Happy new year. Planning your diary already? Looking for the best European conference for information about application security?

Europe's premier application security conference, AppSec EU, is being held in Athens, Greece, from 10th to 13th July 2012. As in Stockholm two years ago, this event has a research theme, but there will be plenty of practical information, advice and application security training.

In May I participated in the OWASP Greece chapter Training Day in Athens and was overwhelmed by the level of attendance from the enthusiastic and knowledgeable development community. I am sure the sponsorship opportunities and tickets will be snapped up quickly.

AppSec EU Research 2012 is being hosted by the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens.

Another report from the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) highlights deficiencies in the maritime sector.

The study's report Cyber Security Aspects in the Maritime Sector discusses that while there is increasing knowledge concerning physical security and crew safety, maritime cyber security awareness is low to non-existent. The situation is made worse by fragmented responsibilities, lack of incident information, and missing legislation in this area.

A relatively quick read if you are active in the sector.

Last week, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) announced the publication of two guidance documents relating to Article 13a of the new telecommunications legislation (Directive 2009/140/EC) regarding security incidents and security controls.

I don't often quote legislation here, but I thought it was relatively short and provides the intent behind ENISA's guidance. ENISA has published two documents.

Technical Guideline on Incident Reporting provides guidance on the annual summary of significant issues and the notification of cross-border incidents. While most (all?) readers of this blog won't necessarily work in the telecommunications sector, I think the document is useful more widely for two aspects. It demonstrates the type of reporting which could be required if breach notification becomes a requirement for other sector or types of data (e.g. personal data)in the future. Also, the Section 5 on impact parameters and thresholds provides some insight into the continental and national viewpoint on the effects of security incidents.

The second document Technical Guideline on Minimum Security Measures defines the security controls national regulators need to consider when evaluating public communications networks. These are relatively high-level and are grouped into governance/risk management, human resources security, security of systems and facilities, operations management, incident management, business continuity management, and monitoring, auditing and testing. So a clear mapping to ISO27001/2/5 for information security and risk management, and BS 25999 for business continuity.

This week, the Cloud Security Alliance has announced its new repository of security control self -assessments for cloud computing providers.

The CSA Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) lists providers who have completed and submitted a Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) or Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM) response to indicate their compliance with CSA best practices.

Currently only two providers are listed, but more are in progress. This will be a very helpful resource for those seeking assurance about controls from suppliers, and potentially standardise the way cloud providers publish information about their security practices, simplifying procurement processes. If you are an IaaS, PaaS or SaaS provider, the existing submissions may help your own controls development or completion of an assessment.

There is more information in the detailed FAQ and LinkedIn forum.

The UK's Ministry of Justice published a consultation about the draft Defamation Bill in March 2011.

The Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill was appointed by the House of Commons and the House of Lords in March to examine the Draft Defamation Bill and report to both Houses by 31 October 2011. The report is now available.

Web publishers may want to take note of the suggestions in paragraphs 26 to 30 concerning the protection of freedom of speech. In particular, paragraph 30 notes the need to be able to allow for rapid corrections and apologies, and the potential requirement to be able to attach a notice to the material indicating it has been challenged as libellous.

Also worthy of note may be the recommendations on the single publication rule in paragraphs 58 and 59.

Following the busy Thursday, I returned to the Minneapolis Convention Centre on Friday.

I began the second day of AppSec USA 2011 on the OWASP track, where I was speaking in a session shared with Michael Coates.

Michael described the objectives and current content of the practical OWASP cheat sheet series of documents, which cover the most common web application security issues developers come across and who need accurate, and up-to-date information. The relatively concise cheat sheets are undergoing review, and three further cheat sheets (HTML 5, password storage and web services) are in progress. He also said the full set of cheat sheets are likely to be produced as a single book, as well as being freely accessible on the OWASP wiki (where all these are currently located and available). There was some useful feedback from the audience about the need for another tier of 1-2 page lists/summaries, and that all the cheat sheets should be formatted and structured in an indentical style where possible. Another delegate asked if all the details could be incorporated into the OWASP development guide. And as a last question, one person asked if issues relating to mutual authentication might be addressed.

I then described a different sort of strategy by OWASP, the OWASP Application Security Codes of Conduct project. I adopted these documents which were largely produced during the summit in Portugal earlier this year, to consolidate the work, produce release-quality documents and then promote their adoption. If you remember, these describe what OWASP believes other types of organization could do to support OWASP's mission. While these are aspirational (by OWASP), they do define some minimal normative behaviour, and optional additional recommendations, for government bodies, educational institutions, standards groups, trade organisations and certifying bodies. Excellent feedback from the audience included whether there was a need for prioritised approach for organisations that might fall into two target groups (e.g. educational institution and government body). The audience also asked about the specific requirements for educational institutions and the practicality of achieving them. I will revirew these ideas and post some suggestions to the project's mailing list.

Ryan Stinson provided an introduction to Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC), and how this can be used to help target resources in an implementation agnostic through typical secure software development life cycles (SDLCs). This is easiest when threat modelling is used so that threats can be linked with attacks listed in CAPEC. It provides a way to cross-reference data from different points in the secure SDLC such as requirements, design, development, code review, QA, testing and operations. Switching to Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE), Ryan explained how this describes an overall style of a vulnerability and what challenges developers face relating to these. The taxonomy is extensive and fine-grained. Ryan uses this in his company to link vulnerabilities found during their engagements with the matching CWE issue. This provides additional centralised support resources and demonstrates the relevance to clients.

After a short break, I continued my pursuit of good threat modelling guidance and attended Mike Ware's session on this topic. He explained the need to keep threat modelling simple and described a process built around identifying who, what, where & how, combined with the impact and mitigations. The suggested process needs to involve a range of stakeholders which Mike referred to as the builders (e.g developers, suppliers), gluers (e.g. enterprise architects, CTO, shared service providers), owners (e.g. system, business, data), defenders (e.g. infrastructure, operations), and breakers (e.g. security teams, external penetration testers). The eight-part method includes diagramming the software architecture, enumerating the attack surface, documenting threats, illuminating assets, illuminating trust boundaries, and mitigation. A key take-away was that if you don't have good design information, don't attempt to begin threat modelling.

During lunch Moxie Marlinspike described the problems with trust using the internet, and in particular the difficulty of proving authenticity using SSL. His approachable presentation style won over the audience while he was discussing what might be called a complete failure in the current trust model that relieas on certificate authorities, domain name registrars and top level domain owners. He said that trust agility needs to have the ability for trust decisions to be reversed, and for users to be able to decide where they can place their trust. He described a previous concept called Perspectives but this had problems with completeness, privacy and responsiveness. Moxie went on to discuss his own inititiative called Convergence which could be a new authenticity system for SSL. It uses local caching and notary bounce to avoid the problems Perspectives had, and is designed with future extensibility buit in. There is a plugin for Firefox and this doesn't break the existing model — there is no need for changes on individual (web) servers. I need to check this out further.

After lunch I returned to the software assurance track to attend Adam Meyers' presentation on assessing threats to mobile computing. He described the milestones facilitating the current wave of mobile computing. He said that mobile security concerns relate to all the components (e.g. device, networks operating system, third party applications, browsers & web sites, enterprise applications), limitations (OS API, 3rd party application validation, carrier device authentication, data encryption, mandatory security controls, security updates). He described protections (and lack of) for data at rest, data in motion and voice for each operating system, and the additional personal security concerns, perimeter issues and data ownership concerns relating to mobile computing. Adam went on to explain detection and mitigation concerns due to issues like devices not always remianing on enterprise infrastructure, klack of real auditing for installed applications, difficulty in tracking user behaviour and difficulty in removing malicious code. He then identified the mobile computing attack surface and his most important recommendations for mobile software developers.

Continuing, Charles Schmidt described how to utilise Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP). He said that even if you have an application with no flaws, no weaknesses and no bugs, it's still not secure. This is because deployment and operational management also matter. Perfect engineering makes an application securable, not secure. He said that documentation is a complete guide to an application, whereas guidance is a set of suggestions for how to configure it for specific use cases. The idea is that there can be automated security guidance, in a format that allows automated assessment of meeting these in the actual environment. This can provide the specific deviations to be identified that can then be assessed, and mitigated as necessary. SCAP is an open standard being used by the US government and others, for this automated guidance. The seven components are connected together by SCAP are:

• Common Configuration Enumeration (CCE) for configurable items in software
• Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) for public vulnerabilities in public software
• Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) for identifying software & hardware items
• Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to rank vulnerabilities on its likely danger
• Extensible Configuration Checklist Description Format (XCCDF) defining a standard format for security guidance that allow tailoring structures to customise recommendations and assessments
• Open Vulnerability Assessment Language (OVAL) format to express assertions about system state
• Open Checklist Interactive Language (OCIL) standard format for user questionnaires.

Apart from SCAP's well-known uses for vulnerability management, Charles described a use case for an off-the-shelf software package. The guidance for the application and the underlying infrastructure can be built using XCCDF, with OVAL for the low-lying technical checks and OCIL for the non-technical checks. If it is not a public application, CCE and CPE could be used for further annotation. The software acquirers can then use this for initial configuration and ongoing assessment. In another use case for inventory management, users can use the standardised format to be alerted about rogue installations and outdated versions.

For the final session of the day I returned to the OWASP track to listen to Ryan Barnett discussing how the ModSecurity Core Rule Set can be extended to implement some aspects of detection and response from AppSensor. After a brief introduction to the concepts, his dynamic presentation highlighted the pros and cons of building defense logic external to the application, and then how experimental rules have been created for the CRS for many detection points. There are some ideas there I will need to investigate, and make sure I write up for the next version of the AppSensor book.

The conference closed with a final recap by members of the board and the local organising committee. Vendors' prizes were distributed and thanks given to the volunteer organising team in Minneapolis. Yes, the whole week had been run fantastically well, and I hadn't heard any complaints. With over 540 delegates, that's excellent work. A high standard for Austin TX to follow next year.

The next global OWASP events are AppSec Latin America October 4th-7th in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and AppSec Asia November 8th-11th in Beijing, China. The next European AppSec conference will be held in Athens during July 2012.

All presentations will be available on the OWASP AppSec USA web page.

The first keynote speech at AppSec USA 2011 was given by Mark Curphey, a founder of OWASP.

He described OWASP's beginnings in 2001, how the organisation has grown and become the success story it is today. And that success is completely about the people and its open principles. Despite having contributions from all round the world, he described that connecting people in person together, face-to-face, is critical and thus how important the local chapters, local events and regional conferences are. He included a compilation of short videos from chapters around the world. He also saluted many of the exceptional people involved over ten years, and how he believes the application security community needs to keep instead with the trends in the developer community.

The talks were spread over four parallel tracks. Following the morning break, I attended a talk by Andres Riancho on web application security testing payloads. Andres described the lack of post exploitation techniques available in web penetration testing tools. If these do exist, they are mainly in the area of buffer overflows rather than for web exploits where there is often much reduced capability. He showed how W3AF has been extended to build a number of post exploitation payloads, mainly in Linux/Apache HTTP space. He also demonstrated how a custom payload could be used to download an web site's source code where there is a file read vulnerability, and then with a proof-of-concept static code analysis tool, examine that code to look for additional vulnerabilities that may be exploitable to achieve file write capabilities, and thus file execution. This combination of blackbox penetration testing and static-code analysis is a fascinating and useful concept.

I then attended a presentation on the mobile track by Ryan Smith about a distributed framework for performing large-scale android application security analysis called STAAF (Scalable Tailored App Analysis Framework). He described how there are many Android app analysis tools, but these are mostly designed to analyse a single app at a time. STAAF uses these as modules but has additional efficiency, scalability and data analysis capabilities. Ryan described the low barrier to entry for Android developers and the problem with third-party market places from where some users will download and install apps. The mobile devices treat all the apps the same. For users there is no distinction between core apps and third party applications and they can only make decisions based on trust of the source and the permissions requested. In practice this means malicious apps are widely available and downloaded by unsuspecting users. STAAF was built to scale across multiple servers to process scanning requests with centralised long-term storage and results reporting. Modules include extraction of permission requirements, libraries used, referenced static URLs, methods, manifest and Dex bytecode. Efficiencies are obtained by caching intermediate results, data conversion to ASCII, Smali & Java and storing the control flow graph from the Dex. Additionally common libraries and shared resources are not re-processed every time. The framework is bound by CPU power due to database activity, but it appears to have the potential to scan 50,000 apps in less than 8 hours with a relatively small number of nodes.

Next I listed to Scott Matsumoto's presentation on threat modelling for cloud-based services and applications. Threat modelling can be complex, and therefore I am always interested to hear about different approaches. Scott used the NIST Cloud Definition Framework to describe how Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) affect application design, deployment and operation. He discussed the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 as an example change to an application's architecture to identify the assets, threats and risks of using a cloud-based approach. He described the risks unique to cloud-based applications as well as those that are often very relevant, but are common to other architectures too. There is a related presentation tomorrow, by one of Scott's colleagues, on simplifying threat modelling.

During lunch the OWASP Board described the current healthy status of participation, membership and supporters, chapters, conferences and project activity. Michael Coates is now the new OWASP chair as Jeff Williams steps down after 8 years. The board also announced awards for people who had made special efforts during the previous year,and Michael Coates thanked Jeff Williams for his previous tenure.

After lunch, Dan Cornell described a technique to reduce the exposure time between vulnerability identification to short-term remediation. He explained that when code changes occur, this can lead to vulnerabilities where potential solutions might include web application firewalls, finding all the vulnerabilities and fixing before deployment, or avoiding vulnerabilities in the first place. These all have challenges and problems. His suggested approach for some classes of vulnerability such as injection, is to implement a process to automatically identify new code (e.g. change control processes, file system and network monitoring), analyse this code for vulnerabilities (e.g. using normalised data from manual and automated code review and vulnerability scanning tools) and automatically block traffic that is being targeted to exploit these using virtual patching using IDS/IPS/WAF systems. Once the rules are created, the alerts can be mapped back to the vulnerabilities to provide insight into what attackers have discovered and what they are interested in. These techniques may be of use where you have little or no control over the deployed code, or where it takes a,long time to create and deploy security fixes.

I returned to the mobile track to listen to Kevin Stadmeyer and Garret Held give an information-rich presentation on the security issues relating to iPhone applications, and how to develop these applications more securely. They described the secure storage of credentials and other data, inadvertent local storage, caching, and client-side sanitisation. Following a description of the most common issues, Kevin and Garret defined some secure coding practices to protect against buffer overflows, format string attacks, race conditions, and measures to take server side and to secure communications.

Jon McCoy demonstrated the use of tools and methodologies to verify security in C# .NET applications based on legacy tools and his own research. He used his tool GrayWolf to decompile demonstration executables & DLLs and GrayDragon to attack a test application while running, by modifying the memory. He described that once you have access to the source code, you can examine the protection measures and have much more ability to identify vulnerabilities and thus validate information assurance of deployed code. It is also possible to modify the code or insert calls to your own procedures. For example, he described a range of methods he has used to circumvent cryptographic controls using these tools. He went on to describe measures such as code signing, package encryptors and obfuscation which are used to prevent this reverse engineering, but also described how these techniques can be ineffective or lead to additional vulnerabilities.

The talks continue tomorrow. All presentations will be available on the OWASP AppSec USA web page.

European organisations that are telecoms operators and internet service providers are subject to personal data breach notification under the revised ePrivacy Directive (2009/136/EC) which was passed on 25th May 2011, and is part of the Telecoms Reform package. The European Commission is now consulting stakeholders to gather evidence about existing practices and initial experience of the new rules.

You might wonder if this has any relevance if your organisation is neither a telecoms operator nor internet service provider. Well, personal data breach notification could become more widespread in the future, and therefore I think it is important to get this right as far as possible for the "pioneer" sectors.

The public consultation ePrivacy Directive: Circumstances, Procedures and Formats for Personal Data Breach Notifications as the name suggests is seeking input on three issue areas:

• Circumstances: how organisations comply, or intend to comply, with the new obligation under the telecoms rules; the types of breaches that would trigger the requirement to notify the subscriber or individual, and examples of protection measures that can render data unintelligible
• Procedures: the notification deadline, the means of notification and the procedure for an individual case
• Formats: the contents of the notification to the national authority and to the individual, existing standard formats and the feasibility of a standard EU format.

The information already gathered by ENISA will be very useful here together with the Article 29 Working Group's Opinion 01/2011 (WP 184).

The consultation asks respondents to reply to 28 particular questions which give a good indication of how specific subsequent guidance will be. The majority are aimed at organisations in these two sectors, but the issues of incident handling procedures, technological protection measures to render data unintelligible, speed of response and record keeping have wider applicability. So perhaps there will be some useful information for your own web/system incident response plan.

The consultation closes on 9th September 2011.

Last year I provided help with the definition of information assurance objectives and controls for the systems acquisition and development domain in the Common Assurance Maturity Model (CAMM), a joint-initiative originally created by originally created by European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

My contribution was on behalf of OWASP who were among the many organisations, groups and companies supporting the CAMM initiative. Well, the project has come a long way, and is now a key contributor to the plans to create a global repository of assessments for assurance of the IT supply chain.

At the end of last week, a paper Business Assurance for the 21st Century was published defining the common vision of a single approach for assessments (either self-assessed or independently verified) to make it simpler for organisations to select suppliers and partners based on the coverage and maturity of their information assurance practices. The concept is that the global repository, or "Third Party Assurance Centre", would support a number of assurance frameworks and allow vendors to publish information in a single open format, reducing the need for numerous separate assessments for each potential customer.

All the major assurance frameworks seem to be on board, so this could well achieve a step-forward in transparency, whilst at the same time introducing cost reductions into the market.

Last week at AppSec EU, I gave a talk about OWASP AppSensor project.

(Show Full Size Image, 1203x728px, 98kB)

Following a short introduction to the concept, I sked the audience two questions: do you know if your applications are being attacked right now, and have any unknown vulnerabilities been exploited today? Using three attack test cases, I outlined how conventional defences do not protect applications and why building application-specific security controls within the application code is best. I provided references to the project documentation and video presentation by the project leader Michael Coates, for those who wanted further details. But I wanted to focus on the aspects of AppSensor architectures, application logging and signalling information to other systems such as a live dashboard, to illustrate that implementation need not be a huge challenge, and that by starting simply, this can be a good foundation to gradually build up a more comprehensive approach.

I described how AppSensor detection, logging and analysis could all be located on a single-server system and how this is not so dissimilar to a simple three-tier architecture with no failover. Even in this arrangement it may make sense to move analysis, and possibly logging, to a separate system. In clustered environments with load balancing, there may already be separate centralised logging. But detection needs to be added to every application instance, with centralised AppSensor analysis. The analysis engine may also collect information from other detection point locations such as network security devices and other business systems. It may also send (signal) information to some of these systems.

Then I described application logging practices and what additional types of information should be recorded if AppSensor is implemented. I made a distinction between the raw application logs (which may be done locally or by some other device), and signalling which I see as a sub-set of log data. It could also include some form of aggregation of discrete events, such as say a single data points concerning an average function usage over a particular time period.

The use of Common Event Format (CEF) was explained since this can be used for both raw logging and signalling, and benefits from being widely supported. But I noted we should keep our eyes open for developments in Common Event Expression (CEE) and Event Management Automation Protocol (EMAP) - read how these are related.

Moving on, I then described an example ecommerce web site (Schematic Diagram, 932x426px, 53kB), and what an initial base configuration of AppSensor might look like. For the example site, the primary issues were considered to be product pricing errors, discounts and fiddles, order process manipulation, payment card mis-use and personal data theft. Therefore just nine detection points were considered relating to general request processing to filter out clearly malicious payloads, some specific detection in the catalogue, shopping basket and payments functions, together with some detection related to database result sets and database table integrity.

Three (request exception) detection points would monitor every request, and the database detection points would occur in multiple locations (code and tables). Response actions would always include increased logging (e.g. request and response headers), with some events leading to alerts to operational staff, and serious events causing temporary blocking of user accounts, and/or IP address ranges. A dynamic demonstration of signalling and an example live dashboard was used to show how the detection events, responses and information on any locked customer accounts might be displayed. A video (without narration) of this first scenario is available (You Tube Example 1).

I then discussed how that base configuration might be extended to provide greater insight into input validation failures, checks on session management and user/system trend monitoring. The second scenario also included the use of information from third party malware monitoring and a network intrusion protection system, providing additional data which could be used by the analysis engine to make decisions (YouTube Example 2).

The videos should be updated soon with new recordings that have a narrative soundtrack.

If you are going to be in or near Brussels, I will be repeating the talk and live demonstration at OWASP Belgium in two days time (16th June 2011). I am also looking forward to hearing Andreas Falkenberg speak at the same event on "How to Become Twitter's Admin: An Introduction to Modern Web Service Attacks". See you there.