SecurityResearch-101

Hi Readers, today we will learn about another interesting part of Penetration Testing, this revolves around Security assessments of web services. To start with let’s take a look at what web services are made of: A web service is software composed of standardized XML messaging system. The benefit of web services are since all of its communication is in XML, they are not restricted to any  operating system or programming languages They are built on Web services are built on top of open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP, Java, HTML, and XML. Anatomy of Web Services In simple language, any basic web services platform is a combination of XML and HTTP. They can be of: ·          SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) ·          UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) ·          WSDL (Web Services Description Language) How does a Web Service Work Web services depends on •             XML to tag the data ( as markup and syntax) •    

Hi Readers, in the field of penetration testing, we all know attacks such as Clickjacking, Cross Site Scripting etc. These are attacks from most  OWASP Top 10 test cases. Today we will look into some advanced attack vectors which have been lately around sometime but not all are aware of. Pastejacking. The art of changing what you copy from web pages. What is pastejacking? • Pastejacking is a method that malicious websites employ to take control of your computers’ clipboard and change its content to something harmful without your knowledge. • This feature can allow malicious websites to take over your computers’ clipboard. • When you copy something and paste it to your clipboard, the website can run one or more commands using your browser. • The method can be used to change the Clipboard contents. • If you paste something directly to the Terminals!? Result: Lethal Commands Executed To avoid paste jacking: • Windows users need to check what is placed into your compu

I2P Intro: According to Wikipedia, The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is an anonymous network layer that allows for  peer to peer communication via encrypting the user’s traffic and sending it through a volunteer-run network of roughly 55,000 computers distributed around the world. The software that implements this layer is called an “I2P router” and a computer running I2P is called an “I2P node“. I2P is free and open source. I2P can be run both on Pc as well as android, here is a screeshot of I2P running on android device. Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:I2PAndroid-console-0.9.20.png While tor lets you being anonymous and open sites hosted either publicly or dark sites ( with .onion) I2P’s focus on the other hand is creating its own internal internet is that the network isn’t accessible from a regular computer. By installing the requisite I2P software, your computer can join I2P and begin routing traffic, just like a Tor middle relay as it creates d

Curiosity towards hidden and unknown things is natural to people. For the general folks, Internet is existence of websites indexed via popular search engines like Google, however the Deep Dark web is beyond the traditional search engines which are hidden and inaccessible through standard web browsers. It is an interesting fact to know that hardly only 4% of the internet is visible to the common people. That makes 96% of the internet is made up of “The Deep Web”! The Deep Web hosts the “Dark Web,” a series of networks called “darknets” that overlay the public Internet but require specific software or authorization to access. As users can operate Darknets anonymously, it’s not hard to guess that these are the abode of various criminal activities. In fact, Darknet hosts a worldwide marketplace of illicit goods and services. Top darkweb searches include child pornography followed by drug dealing, software hacking, currency counterfeit, stolen information from sensitive sources, w

For carrying out penetration testing assessments, our main aim has been to resolve the actual domain to the loopback IP address, by adding an entry to the hosts file. Let us know consider a situation where the thick Client application does not send the request to a domain or a host name, then what happens? We are stuck since it becomes impossible to make a host file entry. Consider a thick client url like http://172.32.23.23:891/login. It cannot be mapped in hosts file without a valid pointing domain. So lets do a workaround via configuring burp with the concept of Microsoft Loopback Adapter. Prerequisites: Two machines residing in the same network ,both having Burp Suite tool running One machine (the testing machine) should have Microsoft Loopback Adapter configured. The second machine acts as a gateway that forwards the requests to the internet. The loopback adapter helps deceiving the local machine. In absence of a real domain, all the application req

WPA2 Krack in a nutshell While its raging all over , lets see in what the finding is all about? KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack) is a replay attack discovered in 2016 by Belgian researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Frank Piessens. The details were published in October 2017. 1. Where exactly is KRACK exploiting wireless networks? WPA2 protocol offers a "four-way handshake." In simple words, the 4-way handshake determines whether a user attempting to join a network and the access point offering the network have matching credentials. By repeatedly resetting the nonce transmitted in the third step of the WPA2 handshake, an attacker can gradually match encrypted packets seen before and learn the full keychain used to encrypt the traffic. 2. How does it become vulnerable? The four-way handshake generates a new encryption key ( the third communication in the four way handshake) 3. Enter the "Key Reinstallation Attack" At this juncture, a hacker can tamper/

Static Analysis/ Reverse Engineering for Thick Clients Penetration Testing 4 Hi Readers, let’s take a look into static analysis. The advantage which thick clients offer over web applications are the ability to inspect the code and perform code level fuzzing which is more interesting for me! How to inspect code at a static level? There are many test cases which aid us to perform static analysis. Some of these include:    1  1)       Memory Level Protection Checks ( DEP / ASLR) 2  2)       String based analysis to find information 3  3)       Configuration File checks 4  4)       Memory inspection to find hardcoded passwords 5  5)       Reverse Code Level Logic to bypass checks/ licences 1.        To check memory level protections , we can use the free system internals suite by Microsoft ( https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/sysinternals-suite ) Once you download the above suite, there are multiple tools available out in to play with. Let’s launch a sample applic