Software protection development - A White Hat's Perspective

"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." - Sun Tzu[1]

Introduction-

Remote Control Codes List

How to know your enemy

Software protection development - A White Hat's Perspective

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Knowing your enemy is vital in fighting him effectively. Protection should be learned not just by network defense, but also by using the vulnerability of software and techniques used for malicious intent. As computer attack tools and techniques continue to advance, we will likely see major, life-impacting events in the near future. However, we will generate a much more fetch world, with risk managed down to an acceptable level. To get there, we have to combine Protection into our systems from the start, and escort acceptable Protection testing throughout the software life cycle of the system. One of the most inspiring ways of learning computer Protection is learning and analyzing from the perspective of the attacker. A hacker or a programming cracker uses discrete ready software applications and tools to analyze and study weaknesses in network and software Protection flaws and exploit them. Exploiting the software is exactly what it sounds like, taking benefit of some bug or flaw and redesigning it to make it work for their advantage.

Similarly, your personal sensitive data could be very useful to criminals. These attackers might be looking for sensitive data to use in identity theft or other fraud, a convenient way to launder money, data useful in their criminal business endeavors, or ideas way for other nefarious purposes. One of the most leading stories of the past combine of years has been the rush of organized crime into the computer attacking business. They make use of business processes to make money in computer attacks. This type of crime can be very lucrative to those who might steal and sell credit card numbers, commit identity theft, or even extort money from a target under threat of DoS flood. Further, if the attackers cover their tracks carefully, the possibilities of going to jail are far lower for computer crimes than for many types of corporeal crimes. Finally, by operating from an overseas base, from a country with petite or no legal framework regarding computer crime prosecution, attackers can control with virtual impunity [1].

Current Security

Assessing the vulnerabilities of software is the key to improving the current Protection within a ideas or application. Developing such a vulnerability diagnosis should take into notice any holes in the software that could carry out a threat. This process should highlight points of infirmity and support in the construction of a framework for subsequent diagnosis and countermeasures. The Protection we have in place today along with firewalls, counterattack software, Ip blockers, network analyzers, virus Protection and scanning, encryption, user profiles and password keys. Elaborating the attacks on these basic functionalities for the software and the computer ideas that hosts it is leading to making software and systems stronger.

You may have a task which requires a client-host module which, in many instances, is the starting point from which a ideas is compromised. Also comprehension the framework you're utilizing, which includes the kernel, is imperative for preventing an attack. A stack overflow is a function which is called in a program and accesses the stack to fetch leading data such as local variables, arguments for the function, the return address, the order of operations within a structure, and the compiler being used. If you fetch this data you may exploit it to overwrite the input parameters on the stack which is meant to furnish a different result. This may be useful to the hacker which wants to fetch any data that may grant them way to a person's inventory or for something like an Sql injection into your company's database. Another way to get the same result without knowing the size of the buffer is called a heap overflow which utilizes the dynamically allocated buffers that are meant to be used when the size of the data is not known and reserves memory when allocated.

We already know a petite bit about integer overflows (or should at least) and so we Integer overflows are basically variables that are prone to overflows by means of inverting the bits to report a negative value. Although this sounds good, the integers themselves are dramatically changed which could be useful to the attackers needs such as causing a denial of aid attack. I'm implicated that if engineers and developers do not check for overflows such as these, it could mean errors resulting in overwriting some part of the memory. This would imply that if anyone in memory is accessible it could shut down their entire ideas and leave it vulnerable later down the road.

Format string vulnerabilities are authentically the result of poor attentiveness to code from the programmers who write it. If written with the format parameter such as "%x" then it returns the hexadecimal contents of the stack if the programmer decided to leave the parameters as "printf(string);" or something similar. There are many other testing tools and techniques that are utilized in testing the compose of frameworks and applications such as "fuzzing" which can preclude these kinds of exploits by looking where the holes lie.

In order to exploit these software flaws it implies, in approximately any case, supplying bad input to the software so it acts in a inescapable way which it was not intended or expected to. Bad input can furnish many types of returned data and effects in the software logic which can be reproduced by learning the input flaws. In most cases this involves overwriting customary values in memory whether it is data handling or code injection. Tcp/Ip (transfer control protocol/internet protocol) and any linked protocols are incredibly flexible and can be used for all kinds of applications. However, the possible compose of Tcp/Ip offers many opportunities for attackers to undermine the protocol, causing all sorts of problems with our computer systems. By undermining Tcp/Ip and other ports, attackers can violate the confidentiality of our sensitive data, alter the data to undermine its integrity, pretend to be other users and systems, and even crash our machines with DoS attacks. Many attackers routinely exploit the vulnerabilities of customary Tcp/Ip to gain way to sensitive systems colse to the globe with malicious intent.

Hackers today have come to understand operating frameworks and Protection vulnerabilities within the operating structure itself. Windows, Linux and Unix programming has been openly exploited for their flaws by means of viruses, worms or Trojan attacks. After gaining way to a target machine, attackers want to avow that access. They use Trojan horses, backdoors, and root-kits to achieve this goal. Just because operating environments may be vulnerable to attacks doesn't mean your ideas has to be as well. With the new expanding of integrated Protection in operating systems like Windows Vista, or for the open source rule of Linux, you will have no trouble maintaining effective Protection profiles.

Finally I want discuss what kind of technology were looking to authentically hack the hacker, so to speak. More recently a Protection expert named Joel Eriksson showcased his application which infiltrates the hackers attack to use against them.

Wired report on the Rsa convention with Joel Eriksson:

"Eriksson, a researcher at the Swedish Protection firm Bitsec, uses reverse-engineering tools to find remotely exploitable Protection holes in hacking software. In particular, he targets the client-side applications intruders use to control Trojan horses from afar, looking vulnerabilities that would let him upload his own rogue software to intruders' machines." [7]

Hackers, particularly in china, use a program called Pcshare to hack their victim's machines and upload's or downloads files. The program Eriksson developed called Rat (remote management tools) which infiltrates the programs bug which the writers most likely overlooked or didn't think to encrypt. This bug is a module that allows the program to display the download time and upload time for files. The hole was adequate for Eriksson to write files under the user's ideas and even control the server's autostart directory. Not only can this technique be used on Pcshare but also a discrete estimate of botnet's as well. New software like this is coming out daily and it will be useful for your business to know what kinds will help fight the interceptor.

Mitigation Process and Review

Software engineering practices for ability and integrity include the software Protection framework patterns that will be used. "Confidentiality, integrity, and availability have overlapping concerns, so when you partition Protection patterns using these concepts as classification parameters, many patterns fall into the overlapping regions" [3]. Among these Protection domains there are other areas of high pattern density which includes distributive computing, fault tolerance and management, process and organizational structuring. These subject areas are adequate to make a unblemished procedure on patterns in software compose [3].

We must also focus on the context of the application which is where the pattern is applied and the stakeholders view and protocols that they want to serve. The threat models such as Cia model (confidentiality, integrity and availability) will define the problem domain for the threats and classifications behind the patterns used under the Cia model. Such classifications are defined under the Defense in Depth, Minefield and Grey Hats techniques.

The tabular classification project in Protection patterns, defines the classification based on their domain concepts which fails to inventory for more of the general patterns which span complicated categories. What they tried to do in classifying patterns was to base the problems on what needs to be solved. They partitioned the Protection pattern problem space using the threat model in particular to distinguish the scope. A classification process based on threat models is more perceptive because it uses the Protection problems that patterns solve. An example of these threat models is Stride. Saunter is an acronym containing the following concepts:

Spoofing: An effort to gain way to a ideas using a forged identity. A compromised ideas would give an unauthorized user way to sensitive data.

Tampering: Data corruption while network communication, where the data's integrity is threatened.

Repudiation: A user's refusal to rejoinder participation in a transaction.

Information Disclosure: The unwanted exposure and loss of incommunicable data's confidentiality.

Denial of service: An attack on ideas availability.

Elevation of Privilege: An effort to raise the privilege level by exploiting some vulnerability, where a resource's confidentiality, integrity, and availability are threatened. [3]

What this threat model covers can be discussed using the following four patterns: Defense in Depth, Minefield, procedure promulgation Point, and Grey Hats. Despite this all patterns belong to complicated groups one way or Another because classifying abstract threats would prove difficult. The Ieee classification in their classification hierarchy is a tree which represents nodes on the basis of domain exact verbatim. Pattern navigation will be easier and more meaningful if you use it in this format. The classification project based off of the Saunter model alone is limited, but only because patterns that address complicated concepts can't be classified using a two-dimensional schema. The hierarchical project shows not only the leaf nodes which display the patterns but also complicated threats that affect them. The internal nodes are in the higher base level which will find complicated threats that all the dependent level is affected by. Threat patterns at the tree's root apply to complicated contexts which consist of the core, the perimeter, and the exterior. Patterns that are more basic, such as Defense in Depth, reside at the classification hierarchy's top level because they apply to all contexts. Using network tools you will be able to find these threat concepts such as spoofing, intrusion tampering, repudiation, DoS, and fetch pre-forking, will allow the developer team to pinpoint the areas of Protection infirmity in the areas of core, perimeter and exterior security.

Defense against kernel made root-kits should keep attackers from gaining menagerial way in the first place by applying ideas patches. Tools for Linux, Unix and Windows look for anomalies introduced on a ideas by discrete users and kernel root-kits. But although a perfectly implemented and perfectly installed kernel root-kit can dodge a file integrity checker, trustworthy scanning tools should be useful because they can find very subtle mistakes made by an attacker that a human might miss. Also Linux software provides useful tools for incident response and forensics. For example some tools returns outputs that you can be trusted more than user and kernel-mode root-kits.

Logs that have been tampered with are less than useless for investigative purposes, and conducting a forensic investigation without logging checks is like cake without the frosting. To condense any system, a high estimate of attentiveness will be needed in order to defend a given system's log which will depend on the sensitivity of the server. Computers on the net that include sensitive data will wish a great estimate of care to protect. For some systems on an intranet, logging might be less imperative. However, for vitally leading systems containing sensitive data about human resources, legality issues, as well as mergers and acquisitions, the logs would make or break protecting your company's confidentiality. Detecting an attack and looking evidence that digital forensics use is vital for construction a case against the intruder. So encrypt those logs, the great the encryption, the less likely they will ever be tampered with.

Fuzz Protocols

Protocol Fuzzing is a software testing technique that which automatically generates, then submits, random or sequential data to discrete areas of an application in an effort to locate Protection vulnerabilities. It is more commonly used to eye Protection weaknesses in applications and protocols which handle data vehicle to and from the client and host. The basic idea is to attach the inputs of a program to a source of random or unexpected data. If the program fails (for example, by crashing, or by failing in-built code assertions), then there are defects to correct. These kind of fuzzing techniques were first developed by Professor Barton Miller and his company [5]. It was intended to change the mentality from being too inescapable of one's technical knowledge, to authentically query the conventional wisdom behind security.

Luiz Edwardo on protocol fuzzing:

"Most of the time, when the perception of Protection doesn't match the reality of security, it's because the perception of the risk does not match the reality of the risk. We worry about the wrong things: paying too much attentiveness to minor risks and not adequate attentiveness to major ones. We don't correctly correlate the magnitude of different risks. A lot of this can be chalked up to bad data or bad mathematics, but there are some general diagnosis that come up over and over again" [6].

With the mainstream of fuzzing, we have seen numerous bugs in a ideas which has made national or even international news. Attackers have a list of contacts, a handful of Ip addresses for your network, and a list of domain names. Using a variety of scanning techniques, the attackers have now gained vital data about the target network, along with a list of phone numbers with modems (more obsolete but still viable), a group of wireless way points, addresses of live hosts, network topology, open ports, and firewall rule sets. The attacker has even gathered a list of vulnerabilities found on your network, all the while trying to evade detection. At this point, the attackers are poised for the kill, ready to take over systems on your network. This increase in fuzzing has shown that delivering the product/service software using basic testing practices are no longer acceptable. Because the internet provides so many protocol breaking tools, it is very likely that an intruder will break your company's protocol on all levels of its structure, semantics and protocol states. So in the end, if you do not fuzz it man else will. Session based, and even state based, fuzzing practices have been used to compose the connections using the state level of a session to find great fault isolation. But the real challenge behind fuzzing is doing these techniques then isolating the fault environment, the bugs, protocols implementation and the monitoring of the environment.

Systems Integrations

There are three levels of systems integration the developer must consider for security. The software developer must consider the entire mitigation communicate of the software flaw and base it on the compose implementation. This includes way control, intrusion detection and the trade-offs for the implementation. Integrating these controls into the ideas is leading in the implementation stage of development. Attacks on these systems may even lead to severe Protection and financial effects. Securing computer systems has become a very leading part of ideas amelioration and deployment.

Since we cannot fully take away the threats, we must minimize their impact instead. This can be made possible by creating an comprehension of human and technical issues involved in such attacks. This knowledge can allow an engineer or developer make the intruder's life as hard as possible. This makes the challenge even greater in comprehension the attacker's motivations and skill level. Think of it as infiltrating the hackers head by mental like them psychologically.

Access Control

Even if you have implemented all of the controls you can think of there are a variety of other Protection lockdowns that must continually be supplemented to constant attacks against a system. You might apply Protection patches, use a file integrity checking tool, and have adequate logging, but have you recently looked for unsecured modems, or how about activating Protection on the ports or on the switches in your vital network segments to preclude the latest sniffing attack? Have you carefully implementing non-executable stacks to preclude one of the most coarse types of attacks today, the stack-based buffer overflow? You should always be ready for kernel-level root-kits with any of these other attacks which imply the attacker has the ability of taking you out of command of your system.

Password attacks are very coarse in exploiting software authorization protocols. Attackers often try to guess passwords for systems to gain way whether by hand or straight through using scripts that are generated. Password cracking will involve taking the encrypted or hashed passwords from a ideas cache or registry and using an automatic tool to resolve the customary passwords. Password cracking tools generate password guesses, encrypt or hash the guesses, and correlate the result with the encrypted or hashed password so long as you have the encryption file to correlate the results. The password guesses can come from a dictionary scanner, brute force routines, or hybrid techniques. This is why way controls must protect human, corporeal and intellectual assets against loss, damage or compromise by permitting or denying entry into, within and from the protected area. The controls will also deny or grant way rights and the time thereof of the protected area. The way controls are operated by human resources using corporeal and/or electronic hardware in accordance with the policies. To defend against password attacks, you must have a strong password procedure that requires users to have nontrivial passwords. You must make users aware of the policy, hire password filtering software, and periodically crack your own users passwords (with acceptable permission from management) to inflict the policy. You might also want to consider authentication tools stronger than passwords, such as Pki authentication, hardware tokens or auditing software [1].

But despite this, Another developer might be interested in authenticating only. This user would first generate minimal way points where the authenticator pattern will inflict authentication policies. The subject descriptor will define the data used to grant or deny the authentication decision. A password synchronizer pattern performs distributed password management. Authenticator and password synchronizer are not directly related. The users will need to apply other patterns after authenticator before they could use a password synchronizer.

Intrusion Detection

Intrusion detection is used for monitoring and logging the activity of Protection risks. A functioning network intrusion detection ideas should indicate that man has found the doors, but nobody has authentically tried to open them yet. This will eye inbound and outbound network activity and identify patterns used that may indicate a network or ideas attack from man attempting to compromise the system. In detecting the misuse of the ideas the protocols used, such as scanners, analyzes the data it gathers and compares it to large databases of attack signatures it provides. In essence, the Protection detection looks for a exact attack that has already been documented. Like a virus detection system, the detection ideas is only as good as the index of attack signatures that it uses to correlate packets against. In anomaly detection, the ideas administrator defines the general state of the network's traffic breakdown, load, protocols, and typical packet size. Anomaly detection of segments is used to correlate their current state to the general state and look for anomalies. Designing the intrusion detection must also put into account, and detect, malicious packets that are meant to be overlooked by a generic firewall's basic filtering rules. In a host based system, the detection ideas should eye the activity on each individual computer or host. As long as you are securing the environment and authorizing transactions, then intrusion detection should pick up no activity from a flaw in the system's data flow.

Trade-Offs

Trade-offs of the implementation must also be taken into notice when developing these controls and detection software. The developer must also consider the severity of the risk, the probability of the risk, the magnitude of the costs, how effective the countermeasure is at mitigating the risk and how well disparate risks and costs can be analyzed at this level, despite the fact that risks diagnosis was complete, because actual changes must be carefully and the Protection estimation must be reassessed straight through this process. The one area that can cause the feeling of Protection to diverge from the reality of Protection is the idea of risk itself. If we get the severity of the risk wrong, we're going to get the trade-off wrong, which cannot happen at a vital level. We can do this to find out the implications in two ways. First, we can underestimate risks, like the risk of an automobile crisis on your way to work. Second, we can overestimate some risks, such as the risk of some guy you know, stalking you or your family. When we overestimate and when we underestimate is governed by a few exact heuristics. One heuristic area is the idea that "bad Protection trade-offs is probability. If we get the probability wrong, we get the trade-off wrong" [6]. These heuristics are not exact to risk, but contribute to bad evaluations of risk. And as humans, our ability to fast correlate and spit out some probability in our brains runs into all sorts of problems. When we compose ourselves to correctly analyze a Protection issue, it becomes mere statistics. But when it comes down to it, we still need to outline out the threat of the risk which can be found when "listing five areas where perception can diverge from reality:"

-The severity of the risk.

-The probability of the risk.

-The magnitude of the costs.

-How effective the countermeasure is at mitigating the risk.

-The trade-off itself [6].

To think a ideas is fully fetch is absurd and illogical at best unless hardware Protection was more widespread. Feeling of the word and reality of Protection are different, but they're closely related. We try our best Protection trade-offs inspecting the perception noted. And what I mean by that is that it gives us genuine Protection for a inexpensive cost and when our actual feeling of Protection matches the reality of security. It is when the two are out of alignment that we get Protection wrong. We are also not adept at making coherent Protection trade-offs, especially in the context of a lot of ancillary data which is designed to persuade us in one direction or another. But when we reach the goal of unblemished lockdown on Protection protocol that is when you know the estimation was well worth the effort.

Physical Security

Physical Protection is any data that may be available, and used in order to gain exact data about business linked data which may include documentation, personal information, assets and habitancy susceptible to public engineering.

In its most widely practiced form, public engineering involves an attacker using employees at the target society on the phone and exploiting them into revealing sensitive information. The most frustrating aspect of public engineering attacks for Protection professionals is that they are nearly always successful. By pretending to be Another employee, a customer, or a supplier, the attacker attempts to manipulate the target man into divulging some of the organization's secrets. public engineering is deception, pure and simple. The techniques used by public engineers are often linked with computer attacks, most likely because of the fancy term "social engineering" applied to the techniques when used in computer intrusions. However, scam artists, incommunicable investigators, law enforcement, and even carefully sales habitancy hire virtually the same techniques every particular day.

Use public and incommunicable organizations to help with staffed Protection in and colse to involved parameters also setup alarms on all doors, windows, and ceiling ducts. Make a clear statement to employees about assign clear roles and responsibilities for engineers, employees, and habitancy in construction maintenance and staff that they must always have authorization before they can disclose any corporate data information. They must make vital contacts and ongoing transportation throughout a software product and disclosure of documentation. Mobile resources must be given to employees that tour and there should be installed on their Mobile devices the spoton Protection protocols for communicating back and forth from a web connection. The business must use local, state, and remote facilities to backup data or use services for extra Protection and Protection of data resources. Such extra Protection could include guard of business waste so it is not susceptible to dumpster diving. Not to say an assailant might be looking for your yesterday's lunch but will more likely be looking for shredded paper, other leading memo's or business reports you want to keep confidential.

Dumpster diving is a difference on corporeal break-in that involves rifling straight through an organization's trash to look for sensitive information. Attackers use dumpster diving to find discarded paper, Cds, Dvds, floppy disks (more obsolete but still viable), tapes, and hard drives containing sensitive data. In the computer underground, dumpster diving is sometimes referred to as trashing, and it can be a smelly affair. In the massive trash receptacle behind your building, an attacker might eye a unblemished diagram of your network architecture, or an worker might have carelessly tossed out a sticky note with a user Id and password. Although it may seem disgusting in most respects, a good dumpster diver can often retrieve informational gold from an organization's waste [1].

Conclusion

Security amelioration involves the right notice of business value and trust. With the world as it exists today, we understand that the response to electronic attacks is not as lenient as they should be but none the less unavoidable. expert criminals, hired guns, and even insiders, to name just a few of the threats we face today, cannot be compared to the pimply teen hacker sitting at his computer ready to initiate his/her latest attacks at your system. Their motivations can include revenge, monetary gain, curiosity, or coarse pettiness to attract attentiveness or to feel terminated in some way. Their skill levels range from the straightforward script kiddies using tools that they do not understand, to elite masters who know the technology great than their victims and perhaps even the vendors themselves.

The media, in retrospect, has made it a inescapable point that the threat of digital terrorism is in the golden age of computer hacking. As we load more of our lives and society onto networked computers, attacks have become more prevalent and damaging. But do not get discouraged by the estimate and power of computer tools that harm your system, as we also live in the golden age of data security. The defenses implemented and maintained are definitely what you need. Although they are often not easy, they do add a good deal of job Protection for effective ideas administrators, network managers, and Protection personnel. Computer attackers are excellent in sharing and disclosing data with each other about how to attack your specified infrastructure. Their efficiency on data distribution regarding infiltrating their victims can be ruthless and brutal. Implementing and maintaining a widespread Protection program is not trivial. But do not get discouraged, we live in very inspiring times, with technologies advancing rapidly, contribution great opportunities for learning and growing.

If the technology itself is not inspiring enough, just think of the great job Protection given to ideas administrators, Protection analyzers, and network managers who has knowledgeable feel on how to fetch their systems properly. But also keep in mind that by staying diligent, you authentically can defend your data and systems while having a inspiring and inspiring job to give you more experience. To keep up with the attackers and defend our systems, we must understand their techniques. We must help ideas administrators, Protection personnel, and network administrators defend their computer systems against attack. Attackers come from all walks of life and have a variety of motivations and skill levels. Make sure you accurately correlate the threat against your society and deploy defenses that match the threat and the value of the assets you must protect. And we have to all be aware that we should never underestimate the power of the hacker who has adequate time, patience and knowhow to achieve anyone they put their minds to. So it is your duty to do the same.

Software protection development - A White Hat's Perspective