Yet another BaySec meeting. Come and mingle.

Where: O’Neills

When: September 17th, 7pm

Who: People interested in computer security / geeks / …

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While I am on a roll, talking about normalization and log standards, let me have a look at a publication from Gartner. It is a bit dated already (May 2006), but people are probably still referring to it. There are a couple of things that I want to make sure people understand.
While I like the fact that someone like Gartner is trying to dive into a technical topic, I am not too certain that this is very productive. The Gartner publication I am looking at is “Define Application Security Log Output Standards” by Amrit Williams. I must say, the publication is not horribly wrong or bad, however, there are some interesting problems that I want to address:

• The publication outlines what fields should be contained in an “account access event”. Most of the fields make sense. However, there are two fields: “login success” and “login failure”. These fields should be normalized. There shouldn’t be two fields, one for success and one for failure. Just have one that indicates success or failure. That way you can correlate those two events against each other. Otherwise you can’t because you have two different fields. Well, you can, but it’s much more difficult.
• Another field in the account access event is “access rights”. If you include this field in an event, you need a system which can deal with sets or lists of values. This is not simple and I don’t think any of the SIMs really take care of that. Not that they shouldn’t, but it’s really really expensive to build that into a correlation engine. Now, in this specific instance, for access rights, they should not be in an event anyways. This is static information that should be read into the correlation engine asynchronously or looked up on a need to know bases.
• The publication further indicates that the access events have additional variables, called “Variable 1”, “Variable 2”, etc. I have no idea what these fields would be used for. But that’s not even important. The important part is that having generic variables without a fixed meaning is not very useful for later consumption in reports or correlation rules. You need a semantic associated with every field. That’s exactly why there is a common event language to start with!
• The same mistake with splitting out the same type of events into multiple event fields is done in the “account /role management events”. Make one field tat talks about “creation”, “modification”, etc. One of the things to mention in this context is an event taxonomy. I am working on a generic taxonomy right now for CEE, the common event exchange format. CEE is an effort that I pushed Mitre to address a long time ago. Finally, there is a small working group and we should soon have the <A href=”http://cee.mitre.org”>Web presence</A> up and running.
• I don’t agree with the “Log Output Formats” discussion at all. Sorry. Gartner (or Amrit?) recommends syslog as output format. While I am quite a fan of syslog, it’s definitely not my transport of choice. Read that again: TRANSPORT! Syslog is not a log format. It’s a transport. I am not going to roll-up my rant about formats and transports again. Read my older blog entry about the <a href=”http://raffy.ch/blog/2007/04/19/standard-logging-format-common-event-exchange-cee/”>format vs. transport</A> issue.
• It seems really interesting to me that syslog is pushed as the “log format” (again, it’s a transport, but whatever). The publication even mentions all the RFCs associated with syslog, but not a single sentence about the draw backs. Unstructured, reliability (okay TCP is mentioned), poor timestamp, etc.

Again, I think it’s great that Gartner picked this topic up. It’s incredibly important, but it takes a fair amount of work and experience to get a decent log standard put together. Stay tuned and check back for more information about <a href=”http://raffy.ch/blog/2007/04/23/common-event-expression-cee/>CEE</A>.

[tags]log standard,syslog,cee,event fields[/tags]

We have another BaySec meeting scheduled for the coming Monday. 7pm at O’Neills, at 3rd and King Street. Right around the corner from my work 😉

I thought I’d already disabled mDNSResponder when I did some basic hardening of my Laptop. Turns out that when Marty (no, I am not refereing to myself in the third person) asked me whether I disabled it and I checked again, it was really not. Maybe I just killed the process, but here is how to really disable that service:

Launch the following command

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist

The next step is turning off the mDNSResponder at startup. And where do you do that? As I am not really confident getting online here at BlackHat, I decided to just look around on the hard drive and what I found was that you could probably just change an entry in the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist file:

<key>OnDemand</key>
<false></false>

Replace false with true. Do you notice something? Someone really knew XML. Darn it. Two elements. One being the key, the other one being the value. Ever heard of attributes in XML? To whoever built this, this is how I would write the entry:

Or even better, re-architect the entire XML file to actually make sense!

I just now found the real way to actually disable the service by using the -w flag on the launchctl command from above. That will turn the process off permanently. A good reference is here.

Bob Blakley from the burton group wrote a blog entry about event interoperability standards. This clearly shows that interoperability is a hot topic. However, it also shows that we (CEE) still have to do a lot of work educating the community ;)I want to correct some of Bob’s statements about CEF and provide some more information and thoughts:

1. “CEF defines only a record format”. Well, that’s absolutely right and very very intended. You do not HAVE to define anything else. The transport for example is something that should not depend on the syntax and vice versa. I keep haing to make that point. The ArcSight CEF standard is not bound to any transport. Use anything. If you don’t have anything better, use syslog. It is very very very easy to implement. You just marshall a packet, send it to port 514 and done. Yes, it’s not reliable and all, but it’s a very simple and quick start. If you want, use something more complicated and with more capabilities. CEE will be doing exactly the same thing. We’ll break the standard up into four subtypes, separating syntax from transport, recomendation, and taxonomy.
2.  “it doesn’t define service interfaces to allow event producers to notify event consumers that an event has been created and is ready to be processed”. Wow, this is interesting. Why would you not just send the event? Why going asynchronous? People, get away from the notion of pulling events!
3. “it does not contain any mechanism for dealing with clock synchronization issues in distributed environments”. Since when should an interoperability standard take care of synchronizing clocks? Use NTP. I am just assuming that! The standard should not have to talk about that!
4. “[…] CEF leaves the definition of event types (which are called “Signature IDs” […] ) up to the individual event producers, thus inviting both ID conflict issues and proliferation of different names for events of the same type in different systems.” Half of this is definitely wrong. The other half is again a separation issue. CEF is a syntax standard. Not a taxonomy! Furthermore, you use a combination of deviceVendor, deviceProduct, deviceVersion, and SignatureID for the unique ID. Hence, no overlapping IDs. I know where this is going. Have a look at CPE. Darn, that thing is complex. However, compeltely unnecessary in this case. Let people define their own IDs. They have them already anyways (except for most syslog entries, but there you just make an ID up). I know what I talk about. I have been doing all of this for the last 4 years! What is really missing in the critique is (and yes, I will admit that there are wholes in CEF) that the granularity of defining the signature IDs is not defined. For example, do you use the same ID for all logins? Failed and successful? The answer here is no. I need different ones, but that’s something CEF does not define. Be assured, CEE will!

I also disagree with Bob that multiple standards should be pursued and supported. I will definitely push CEE harder than CEF. It’s open, it’s a community effort, it’s Mitre led, and it’s going to be a more comprehensive approach. We are keeping NIST and all the other interested parties involved. No need for NIST to go out and create yet another standard. There are so many other standards out there also and just because they exist does not mean they are any good. For example XDAS  is not what I want to see standardized! Why? See my review of XDAS.

[tags]CEE, CEF, event interoperability, standard, event exchange[/tags]

This is a pretty random blog entry, but oh well… I am sitting in the London airport. In the lounge here, they have a computer that is connected to the Internet. I sat down, opened a browser, typed in my webmail domain and paused for a second. Then I opened a command shell and checked for open ports, processes running, and all that. Well, I still felt like I couldn’t enter my password. What if a keylogger was running?

Then I had an idea. I opened a notepad and just entered some random characters. Then I started, using the mouse, to rearrange the letters into my username and password. A key logger is not able to capture my password like this. I _think_ I successfully circumvented these beasts.

I know, there are other trojans, such as transaction generators that could get in my way, but …

A group of info sec people is meeting up in San Francisco for an informal get together. We’ll have a drink and probably chat about security.

You work in computer security? Join us:

Wednesday, May 16th, 7pm at Zeitgeist in San Francisco.

No RSVP needed. So far you’ll have to buy your own beer unless we’ll find a sponsor 😉

Everybody blogged about RSA, I guess I am the only one who has not gotten around to do so until now. I did some pretty interesting survey of companies and how they use visualization in their products. I will try to publish some of my findings at a later point. The other thing which is always incredible about RSA is the people and the networking. I don’t know how many parties there were in total, but there were a lot. Just the parties I knew about were in the high teens. I even went to the Gala for a little bit but unfortunately I left too early. Otherwise I would have seen this life:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=geeks+dance+rsa

I wish I could dance like this guy. Dude, he got moves!

Anton Chuvakin just blog-tagged me. What that means is that I have to write five things about myself that not many people know and then list five other people that should do the same thing. Well, here ya go:

1. I used to be heavily involed in crossbow shooting. I was Swiss champion, was shooting in the national team for about 6 years and was the coach of the youth team for about 2 years. A great time which is responsible for a lot of what I am today.

2. I have a passion for bridges. I love taking pictures of them. I should probably start posting them 😉
3. I guess this is well known: I am Swiss. I grew up in Switzerland. In 1999 I came to the Silicon Valley for an internship, left the US again and then moved back to San Francisco in 2003.
4. My interest in security came about during my cryptography lessons in college. I was phascinated by the concepts and how they can be put into practical solutions. That initial phascination led to an internship and then later my master thesis at IBM Research in Zurich.

5. VIM: I am a huge fan of VIM. Some people hate me for using VIM for all my writing; Anton? I write my emails in VIM, I write my books in VIM, and much to the annoyance of my co-workers, I set my shells to VIM mode (set -o vi). And who is responsible for that? I am pretty sure it was Dhawal during my internship at Cylink.

So, who am I tagging?

1. Jian Zhen

2. Jan P. Monsch

3. Michael Rash

4. Deigo Zamboni

5. Axel Eble

I wanted to post this picture for a while. Here we go. Anton (NetForensics) and myself (ArcSight) at some of our competitors booths … Thanks for taking the pictures!