes a LOT of sense, for manual pen-testing and automated tools - and THIS is phase one, aimed to cover the rest of the unattended top 10.

Cross-site search (XS-search) is a practical timing side-channel attack that allows the extraction of sensitive information from web-services. The attack exploits inflation techniques to efficiently distinguish between search requests that yield results and requests that do not. This work focuses on the response inflation technique that increases the size of the response; as the difference in the sizes of the responses increases, it becomes easier to distinguish between them. We begin with browser-based XS-search attack and demonstrate its use in extracting users' private data from Gmail and Facebook. The browser-based XS-search attack exploits the differences in the sizes of HTTP responses, and works even when significant inflation of the response is impossible. This part also involves algorithmic improvements compared to previous work. When there is no leakage of information via the timing side channel it is possible to use second-order (SO) XS-search, a novel type of attack that allows the attacker to significantly increase the difference in the sizes of the responses by planting maliciously crafted record into the storage. SO XS-search attacks can be used to extract sensitive information such as email content of Gmail and Yahoo! users, and search history of Bing users.

This CTF competition aims to encourage and promote interest in web application security, as well as for just having some fun.

We do not see it as a competition really, though there are winners and they are going to win some cool prizes...

There are a lot of interesting talks at OWASP this year that you wouldn't want to miss.. So, it is perfectly ok if you don't end up collecting all flags.. We know, you have been busy.. 

 

Here are some FAQ I frequently hear (I never heard them actually, but what the hack?)

Is there any registration needed?

Registration is available here (just add yourself to my sched) or on site, at Komodo booth.

 

What prizes do the winners get?

There are going to be 4 prizes. 3 top scores will get a prize while one prize will be won by a lottery between all who scores a minimum of 10 points.

If there are 2 attendees who reached the same score, a lottery   between the two will be taken.

Oh.. and the prizes.. We'll decide soon enough and let you know.

 

What is the CTF structure?

We have built a PHP based web application that holds 6 challenges. Each challenge require a knowledge of a different attack or a different attack vector. Once you find the flag, you should use our 'proof of hack' PHP page to get the scores.

We might add a 'buy a hint' functionality, but even if we won't there are going to be plenty of people around who could steer you to the right direction.

 

What time do the CTF take place?

The CTF will be open all day long, starting at the first talk and till the end of last one.

 

What should I bring?

Bring your kali linux. Well, there is no need for that really, just kidding.

What you might need is:

1. Laptop, any OS will do.


2. Internet connection.


3. Python installed (2.x I believe)


4. HTTP Proxy (burp, fiddler, whatever…)


5. Wireshark, tcpdump or something like that


6. Internet facing server (but we can provide you with that if needed)

 

Of course, you might get all flags without needing any of the above. That would be super cool, we would love to see your take on our challenges.

 

How long should it take?

The CTF is open for the entire day. We estimate each challenge to take approximately 30 minutes, so it is 3 hours altogether.

All challenges are solvable in a matter of few minutes, once you know how. The difficulty level vary from entry level to advance.

There is one which may take quite a while and will require determination and persistency to solve.

Search engines optimization (SEO) is a technique being used by web sites owners in order to improve visibility and traffic to their web site. Legitimate SEO activity will use optimization techniques such as: changing structure and textual usage of the web site pages, publication in social media and web forums that will referrer relevant users.
The ultimate goal of SEO campaign is to promote web site ranking in the leading search engines, having the promoted web site returned in the primary result page once searching for relevant terms and keywords. 

In the presentation I’m going to present what happens when threat actors get into the world of SEO campaigns abuse SEO optimization techniques and moreover, use all kind of attack techniques such as SQL injection and open redirects in order to manipulate search engines ranking.
I will also evaluate some of the SEO attacks and the manipulating techniques, try to determine who are the victims in this story, check if these attacks achieved their goal and supply more interesting insights on the world of “Blackhat SEO”.

We often encounter IoT (Internet of Things) systems during our work as penetration testers and security consultants. We know how to assess the security of the server side API, the associated mobile apps, the web apps and so on - but what about the device itself (the "thing")? Moreover, what happens if the device is not using traditional HTTP/S request, or does not even "speak" plain old tcp/ip?

During this talk, we'll go over the obstacles we have to face when analyzing unknown, custom RF based communication that drives the target IoT system we're pentesting. We'll talk about and see in action tools that will allow us to capture RF traffic, analyze it, brute force it, replay it, and of course forge it. It's like plain old appsec hacking tricks, but at the RF level. So let's hack some things belonging to the real world!

March 2016. An anonymous open source developer decides to remove his code (left-pad) from a public repository.
Shortly thereafter, several large organizations felt the impact of his actions. Facebook, AirBnB and others experienced errors impacting the functionality of their services. Packages using “left-pad” wouldn’t properly execute.
Today, we embrace both the open source community and the growth of open source projects, modules and packages but… Dependencies and recursive dependencies might become a risk or even a new attack vector which we didn’t foresee.
Could there be other cases of common and popular open source packages depending on open source modules that might not be there tomorrow or, even worse, could they be maliciously modified?

Join us for an insightful session that will reveal our research on this topic where you will learn:
• Which common open source packages might not be there tomorrow and how this can affect you?
• How packages you use could be maliciously modified impact on your app Discuss the risks introduced by hybrid application development
• How intertwined and complex dependencies have become
 

HTTP/2 is the emerging network protocol for the Internet, facilitating leaner and faster web browsing by introducing several new mechanisms which can be seen as a single transition layer for web traffic. The adoption of HTTP/2 is lightning fast, and even though only a year has passed since its publication, HTTP/2 is already supported by all significant players in the field including browsers, web servers and Content Delivery Networks.
In the presentation we will overview the HTTP/2 attack surface - stream multiplexing, flow control, HPACK compression and server push, with a focus on how the way HTTP/2 servers implement these mechanisms can make or break your security posture. We will continue with presenting new classes of vulnerabilities that have been introduced by the mechanisms used with HTTP/2, and explaining how these vulnerabilities can be used for mounting effective attacks against web servers like Apache, IIS, Ngnix, Jetty and nghttp. We will explain in details several serious zero-day vulnerabilities, such as CVE-2016-1546, CVE-2016-0150 and CVE-2016-1544, and end with discussing several approaches for mitigating attacks of these types.
Those attending this session will understand that:
1. As an emerging technology that introduces novel and flexible mechanisms, HTTP/2 also induces new risks.
2. HTTP/2 implementations are still not “security mature.” Therefore it is almost certain that scrutiny of HTTP/2 implementations will increase in coming years, resulting in the discovery of new vulnerabilities, exploits and security patches. With HTTP/2 gaining more popularity, this trend will intensify.
3. An effective security strategy for newly adopted technologies must rely on supplemental solutions rather than patching

Testing java client applications is not always straightforward as testing web applications. Even under experienced hands, there might be obstacles coming your way; what if you cannot use a proxy? How do you MitM? What if you just can't? How do you modify the app to you benefit?

Fortunately, Java is still java. This lecture is based on a true story, and will follow an interesting case of pen-testing a known product; what tools and techniques can be used in order to jump over hurdles, all the way to the finish line.

The lecture aims to enrich the pentester's toolbox as well as mind, when facing java client applications; MitM-ing, run-time manipulations and patching the code are only some of the discussed cases.

In addition, a newly developed proxy for intercepting and tampering with TCP communication over TLS/SSL and bypassing certificate-pinning protections, will be introduced during the lecture.

NodeJS, and JavaScript at large are quickly taking over software whether it is GitHub’s statistics for projects growth, the IoT industry, ChatOps projects written in JavaScript and Enterprises adoption is growing as well.
With this trend, it is imperative to review OWASP security practices and learn how to harden NodeJS Web Applications.​
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We will begin with a quick NodeJS intro and a few fail stories of how things can go wrong. ​
We will quickly dive into hands-on practical implementation of security measures to adopt in your current or future NodeJS project. Next I will show how to leverage widely adopted security tools for integration in the build and CI/CD process to audit and test for security vulnerabilities, as well as leveraging successful enterprise-level open source npm libraries to enhance your web application’s security.​
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In summary: in this session I will demonstrate:​
* Securing ExpressJS by adopting mature and commonly used npm libraries​
* Secure code guidelines for JavaScript software developers​
* Integrating NodeJS security measures as part of your build CI/CD DevOps process​
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In the proverbial game of cat-and-mouse between endpoint security vendors and malware writers, malware attacks have recently grown more sophisticated. More enterprises are losing ground to hackers, who are able to outmaneuver static and runtime solutions by constantly changing their attack strategies. The team that uncovered iOS malicious profiles, WiFiGate, HTTP Request Hijacking, No iOS Zone and Invisible Profiles are taking it upon themselves to coach developers and organizations on how to regain control, and turn the tables on the hackers behind next-generation mobile malware.

In his presentation, Yair will discuss cutting-edge techniques used by malware writers to circumvent mobile security paradigms such as app-sandboxing and containers. Mr. Amit will then break down the current set of techniques (signatures, static analysis & dynamic analysis) used to identify malware on mobile devices, and identify the pros and cons of these approaches. He will also explain why attackers constantly succeed in fooling these technologies, and explore the problem of false positive/false negative tradeoffs in such solutions.

During a live, interactive demo, Yair will create a mobile malware on stage, meant to be undetected by static and runtime analysis technologies.

Everybody knows that manual code review can be a tedious and lengthy effort, with complexity growing exponentially with the size of the code. However, understanding code flow and focusing on relevant parts can become much easier when employing interactive debugging techniques. This allows combining the best of penetration testing and code review benefits to achieve maximum results in the most efficient manner. In this talk we will explain and demonstrate this eye-opening technique for effectively performing a manual code review on a live system using a debugger and provide a quick starter kit for implementing this technique.

Chrome extensions have opened a variety of opportunities for either users and developers, expanding the limits of what we've known as browsing experience. Attacker have also spotted the widely usage of such extensions, and abuse people's trust in Chrome Web Store to distribute malicious extensions. This allows them to run web-based bot attacks straight from victims' browsers, shending cross-site Ajax requests, resulting in impersonation of users in third-party websites.
Furthermore, the detection of such bot attack by the attacked server is more complex than in regular distributed attacks, since real humans actually use the Chrome tab abused to attack the victim.
The lecture will include an overview on Chrome Extension abilities followed by techniques to abuse them in order to run bot attacks, as well as distribute a malicious extensions to big crowds of victims.

You're in a potentially malicious network (free WiFi, guest network, or maybe your own corporate LAN). You're a security conscious netizen so you restrict yourself to HTTPS (browsing to HSTS sites and/or using a "Force TLS/SSL" browser extension). All your traffic is protected from the first byte. Or is it?

We will demonstrate that, by forcing your browser/system to use a malicious PAC (Proxy AutoConfiguration) resource, it is possible to leak HTTPS URLs. We will explain how this affects the privacy of the user and how credentials/sessions can be stolen. We will present the concept of "PAC Malware" (a malware which is implemented only as Javascript logic in a PAC resource) that features: a 2-way communication channel between the PAC malware and an external server, contextual phishing via messages, denial-of-service options, and sensitive data extraction from URI's. We present a comprehensive browser PAC feature matrix and elaborate more about this cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac) and cross-browser (IE, Chrome, Safari) threat.

From an international perspective, Israel provides a unique laboratory for studying the effect of law and regulation on cybersecurity research and development. This presentation will provide an introduction to specific laws and regulations concerning cybersecurity research and ask whether these laws have in actual practice influenced the growth of the cybersecurity ecosystem in Israel. More specifically, how have industry players, including startups, multinationals and the military, reacted to the unique legal framework that Israel provides for cybersecurity activities?

There are many different security development lifecycles (SDLC) frameworks in the modern world. However, a fully implemented SDLC program is often represented as heavy, time-consuming and not suitable to Agile development methodology. We’d like to break the myth and show how a very comprehensive security program, managed by a dedicated security office, can be successfully integrated in agile development project on a real case example.

We’ll shortly describe the main challenges, and the techniques and procedures helping to overcome the challenges. We’ll present the Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) Framework developed and used in HPE SW in the last three years, and describe how it integrated into development of new SaaS based fully agile developed product, with emphasis on main activities and roles. As a part of the presentation we would like to highlight the importance of the proper program management and role of the PMO and how it became a key success factor in the effective security program implementation.

Software Signoff is an inevitable step in maturing our software development processes in order to deliver better and safer software. Like with other engineering disciplines before, the growing concerns for safety, security and standards is driving the industry to do better. In this talk we will explain what Software Signoff means and why organizations must adopt it before it is too late.