Hey folks,

This is my writeup for Whatscat, just about the easiest 300-point Web level I’ve ever solved! I wouldn’t normally do a writeup about a level like this, but much like the mtpox level I actually wrote the exact tool for exploiting this, and even wrote a blog post about it almost exactly 4 years ago - April of 2010. Unlike mtpox, this tool isn’t the least bit popular, but it sure made my life easy!

Hello again!

This is my second writeup from PlaidCTF this past weekend! It’s for the Web level called kpop, and is about how to shoot yourself in the foot by misusing serialization (download the files). There are at least three levels I either solved or worked on that involved serialization attacks (mtpox, reeekeeeeee, and this one), which is awesome because this is a seriously undersung attack. Good on the PPP!

Hey folks,

This is going to be my first of a couple writeups about this past weekend’s CTF: PlaidCTF!

My first writeup is for a 150-point Web level called mtpox. I chose this one to do first not only because it’s the first level I completed, but also because the primary vulnerability was a hash extension issue, and I wrote one of most popular tools for exploiting those. So it’s like the level made for me!

(Actually, there’s another level that I wrote a less popular tool for. I’ll talk about that one in my next post. :) )

Hey folks,

It’s a little bit late coming, but this is my writeup for the Fuzzy level from the Ghost in the Shellcode 2014 CTF! I kept putting off writing this, to the point where it became hard to just sit down and do it. But I really wanted to finish before PlaidCTF 2014, which is this weekend so here we are! You can see my other two writeups here (TI-1337) and here (gitsmsg).

Like my other writeups, this is a “pwnage” level, and required the user to own a remote server. Unfortunately, because of my slowness, they’re no longer running the server, but you can get a copy of the binary at my github page and run it yourself. It’s a 64-bit Linux ELF executable. It didn’t have ASLR, and DEP would have been

“It’s Saturday night; I have no date, a 2L bottle of Shasta, and my all-rush mix tape. Let’s rock!”

…that’s what I said before I started gitsmsg. I then entered “Rush” into Pandora, and listened to a mix of Rush, Kansas, Queen, Billy Idol, and other 80’s rock for the entire level. True story.

Anyway, let’s get on with it! Not too long ago I posted my writeup for the 100-level “Pwnage” challenge from Ghost in the Shellcode. Now, it’s time to get a little more advanced and talk about the 299-level challenge: gitsmsg. Solved by only 11 teams, this was considerably more challenging.

As before, you can obtain the binary, my annotated IDA database, and exploit code on my Github page

Hey everybody,

This past weekend was Shmoocon, and you know what that means—Ghost in the Shellcode!

Most years I go to Shmoocon, but this year I couldn’t attend, so I did the next best thing: competed in Ghost in the Shellcode! This year, our rag-tag band of misfits—that is, the team who purposely decided not to ever decide on a team name, mainly to avoid getting competitive—managed to get 20th place out of at least 300 scoring teams!

I personally solved three levels: TI-1337, gitsmsg, and fuzzy. This is the first of three writeups, for the easiest of the three: TI-1337—solved by 44 teams.

You can download the binary, as well as the exploit, the IDA Pro files, and everything else worth keeping that I generated, from my Github repository.

Hey folks,

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2014!

On a recent trip to Tyson’s Corner, VA, I had some time to kill, so I took a careful look at a malware sample that a friend of mine sent to me some time ago, which I believe he originally got off somebody else’s hosed system. The plan was for me to investigate it, and I promised him I would; it just took awhile!

Anyways, the sample has a few layers of packing, and I thought it’d be fun/interesting to show you how to unwrap the entire thing to obtain the final payload. I am not going to discuss the payload itself in this post, largely because I haven’t spent much time reversing it. Perhaps in the future I’ll dig a little deeper, but for now we’ll focus on the packing.

I called this sample “lcmw”. It stood for something interesting, but I don’t really remember what—I may have been drinking when I named it. :)

For those of you who are close to me, you’ll know that my life has been crazy lately. Between teaching courses, changing jobs (here I come, Google!recently started at Google! (I’m slow at posting these :) )), and organizing BSides Winnipeg, I’ve barely had time to breathe!

Things are still chaotic, of course (in fact, movers were packing up my life as I wrote this), but I wanted to take some time and talk about BSides Winnipeg.

I’ll go over the background, the planning, the day-of, and some lessons learned. If you just want to see cool photos, here you go!

One of the worst feelings when playing a capture-the-flag challenge is the hindsight problem. You spend a few hours on a level—nothing like the amount of time I spent on cnot, not by a fraction—and realize that it was actually pretty easy. But also a brainfuck. That’s what ROP’s all about, after all!

Anyway, even though I spent a lot of time working on the wrong solution (specifically, I didn’t think to bypass ASLR for quite awhile), the process we took of completing the level first without, then with ASLR, is actually a good way to show it, so I’ll take the same route on this post.

Before I say anything else, I have to thank HikingPete for being my wingman on this one. Thanks to him, we solved this puzzle much more quickly and, for a short time, were in 3rd place worldwide!

When I was at Shmoocon, I saw a talk about how to write an effective capture-the-flag contest. One of their suggestions was to have a tar-pit challenge that would waste all the time of the best player, by giving him a complicated challenge he won’t be able to resist. In my opinion, in PlaidCTF, I suspected that “cnot” was that challenge. And I was the sucker, even though I knew it all the way…

(It turns out, after reviewing writeups of other challenges, that most of the challenges were like this; even so, I’m proud to have been sucked in!)

If you want a writeup where you can learn something, I plan to post a writeup for “Ropasaurus” in the next day or two. If you want a writeup about me being tortured as I fought through inconceivable horrors to finish a level and capture the bloody flag, read on! This level wasn’t a lot of learning, just brute-force persistence.

Early last week, I posted a blog about padding oracle attacks. I explained them in detail, as simply as I could (without making diagrams, I suck at diagrams). I asked on Reddit about how I could make it easier to understand, and JoseJimeniz suggested working through an example. I thought that was a neat idea, and working through a padding oracle attack by hand seems like a fun exercise!

(Having done it already and writing this introduction afterwards, I can assure you that it isn’t as fun as I thought it’d be :) )

I’m going to assume that you’ve read my previous blog all the way through, and jump right into things!

This post is about padding oracle vulnerabilities and the tool for attacking them - “Poracle” I’m officially releasing right now. You can grab the Poracle tool on Github!

At my previous job — Tenable Network Security — one of the first tasks I ever had was to write a vulnerability check for MS10-070 — a padding oracle vulnerability in ASP.net. It’s an interesting use of a padding oracle vulnerability, since it leads to code execution, but this blog is going to be a more general overview of padding oracles. When I needed to test this vuln, I couldn’t find a good writeup on how they work. The descriptions I did find were very technical and academic, which I’m no good at. In fact, when it comes to reading academic papers, I’m clueless and easily frightened. But, I struggled through them, and now I’m gonna give you a writeup that even I’d be able to understand!

By the way, the Wikipedia page for this attack isn’t very good. If somebody wants to summarize my blog and make it into a Wikipedia page, there’s now a source you can reference. :)

On a related note, I’m gonna be speaking at Shmoocon in February: “Crypto: You’re doing it wrong”. Among other things, I plan to talk about padding oracles and hash extension attacks — I’m really getting into this crypto thing!

Hey everybody,

This is just a super quick post today to direct you here - http://www.skullspace.ca/blog/2012/11/skullspace-2-0-the-new-frontier/.

That’s a post I wrote about SkullSpace - the hackerspace that me and several others helped found a couple years ago. We went down a “too good to be true” road, where we had a ton of space and super cheap rent. And, eventually, got bitten by it. We’re in the process of moving, and started a fundraiser to make it happen.

Anyway, read the post! It’s interesting. :)

Ron

You can grab the hash_extender tool on Github!

(Administrative note: I'm no longer at Tenable! I left on good terms, and now I'm a consultant at Leviathan Security Group. Feel free to contact me if you need more information!)

Awhile back, my friend @mogigoma and I were doing a capture-the-flag contest at https://stripe-ctf.com. One of the levels of the contest required us to perform a hash length extension attack. I had never even heard of the attack at the time, and after some reading I realized that not only is it a super cool (and conceptually easy!) attack to perform, there is also a total lack of good tools for performing said attack! After hours of adding the wrong number of null bytes or incorrectly adding length values, I vowed to write a tool to make this easy for myself and anybody else who's trying to do it. So, after a couple weeks of work, here it is!

Hey everybody!

While I was doing a pentest last month, I discovered an attack I didn’t previously know, and I thought I’d share it. This may be a Christopher Columbus moment - discovering something that millions of people already knew about - but I found it pretty cool so now you get to hear about it!

One of the first things I do when I’m looking at a Web app - and it’s okay to make a lot of noise - is run the http-enum.nse Nmap script. This script uses the http-fingerprints.lua file to find any common folders on a system (basically brute-force browsing). I’m used to seeing admin folders, tmp folders, and all kinds of other interesting stuff, but one folder in particular caught my eye this time - /.git.

Hey everybody,

There have been a lot of discussion and misconceptions about Battle.net’s authentication lately. Having done a lot of work on the Battle.net protocol, I wanted to lay some to rest.

The first thing to understand is that, at least at the time I was working on this, there were three different login methods (this is before they combined the Web logins with Battle.net logins - I can’t speak on those). The three methods are:

1. CHAT protocol - deprecated a long, long time ago
2. Old Login System (OLS) - used by Diablo, Warcraft 2 BNE, Starcraft, and Diablo II
3. New Login System (NLS) - used by Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft, and in some fashion by newer games. Also supported - but unused - by Diablo II

I’ll describe, in detail, how each of these work. The summary is, though, that at no point does a game client ever send a plaintext password to the server. The closest is the SHA1 of the password, which is used for account creation in old games. For more information, read on!

Hey guys,

Today, I thought it’d be fun to take a good look at a serious flaw in some computer-management software. Basically, the software is designed for remotely controlling systems on networks (for installing updates or whatever). As far as I know, this vulnerability is currently unpatched; there are allegedly mitigations, but you have to pay to see them! (A note to vendors - making us pay for your patches or mitigation notes only makes your customers less secure. Please stop doing that!)

This research was done in the course of my work at Tenable Network Security on the Reverse Engineering team. It’s an awesome team to work on, and we’re always hiring (for this team and others)! If you’re interested and you have mad reverse engineering skillz, or any kind of infosec skillz, get in touch with me privately! (rbowes-at-tenable-dot-com if you’re interested in applying)

Hey everybody,

Two weeks ago today, Microsoft released a bunch of bulletins for Patch Tuesday. One of them - ms11-058 - was rated critical and potentially exploitable. However, according to Microsoft, this is a simple integer overflow, leading to a huge memcpy leading to a DoS and nothing more. I disagree.

Although I didn’t find a way to exploit this vulnerability, there’s more to this vulnerability than meets the eye - it’s fairly complicated, and there are a number of places that I suspect an experienced exploit developer might find a way to take control.

In this post, I’m going to go over step by step how I reverse engineered this patch, figured out how this could be attacked, and why I don’t believe the vulnerability is as simple as the reports seem to indicate.

Oh, and before I forget, the Nessus Security Scanner from Tenable Network Security (my employer) has both remote and local checks for this vulnerability, so if you want to check your network go run Nessus now!

Hey everybody,

As I’m sure you all know, I normally post about IT security here. But, once in awhile, I like to take a look at physical security, even if it’s just in jest.

Well, this time it isn’t in jest. I was at Rona last week buying a lead/asbestos/mold-rated respirator (don’t ask!), when I took a walk down the lock aisle. I’m tired of all my practice locks and was thinking of picking up something interesting. Then I saw it: a lock that advertised that it could re-key itself to any key. Woah! I had to play with it.

Now, maybe I’m an idiot (in fact, my best friends would swear it). But I hadn’t ever heard of a lock that can do that before! So I did the obvious thing: I bought it, took it apart, figured out how it worked, then took pictures of everything.

Hey everybody!

This is part 3 to my 2-part series on password reset attacks (Part 1 / Part 2). Overall, I got awesome feedback on the first two parts, but I got the same question over and over: what’s the RIGHT way to do this?

So, here’s the thing. I like to break stuff, but I generally leave the fixing to somebody else. It’s just safer that way, since I’m not really a developer or anything like that. Instead, I’m going to continue the trend of looking at others’ implementations by looking at three major opensource projects - Wordpress, SMF, and MediaWiki. Then, since all of these rely on PHP’s random number implementation to some extent, I’ll take a brief look at PHP.