PHPIDS » Web Application Security 2.0

Today we are talking to Giorgio Maone who helped us several times improving the PHPIDS filters and converter with elegant XSS vectors. He was the first to break the filter after the XSS contest begun and some weeks before he generated real headaches on our sides by exploiting the name-trick in multiple ways. Ah – and not to forget – he has a cool blog too

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself!

A: I’m a senior software developer and CTO at InformAction, an Italy-based IT consulting firm I co-founded in 1998. I love slow food, martial arts, elegant code, listening good jazz and playing bad jazz. Some competitors keep accusing me of being the evil mind behind NoScript, but I plead not guilty: it’s just a setup to scare way Web 2.0+ investors from my company. Ajax, Comet, Widgets and Mashups FTW!

Q: You have a pretty impressive vita as developer and security expert – how did it all start?

A: My dad took home a Commodore 64 almost 25 years ago, and I immediately started hacking it passionately in a few weeks. 50KB RAM and a supernaturally fast 1MHz CPU can do wonders at carving your notions of “code bloat” and “optimization” in stone. My Web debut has been with Mosaic, an Amiga porting of the venerable NCSA browser with no JavaScript interpreter… did you say imprinting?! When I had my first RDBMS experience, injections were almost impossible: SQL statements were embedded in Cobol programs through a pre-compiler and parameters were safely bound to variables. I’d dare say we saw an involution, through Visual Basic to Web scripting, and only recently the
mainstream (the PHP/MySQL crowd) is red discovering prepared statements and parameter binding, which have always been there, e.g. in JDBC.

Q: Firefox 3 will bring us… please complete the sentence

A: It depends on who’s “us”.

• Users: brand new bookmarking, tagging and rating system (Places), malware blocking (Google-powered blacklist, no less!), disconnected web applications, cross-session resumable downloads, UI to disable plugins
• Chrome developers: simplified JavaScript API (FUEL), site-specific preferences, reliable SQL storage (it’s already here, but now we can stop worrying about legacy compatibility)
• Content developers: offline persistence, better SVG, CSS3 and ACID test compatibility, many HTML5 features
• Black hat folks: offline persistence, better SVG, CSS3 and ACID test compatibility, many HTML5 features
• White hat folks: lots of fun!

Q: What would you forbid if you had the chance

A:

• Stupidity
• Corporate greed
• Globalized exploitation (and no, I don’t mean a PHP attack involving superglobals)

Q: The PHPIDS is… please complete the sentence.

A: The Sudoku killer! The new Rubik cube!! Hours and hours of unlimited fun!!! No, really, I believe it’s a very useful project and a great first line defense against generalized attacks, e.g. those targeting popular CMS packages like Joomla or Wordpress whose quality is not entirely under your control. Blacklist-based filters cannot replace good coding practices, and a really motivated and skilled enough attacker can always find a way around sooner or later, but if your sysadmin is attentive and your developers know their stuff, PHPIDS is surely a precious tool to detect suspicious activity and harden your walls before it’s too late.

Q: Thanks a lot for the interview, Giorgio!

It’s not that long ago that we released PHPIDS 0.4 but nevertheless this release brings some very interesting new features you may like. To make things short – here’s a list:

• Getter and setter methods for the config array
• Several completely reworked rules – thanks to the heavy testing in the PHPIDS Group
• Way less false alerts, more true ones with fewer rules
• A pretty new feature called ‘PHPIDS Centrifuge BETA’
• More tests and better coverage
• Simplification of the settings for the Caching features
• Several minor bug fixes

The PHPIDS Centrifuge BETA is basically a new method in the Converter class which is able to detect unknown attack patterns not covered by the rules yet. This is performed via acting on incoming and suspicious string like a centrifuge- stripping all uninteresting characters, normalizing some others and finally having a result that is very short and reflects around 75% to 85% of the attack vectors we tried during testing – and we tried a bunch of. We are still testing and enhancing that feature so the minimum amount of chars for a string to be mangled by the Centrifuge is set to 80. Thanks Martin and Gareth for your help with the testing.

Furthermore many users requested the possibility to have a setter for the config array inside the Init object. This is also included in this release and opens the 0.5 sprint we named ‘Usability & Scalability’.

We hope as always that you like this release and thank you for your support. You will find the download packages here.

This time we talk to a guy who approached in the group a while ago and submitted tremendously obfuscated JavaScript vectors and pointed out important flaws in the recent rule revisions. Since he came up with vectors containing characters like ‘ä’ and ‘ö’ we were pretty sure is from Europe – now we know more. Here’s what xorrer has to say:

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself!

A: I’m a software engineering student at the Vienna University of Technology. Currently I’m working for a small company on their web shop. I like to listen to all kinds of music, my all time favorites are The Doors.

Q: How did you come to webappsec

A: To be honest, a few weeks ago I wasn’t at all into webappsec. I guess I was reading/researching some stuff for work when I came across some RSS-feed about XSS. After a little research, a few other feeds (e.g RSnake’s XSS cheat sheet) I was into it. Since then I read a lot about PHP Security, SQLI, XSS, you name it. And with this entry I got to the PHPIDS project.

Q: What do you think about JavaScript – especially at the moment

A: That’s a funny question, as before writing some vectors for PHPIDS I never really did anything in JavaScript. Now after some fiddling around, while testing PHPIDS, I think that JavaScript is the ultimate web security nightmare. As Gareth already stated “Javascript: The ultimate hacking tool“. There is just way too much you can do with it and nowadays you can’t even turn it off in your browser, as there are many sites out there which won’t work without (Ajax, jQuery, Dojo, …).

Q: You’re hat is… please complete the sentence!

A: White. Responsible disclosure is the way to go. There are just too many script kiddies and other people out there for full disclosure.

Q: How would you imagine webappsec in five years?

A: I guess that for some years to come the situation will remain basically the same. The protections are just inferior to the attacks. And this won’t change so easily, as long as no company really gives (or even knows they should give) a thing about web security. Everyday there gets launched a new service and a new technology and in that rate there will be new un-thought of vulnerabilities and new attacks waiting.

Q: The PHPIDS is… please complete the sentence!

A: A good weapon for the first row of defense. It’s build by people who know what they are doing and tested by experts on the field of web application security.

Q: Thanks a lot for the interview!

Today we are talking to thornmaker. He is relatively new to the group and managed to evade the filter rules several times with JavaScript concatenation vectors – which can be described as very sophisticated and clearly near the edge of readability. You can take a look at his work here and here.

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself

A: I am David Lindsay (thornmaker). I am happily employed at Security
Innovation, an application security company based out of Boston, Seattle,
and Amsterdam. While in school I studied pure math (modern algebra, number
theory, topology, and so forth). I am married and became a father 1 year ago
which means a lot of my spare time now is devoted to my little pesky one.
My primary interests right now are web app sec, cryptography, mathematics,
genetics, astronomy, and AI.

Q: How did you get into web technologies and JavaScript

A: After finishing school, I worked in QA for a while testing Java Applications
which is where I became interested in web application security. I have not
had any particular affinity to JavaScript until the last couple of months,
largely thanks to the PHPIDS project.

Q: The hat on your head is usually…

A: …displaying a black and white penguin, with a little bit of yellow on the
beak and feet. Single colored hats are so… bland

Q: What’s the biggest current problem in webappsec

A: Not enough companies taking web app sec (or even security in general)
seriously in the first place.

Q: The PHPIDS is a … please complete the sentence

A: …an excellent project and also a good example of why you can’t rely upon
blacklisting to prevent XSS. I actually only started to look at the project
itself a couple of days ago. My primary interest in the project all along
has been in bypassing the filters simply because I find it a difficult and
rewarding challenge. To that end, thank you for your vigilant attention to
keeping the filters updated!

Thanks a lot for the interview!

After several weeks of work, dozens of sleepless nights, discussions and coding sessions we finally present you the brand new version 0.4 of the PHPIDS. We implemented a whole bunch of new and useful features which improve the PHPIDS in several ways.

First of all you will never have to edit the sources of the PHPIDS core files if you want to configure a certain value – because now theres a Config.ini. This file allows you to configure all important settings in a usable and flexible way. The download package ships a version which you most probably can use out of the box – but make sure the file isn’t located inside the web-root on accident.

Furthermore the PHPIDS now provides an advanced caching interface – be it file caching, database caching, session caching use only if you know exactly what you do) or even memcache caching. As well as all other settings you can chose your favorite caching type in the Config.ini. Our benchmarks resulted in performance boosts between 30% and 45% – depending on the caching type.

Of course we did some major improvements to the filter rules and the conversion algorithms – after a nerve grinding contest in the PHPIDS group we are now more than content with the current rule set. Especially when facing the fact that we reduced the number of rules and straightened up the existing ones.

With all the new features we had to change the API slightly – so be aware when upgrading. The example.php and the FAQ should help you with this – altogether just a small handful of lines have to be changed when upgrading from 0.3.x to 0.4. You will also find a complete generated documentation in the docs folder that might help you on this and other issues if necessary.

Download PHPIDS 0.4

The PHPIDS Team would like to thank all contributors – especially the guys who managed to circumvent the rules the last weeks with more than sophisticated vectors and helped us to improve the rues. Same goes for the guys from Zend.com which helped us with advice and field tests.

We hope you like the new release – if any further questions pop up don’t hesitate to contact us!

Today we talk to Kishor Datar. He joined the PHPIDS Team pretty early and since then provided great help on improving the filter rules, writing tools to test the quality of the PHPIDS.

Kishor is well known in the webappsec scene and maintains an interesting blog about security in general. He is furthermore the author of the XSS in eXceSS tool which is a number one reference for developers who want to get in touch with XSS.

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself

A: Shorter version of my name is Kishor Datar. I am a Masters student at University of Maryland Baltimore County. Well I just have about two years of experience in software industry. I know (rather knew) Indian Classical Music a little bit. And I try to learn guitar on my own.

Q: how did you get involved in webappsec

A: I had developed a web app firewall as my undergrad project. It was based on regexes like PHPIDS is. But it wasn’t perfect if I may say. In fact I knew nothing about XSS back then. So we had very simple rules that blocked script tags and some more things. Also since we built the proxy ourselves, we didn’t handle most of the other things like encoding etc. Then I worked with a company that built web security scanner for two years. There I learned more about web security. About one year back I started blogging. So I am relatively new to web app sec.

Q: what color is your hat usually and why

A: White hat. Unless the issue is very trivial I don’t like to go for full disclosure.

Q: where do you see webappsec in let’s say 5 years

A: After five years, collaboration between web apps will increase further. They will become more and more flexible. Therefore security will be an important goal in web app development cycle. And therefore web app sec will also maintain its importance.

Q: what do you think of the PHPIDS and related projects

A: Since the time I started blogging and getting involved in web sec community, I have seen people talking about only the problems (IMO). They either talked about how to exploit something or tools that found security holes for you. They rarely talked about the solutions. PHPIDS I feel is different than these projects. Because it actually produced something useful. I personally learned a lot from it. And I enjoyed decoding the complex vectors that others developed. And the time they take to fix a vector is how much? Just 15 mins? Thats really impressive.

Q: Thanks a lot for the interview!

Some weeks ago a basic plugin was released which enabled PHPIDS support for your Wordpress Blog. Since it has some usability flaws I’ve been planning for some time to make a port of PHPIDS to Wordpress together with David Kierznowski, but I had some initial problems with it. So it took up to today to get the first release done.

WPIDwhat?

The WPIDS offers protection for your Blog from malicious code injections. Any Request considered as malicious is logged into a database for later analysis. You can also set up email notification for attacks with very high impact. The back-end pages of the plugin will notify you if new filter rules are available and you can check a list of latest intrusion attempts.

But the most important feature of the WPIDS is that you can block attackers for some time if they are running wild on your blog. The plugin is built on the 0.3.2 core of the PHPIDS – a version shipped with the coming 0.4 milestone will be released soon.

New features coming soon

• Better design for the ‘Oh-my-god-you-got-blocked’-page
• Better browsing and analysis features for the attack list
• Functionality to clean the database from old records
• … and the feature you’d like have. Drop me a line!

For telling me what needs to be added or changed you can use my WPIDS Forum. If you have any problems with PHPIDS instead or if you discovered a vector which isn’t caught by PHPIDS yet please report to the PHPIDS team – they eat filters for breakfast.

You can download the Software here.

This is the second part of a series of interviews with people from the PHPIDS group. Today we are chatting with Gareth Heyes.

He recently submitted a bunch of concatenation vectors which gave us real headaches and helped a lot to improve the rules and the converter unit. Gareth is pretty well-known in the security scene and created various tools like the CSK and the JSFuzzer

You can get a taste of his work here and here. Have fun reading!

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself?

My name is Gareth Heyes and work for a big insurance firm near Manchester. I spend most of my daily working life developing web applications and learning new programming techniques. I’m always hacking my own stuff and trying to improve my code on a daily basis. My security work is done in my spare time and I often spend many hours in front of a monitor into the early hours of the morning. I’m married, have two dogs and I love playing and watching football when I’m not hacking.

Q: Who are The Spanners?

My mate Jake Smith asked if I wanted to be involved in a community web development blog, the name came from the “span” HTML tag, the original goal was to create a blog to enable designers and programmers to share knowledge. I started to post a lot of security stuff because I was really into doing security research and it expanded from there. I feel a bit guilty for taking over the blog but Jake assures me that he doesn’t mind and enjoys reading my stuff.

Q: You in ten years – looking back at WebAppSec today. What would you say?

I’d say it’s much harder to secure a web site than it was 10 years ago, the browser security model needs to improve because the
attacks are always getting better. The basic browser security model hasn’t changed much and that worries me a great deal, even 10 years ago the same attacks will work now. One thing that hasn’t changed much is vendors, I submitted XSS attacks to AOL, MSN and Altavista 10 years ago and never got a reply!, at the time I didn’t know it was XSS, I just found that I could insert HTML into their search
results.

Q: JavaScript is… please complete the sentence!

The ultimate hacking tool

Q: You spent lots of time in creating supreme vectors to test the PHPIDS – why?

Lots of reasons really, I love the project and the fact that it is open source and the challenge of beating your filters after so many talented people have submitted vectors. Most of all though I was tempted by Sirdarckcat’s post, I love being challenged to do something that people think is difficult or impossible and I suppose that is why I like security research so much.

Q: Thanks a lot for the interview, Gareth!

Today Markus Bierau finished the first release version of PHPIDS-T3 – the Typo3 extension around the PHPIDS. It comes packaged in the typical T3X format and features full backend support with own database table, pagination and maintenance features.

You just need three lines of TypoScript to include the PHPIDS-T3 and you can decide freely if you want to place it on the root page template or on any other given site in your Typo3 application. Its core is based on the not yet released PHPIDS version 0.3.3 and it depends on PHP5 unlike Typo3 4.x – we won’t provide a native implementation suitable for PHP4 here but you can utilize the PHP4IDS for that purpose if you feel like.

Markus will provide support in the PHPIDS Forum if needed. The private alpha of the PHPIDS is being used in production on several high traffic sites already so you can expect a pretty reliable release – also several PHPIDS core members reviewed most parts of the code.

This is the first part of a series of interviews with people from the PHPIDS group. Today we are talking with SirDarckCat who helped us a lot in hardening the PHPIDS against complex XSS attacks. Besides few others he showed us what obfuscated JavaScript really looks like and gave us several headaches when fixing the rules against bis attack vectors which you can see here and here. Have fun reading!

Q: Please tell us a little bit about yourself
A: Well, my name is Eduardo Vela, I’m studying Engineering in Computational Technologies at “Monterrey Institute of Technology and Superior Studies”, I’ve been collaborating with some communities, mainly developing tools, documents, and doing some research in security, on the rest of my free time, I play piano, and hang out.

Q: how did you get involved in webappsec
A: Actually, as a need, I first learned HTML like 6 years ago, then I needed more interactivity, and learned JavaScript, then I needed more security, and learned PHP and mySQL, and that’s where I started breaking things, since then, I’ve been working with war games, and pen-testing, my passion is security-related programming, so all the time I’m doing some exploit, researching some vuln, or making some tool.

Q: what color is your hat usually and why
A: My hat?, well, I am mostly white hat, responsible disclosure is the best way to go, it gave me good results on the past, and helping to secure the applications I use, is not a service I’m giving to the vendor, is a service I’m giving to myself, anyway I have to admit that from time to time, I get involved into some black hat projects, white hat is more self-rewarding, and it’s even more fun.

Q: where do you see webappsec in let’s say 5 years
A: The webappsec industry is still under development, (lets say, we aren’t in beta any more, but the release isn’t very stable), new attacks are still being invented, and new types of vulnerabilities and tools for exploiting them, are under development, (that’s for the bad guys), and also, the research on contra-measures is not so developed, today the attacks are superior to the protections, as I see it, we are on the raise of the industry, and in 5 years it should be on it’s most.

Q: what do you think of the PHPIDS and related projects
A: I’ve needed to deal with Apache’s mod_security and mod_rewrite rules, (and some php-based attack detections scripts, and a lot of really bad filters) that are extremely easy to bypass, they create an illusion of security to admins, that doesn’t really exist, it’s very important to create real tools (created by hackers, not webmasters), and phpids is one of the few that actually gives developers the ability to deal with real attacks.

Q: Thanks a lot for the interview!