Have a keen interest on scanning over 12000 IP's a week for vulnerabilities? Excited about the thought of assessing over 100 web applications for common vulnerabilities? If so, an exciting, as well as demanding, position has become available within the Managed Vulnerability Scanning (MVS) team at SensePost.
Job Title: Vulnerability Management Analyst
Salary Range: Industry standard, commensurate with experience
Location: Johannesburg/Pretoria, South Africa
We are looking for a talented person to join our MVS team to help manage the technology that makes up our Broadview suite and, more importantly, finding vulnerabilities, interpreting the results and manually verifying them. We are after talented people with a broad skill set to join our growing team of consultants. Our BroadView suite of products consists of our extensive vulnerability scanning engine, which looks at both the network-layer and the application layer, as well as our extensive DNS footprinting technologies.
The role of the Vulnerability Management Analyst will possess the following skills:
SensePost is an equal opportunity partner.
As we grow and operate on a number of continents, so does our dependence on a rock-solid IT infrastructure. We are expanding our repertoire to include a greater collection of Linux/Open Source/Windows and OS X products. With this, we are on the look-out for a rock star to wrangle control of our internal networks, external cloud infrastructure and help us us utilise technology in a way to make us even better.
Job Title: IT Network Packet Wrangling Penguin Master
Salary Range: Industry standard, commensurate with experience
Location: Johannesburg/Pretoria, South Africa
Real Responsibilities:
Taking inspiration from Vlad's post I've been playing around with alternate means of viewing traffic/data generated by Android apps.
The technique that has given me most joy is memory analysis. Each application on android is run in the Dalvik VM and is allocated it's own heap space. Android being android, free and open, numerous ways of dumping the contents of the application heap exist. There's even a method for it in the android.os.Debug library: android.os.Debug.dumpHprofData(String filename). You can also cause a heap dump by issuing the kill command:
kill -10 <pid number>
1.) Open DDMS in Eclipse and attach your device/emulator
* Set your DDMS "HPROF action" option to "Open in Eclipse" - this ensures that the dump file gets converted to standard java hprof format and not the Android version of hprof. This allows you to open the hpof file in any java memory viewer.
* To convert a android hprof file to java hprof use the hprof converter found in the android-sdk/platform-tools directory: hprof-conv <infile> <outfile>
2.) Dump hprof data
Once DDMS has done it's magic you'll have a window pop up with the memory contents for your viewing pleasure. You'll immediately see that the applications UI objects and other base classes are in the first part of the file. Scrolling through you will start seeing the values of variables stored in memory. To get to the interesting stuff we can use the command-line.
3.) strings and grep the .hprof file (easy stuff)
To demonstrate the usefulness of memory analysis lets look at two finance orientated apps.
The first application is a mobile wallet application that allows customers to easily pay for services without having to carry cash around. Typically one would do some static analysis of the application and then when it comes to dynamic analysis you would use a proxy such as Mallory or Burp to view the network traffic. In this case it wasn't possible to do this as the application employed certificate pinning and any attempt to man in the middle the connection caused the application to exit with a "no network connection" error.
So what does memory analysis have to do with network traffic? As it turns out, a lot. Below is a sample of the data extracted from memory:
And there we have it, the user login captured along with the username and password in the clear. Through some creative strings and grep we can extract a lot of very detailed information. This includes credit card information, user tokens and products being purchased. Despite not being able to alter data in the network stream, it is still easy to view what data is being sent, all this without worrying about intercepting traffic or decrypting the HTTPS stream.
A second example application examined was a banking app. After spending some time using the app and then doing a dump of the hprof, we used strings and grep (and some known data) we could easily see what is being stored in memory.
strings /tmp/android43208542802109.hprof | grep '92xxxxxx'
And there we go, a fully "decrypted" JSON response containing lots of interesting information. Grep'ing around yields other interesting values, though I haven't managed to find the login PIN yet (a good thing I guess).
Next step? Find a way to cause a memory dump in the banking app using another app on the phone, extract the necessary values and steal the banking session, profit.
Memory analysis provides an interesting alternate means of finding data within applications, as well as allowing analysts to decipher how the application operates. The benefits are numerous as the application "does all the work" and there is no need to intercept traffic or figure out the decryption routines used.
ASP.NET HttpHandlers are interesting components of a .NET web application when performing security assessments, mainly due to the fact they are the most exposed part of the application processing client requests in HttpContext level and at the same time, not yet part of the official ASP.NET framework.
As a result, data validation vulnerabilities in custom HttpHandlers can be exploited far easier than issues on the inner layer components. However, they are mostly overlooked during the web application tests for two reasons:
If you are using any of the Telerik components in your application, make sure to replace the "Telerik.Web.UI.dll" with the latest version (about 9MB!).
Vulnerability details:
The Telerik UI control has a web-based charts feature, which stores rendered graphic files in a cache folder for performance reasons. It registers a custom HttpHandler in the web.config file, which processes the following GET request and displays the chart in the client browser:
http://site/ChartImage.axd?useSession=false&imageFormat=image/png&ImageName=[base64 encoded value]
The next step is to decompile the code of the ChartHttpHandler.ProcessRequest(HttpContext), which gives us:
Although, the ImageName query string parameter is encrypted using an AES algorithm to prevent tampering, the encryption key and initialization vector are embedded in the application's assembly (Telerik.Web.UI.dll) and can be used to construct malicious requests to download files from the remote server, as shown in the following figure:

Next time you are on an assessment, don't overlook the mundane and not-so-interesting parts of the application, as they can often provide you with an additional attack surface area.
We blogged a little while back about the Snoopy demonstration given at 44Con London. A similar talk was given at ZaCon in South Africa. Whilst we've been promising a release for a while now, we wanted to make sure all the components were functioning as expected and easy to use. After an army of hundreds had tested it (ok, just a few), you may now obtain a copy of Snoopy from here. Below are some instructions on getting it running (check out the README file from the installer for additional info).
Remind me what Snoopy is?
Snoopy is a distributed tracking, data interception, and profiling framework.
Requirements
-Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32bit online server
-One or more Linux based client devices with internet connectivity and a WiFi device supporting injection drivers. We'd recommend the Nokia N900.
-A copy of Maltego Radium
Installation
After obtaining a copy from github run the install.sh script. You will be prompted to enter a username to use for Snoopy (default is 'woodstock') and to supply your public IP address. This is depicted below:
This installation will take around 3-5 minutes. At the end of the installation you will be presented with a randomly generated password for the web interface login. Remember it. You may now run the server component with the command snoopy, and you will be presented with the server main menu, as depicted below.
Selecting the 'Manage drone configuration packs' menu option will allow you to create custom installation packs for all of your drone devices. You will be presented with download links for these packs, such that you can download the software to your drones.
From your drone device download and extract the file from given link. Run setup_linux.sh or setup_n900.sh depending on your drone.
All collected probe data gets uploaded to the Snoopy server every 30 seconds. All associated clients have their internet routed through the server over OpenVPN. If you so desire, you can explore the MySQL database 'snoopy' to see this raw data. Graphical data exploration is more fun though.
Using Maltego
In the Snoopy server menu select 'Configure server options' > 'List Maltego transform URLs'. This will give URLs to download Maltego Snoopy entities and machines, as well as a list of TDS transform URLs. You will need to download and add the entities and machines to your local Maltego installation, and add the transform URLs to your Maltego TDS account (https://cetas.paterva.com/tds). This is depicted below.
We can explore data my dragging the 'Snoopy' entity onto the canvas. This entity has two useful properties - 'start_time' and 'end_time'. If these are left blank Snoopy will run in 'real time' mode - that is to say displaying data from the last 5 minutes (variable can be set in server configuration menu). This time value will be 'inherited' by entities created from this point. The transforms should be obvious to explore, but below are some examples (further examples were in the original blog post).
I shall write a separate blog post detailing all the transforms. For now, enjoy playing around.
Web Interface
You can access the web interface via http://yoursnoopyserver:5000/. You can write your own data exploration plugins. Check the Appendix of the README file for more info on that.