Security Headlines

In this episode of Security Headlines, we are joined by  

the Hacker Johnny Xmas. Johnny is a very interesting character   

with a lot of fun projects behind him.   

Join us as we get to hear Johnny's stories as we deep dive 

into this weeks episode of Security Headlines:

## Venmo

After giving a talk about it and releasing software that made everyone  

able to easily abuse this, Luckily venmo took action and limited the 

amount of data avaliable. Johnny found a way to generate api keys with  

just making a simple request to the 

## Bypassing Webb application firewalls   

A lot of firewalls just focus on IP filtering which is a huge problem  

when, in todays world it is really easy and cheap for a consumer   

to aquire a large sets off ip addresses.  

One provider of proxied ip addresses is Hola VPN that lets their free   

users act as exit nodes that they sell using platforms such as luminate.

Other people have adopted this approach but with mobile development toolkits.  

## Grimm    

Johnny is currently working for the security engineering firm Grimm, a company known for its involvement in the ICS(Industrial control system) security work.  

Currently working on developing 

Grimm is currently hiring people, do you want to get paid to develop security training platforms ?

then Grimm is the place for you!

External links:   

https://twitch.tv/j0hnnyxm4s

https://twitter.com/J0hnnyXm4s/

https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnnyXmas/

https://github.com/johnnyxmas/Talk_Decks/tree/master/2019/Sorry%20about%20your%20WAF

https://ghost.express/   

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/07/zoom-buys-keybase-in-first-deal-as-part-of-plan-to-fix-security.html  

https://www.twitch.tv/mr_horologist   

https://twitter.com/cigarsec   

https://www.icsvillage.com/   

https://www.grimm-co.com/careers   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venmo   

https://www.technowize.com/grindr-security-flaw-lets-anyone-hijack-user-accounts/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_privilege  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branched-chain_amino_acid  

https://opihr.com/   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub7

https://nmap.org/book/man-nse.html  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less_Than_Jake   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh,_Sleeper

https://luminati.io/  

https://selenium.dev/  

https://blog.firosolutions.com

In this podcast episode of Security Headlines: Carl Lerche, Rust developer and

maintainer of the popular Rust programming library Tokio joins us.

He walks us through what Rust and Tokio is, how companies are building their stacks with Rust.

This and a lot more on this episode of Security Headlines!

Carl heard about this new programming language called Rust and wanted to check it out.

What started as a hobby project led Carl down the rust path and he now works for Amazon as a

Rust developer! Helping Amazon build stable infrastructure.

We get to hear the story of how Tokio got started and how the Rust programming language has changed

over the years.

Since a large chunk of Tokio code is focusing on making it easy for developers to write asynchronous functions.

And be able to write fast code that does not get stuck and lets the data flow.

But how does non-blocking code really work? What differs Rust from the programming language Golang is

Golangs, adoption of green threads instead of using regular threads.

Carl walks us through how this works and how Rust tackles this problem "the Rust way".   

Do you want to build reliable network services with Rust?

Then Tokio is something you should check out, try out the new 0.3 release here:

https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/releases/tag/tokio-0.3.1       

In this episode we also cover:   

slowing down syscalls to protect against Spectre

async syscalls with io-uring

building high-performance systems with non-blocking sockets

writing code without syscalls

getting started with Tokio

async operating system api's 

how to start coding with tokio

External links:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/rust-by-example/

https://discord.gg/tokio

https://tokio.rs/

https://twitter.com/carllerche

https://github.com/tokio-rs/

https://github.com/tokio-rs/io-uring

https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/an-introduction-to-the-io_uring-asynchronous-io-framework

https://www.howtogeek.com/338269/a-huge-intel-security-hole-could-slow-down-your-pc-soon/

https://www.rustaceans.org/

https://rust-lang.github.io/async-book/

https://github.com/tokio-rs/mini-redis

https://pop.system76.com/

https://rust-analyzer.github.io/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epoll

https://twitter.com/tokio_rs

https://github.com/carllerche

HD is a very interesting character, founder of Metasploit, security researcher, phone phreak, ruby hacker

and the founder of the company rumble!

He joins us in this episode to tell us the story of Metasploit, making security research

and internet scanning more accessible and normalized.

HD picked up an interest in computers and the telephone system at an early age and

spent his time reading ezines, 2600 and other magazines that talked about the force of technology and the

creative exploring we know as hacking.

The passion went from just making silly screen savers to starting to play with, the analog phone system.

Phreaking away on the phone lines and using the knowledge to travel wherever he wanted, on the phone lines.

In 2003, at the time where the internet still was young and the security research where kept in the dark.

HD wanted to shine some light on this and instead of commercializing and building a proprietary product he

created metasploit.  In order to make exploits easy to use and available for the business side and the hobbyist.  

HD received a lot of push back for doing this. A lot of people did not want to make security tools and techniques  

available for the wide majority to use.  They tried to get him fired, hares him and a lot more :/   

This mob of angry people did not stop him from keep working at metasploit. Countless hours were spent porting   

exploits to it. Making them easier to use and more accessible for everyone to use.    

A couple of years later the metasploit project got bought up by the US-based company "rapid7"   

which is home to several security related projects.   

One of these interesting projects is Project Sonar. Project Sonar is continuously scanning and indexing   

the entire internet.  Creating a huge map of every device on the internet that you can search on based on timestamps.   

Like a modern-day time-machine for exploring devices on the internet.  This can be used for keeping track of   

types of things, such as tracking Hillary Clinton's email server.     

Exploring the internet on a larger scale like this of course does not come without finding a lot of interesting   

things, HD tells us about the time he found a surgical robot that was being used for operating on people   

with a publicly accessible web interface.   Luckily this was quickly reported and fixed!    

Evolution is pushing innovation and scanning the entire internet, which was very hard to do a    

while back is now not only cheap but can also be done in a couple of hours.    

Today HD is the CEO of a company called Rumble, and has gone from exploring the public internet to   

exploring the inner realms of intranets and internal networks.

External links:   

https://www.rumble.run/    

https://www.metasploit.com/       

https://www.rapid7.com/research/project-sonar/      

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAINT_(software)          

https://www.hdm.io/   

https://github.com/hdm   

https://2600.com/    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarVOX   

https://zmap.io/   

In this episode, we talk with Maksymilian Arciemowicz, security research    

that has found bugs in a large chunk of systems, active in the security field   

since 2005. He is the founder and maintainer of cxsecurity which is a website   

that index and host security vulnerabilities for everyone.   

Cxsecurity is home to a lot of exploits and security research, in this episode   

we get to hear the story of how it got created by its founder Maksymilian!   

One of these types of communities is a mailing list called bugtraq.   

Maksymilian learned how to find security bugs thanks to that mailing list and  

soon after finding his first couple of bugs he teamed up with a friend to start a    

website called *securityreason.com*. SecurityReason took the security research from the mailing list   

and displayed it in a nice web interface.   

The two founders wanted to go different ways, Maksymilian wanted the research to stay open and not    

commercialize on it.   

The website got shutdown and Maksymilian forked it into a new better version called cxsecurity.com!

In nature, the power lays in the entity with the most muscles but on    

the internet, the power is in the person with the most knowledge, the power comes  

from the intellect. Whoever comes up with new ideas and is able to prove it wins    

the intellectual battle, Maksymilian explains.   

Since 2005 Maksymilian has been able to find security holes in:  

* IPFilter in openbsd, which was used before they switched to   

* Freebsd      

* Magento   

* Mac osx    

* phpmyadmin    

* PHP       

* NetBSD        

* Vsftpd       

* apache      

* Solaris        

* Thunderbird       

* Opera         

* libc         

and a lot more!

We are super happy to have a true hacker spirit with us in this episode     

on Security Headlines!

In this episode, we cover topics such as:    

How the security landscape has changed since 2005 and how easy it was    

to hack back then.    

Using regular expressions to make security research better and faster!    

How to submit security exploits to software vendors.    

CVE, lack of description       

Stories from the heart of the security scene       

Suricata and Artificial Intelligence      

How to protect your systems.      

Development and a lot more!      

static code analyzer, he has written his own static code analyzer for PHP.   

We of course sidetrack a bit into OpenBSD and when a person such as Maksymilian says:    

*OpenBSD is the most secure operating system in the world*   

We can just smile :)        

External links:

https://cxsecurity.com

https://cifrex.org

https://cxib.net

https://www.exploit-db.com/history

Summary:    

In this podcast episode of Security Headlines our host talks with Kristaps Dzonsons, a long time

OpenBSD user, writer of beautiful software and deep water diver.

We cover a lot of software development, security, the BSD space and of course diving.    

Security is something that is very hard, we are all human and mistakes happen.

In 2014 at a EuroBSD conference, Kristaps

gave a great talk about what we should think about when we want to

produce safe code.    

One of the things he highlights is that ideally, we should:    

Write defensive code, use a team of code auditors, QA

Use up-to-date, audited libraries with a history of attention to security

use a language with formal underpinnings and proof of correctness

run on systems supporting your defensive strategy

And while we're at it, we might as well ride our unicorns to work.

Unfortunately this workflow is not yet adopted.  But since the tools are getting

smarter and smarter, more and more people are adopting fuzzing and the ecosystem is evolving.

There is a lot of reasons to be optimistic about the future!     

One thing we can do to make our programs a bit safer is to look at each

part of the program and ask ourselves, does this part really need

privileges to do these things?   Luckily a great new innovation from OpenBSD comes riding

in like a knight in shine armor, like a hero in a medieval movie.

And its name is Pledge, pledge allows your program to easily predefined the access rights it

needs and if it breaks the promise, the process dies.

It's an easy to use way to approach the entire Mandatory Access Control swamp...      

Pledge

Originally implemented as Tame in OpenBSD, but rebranded as Pledge in OpenBSD's 5.9 release.

Pledge makes security a lot easier for the developer!  If you want a function you have to

only have the privileges of being able to open files or something similar. Pledge makes it super-easy for

you as a developer to in 3 lines of code, in order to only allow a function to do what its suppose to do and

nothing more, so when attackers come and manipulate your function to do other things, Pledge comes riding in

and kills the process, no questions asked!

Kristaps has implemented both Tame and Pledge into production and we get to hear his advice

on how to do it.

Pledge adoption is growing and growing, and you can use it with a large number of programming

languages.  Just search for pledge and the programming language of your choice and someone has

most likely made a library for it.

External links:

https://kristaps.bsd.lv/

https://github.com/kristapsdz

https://learnbchs.org/portability.html

https://man.OpenBSD.org/acme-client.1

https://kristaps.bsd.lv/kcgi/

https://kristaps.bsd.lv/sqlbox/

https://man.OpenBSD.org/pledge

https://man.OpenBSD.org/unveil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuba_diving

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freediving

https://kristaps.bsd.lv/openradtool/

https://www.openrsync.org/

https://asiabsdcon.org/

https://www.eurobsdcon.org/

https://www.bsdcan.org/

https://bsd.lv/

https://man.OpenBSD.org/sysmerge

https://man.OpenBSD.org/OpenBSD-5.8/tame.2

https://manpagez.com/man/3/sandbox_init/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systrace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFRaw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex

Summary:   

In this podcast episode, we interview Mischa Peters which is a long time   

BSD user with a background in the world of data centers and ISP's.     

One of his latest projects is OpenBSD Amsterdam which is a pure-hearted   

OpenBSD virtual machine hosting provider.  That is running 100% OpenBSD,   

it's even using OpenBSD's own hypervisor.  We deep dive into   

OpenBSD Amsterdam, scripting with ssh, awk, and the basic tools, BSD, Hack-tic and    

a lot more!    

OpenBSD Amsterdam is one of the many interesting projects in the BSD space.   

Being a pure hearted OpenBSD virtual machine provider.  The project launched as a hobby project by   

Mischa Peters in 2018 and the first month already 40 people where interested in spinning up a virtual machine   

with OpenBSD Amsterdam.   

What makes it special is that it runs OpenBSD own Hypervisor, unlike the majority of hosting platforms that  

run qemu/kvm or Xen.     

So what you get is an OpenBSD virtual machine running on OpenBSD host. So it's OpenBSD all the way.    

Mischa started playing around with this new hypervisor project for fun and wanted to do something   

bigger with it, Having a background running servers in datacenters as well as running his on internet service  

provider(High5) which he started in 1999.

In this episode, we also get to know how it was to work for Xs4all in the 1990'ies. Xs4all is a Dutch internet  

service provider that came out of the *Hack-tic* scene.   

Which was a Dutch hacking community and magazine that where active between 1989 and 1994.    

This scene has been very active, creating conferences, being a voice     

for internet activism, suing the Church of Scientology and much more.     

Mischa, like many others, got introduced to SunOS Unix systems in school and went deeper and deeper into the   

Unix based rabbit hole. He ended up running Redhat and then found the wonderful world of BSD and   

was liberated from Linux through the adoption of FreeBSD.     

Mischa is the kind of person that handles the juggle between multiple projects demanding projects, a   

day job, a family with kids, a much more.    

We also talk about performing automated package management   

on OpenBSD, doing kernel upgrades, and automating things with simple command-line scripting.   

Sometimes Ansible is just a mess and the same thing can be done simpler with just a for loop   

some ssh and some basic command line hacking.   

Thanks to the OpenBSD Amsterdam project, a large chunk of cash has been donated to the OpenBSD   

foundation which helps the development of OpenBSD moving further.     

But most important: It's helping the adoption of OpenBSD!  

Do you want to learn BSD?  Host your own email?  Setup Wireguard?   

Then OpenBSD Amsterdam is a good start for you. 

External links:

https://openbsd.amsterdam

https://rgz.ee/m/

https://man.openbsd.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XS4ALL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack-Tic

https://why-vi.rocks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS

https://www.osmocom.org/projects/retro-bbs/wiki/Livingston_Portmaster_3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe

https://high5.nl/gist/rdist.html

In this episode of Security Headlines, we jump into curl with   

its founder and maintainer Daniel Stenberg.   

We talk security, CI systems, creation of curl, Fuzzing, IRC bots and a lot more!  

Few software developers never even get near to having one   

of their projects being picked up by a larger community.   

A project that started as a currency plugin to an IRC bot.  

Spun off and ended up becoming bigger and bigger resulting in being 

adopted by over 10 billion devices.  Well, this project is called   

curl!  Curl is known to be the stable swizz army knife that can  

be used for making various types of transfer requests.  

Need to download a file? Curl is here for you        

Need to test a socks5 proxy? Curl is here for you  

Need to download an ezine over Gopher? Curl is here for you     

Need to test a unix socket? Curl is here for you     

In this episode of Security Headlines, we are joined by Daniel   

Stenberg who is the founder and maintainer of Curl.   

He has even been awarded a gold medal by the Swedish king for   

his work with Curl.   

 External links:   

https://curl.haxx.se/     

https://curl.haxx.se/docs/security.html   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURL   

https://twitter.com/bagder   

https://www.wolfssl.com/     

https://daniel.haxx.se/   

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss-fuzz/issues/list?sort=-opened&can=1&q=proj:curl    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29    

https://curl.haxx.se/mail/     

In this episode, we are all about FreeNas, the world's largest NAS system, running FreeBSD as its base.  

The founder of FreeNas Olivier joins us, walking us throw how FreeNas started and how the system   

has grown since its start in 2005. The conversation takes us through the jungle of FreeNas and we end up

landing in Netflix's land of FreeBSD adoption and Olivier's latest project the BSD router project.    

Sit back, relax, and enjoy this episode of Security Headlines.  

We are back with another episode in the BSD theme episode!   

In this podcast episode, we are talking about FreeNAS, the worlds biggest Network-attached storage(NAS)    

operating system.   

And we of course have the founder of FreeNAS with us, Olivier Cochard-Labbé!    

Olivier started FreeNAS in 2005, with not a lot of knowledge on how to do it but with a determintation   

of creating a multimedia system that he could use.    

He wanted something small so he tried to compile   

[busybox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox) but failed, he kept on trying and ran into FreeBSD!   

He named the system FreeNAS and the first month he was able to get a bit over a thousand downloads, which 

is very impressive for a new project.    

The project grow and grow and it attracted a big community taking up to much of Olivier's time.   

This became harder and harder, Especially when you have a family and a full-time   

job and other hobbies to attend.   

Olivier was getting more and more to do as the project became bigger.  One particular example of this   

that he brings up is a security bug that was very severe and of course filed on a Friday. 

The security hole was a critical one, FreeNAS allowed root console access from the web interface   

without requiring authentication.      

The company *iXsystems* offered to allocate some developers to work on FreeNAS and Olivier   

handed over the FreeNAS project to them with the requirement that it shall remain free and opensource!      

Olivier is currently working for Netflix, helping them stream movies to the world using    

the raw power from the FreeBSD operating system that runs Netflix's Content Delivery Network.   

Join us as we jump into the wonders of FreeNAS, the BSD router project, and a lot more!

External links:   

https://bsdrp.net/   

https://www.freebsd.org/    

https://www.freenas.org/   

https://www.netflix.com/     

https://yandex.com/     

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/nanobsd/index.html   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M0n0wall     

https://www.freshports.org/net/bird/   

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/firewalls-ipf.html  

https://www.openmediavault.org/   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WireGuard    

In modern stacks, a large chunk of applications run in container environments   

such as docker and systemd-nspawn.  However, these applications are not built for security.   

The security community has proven it again and again that privilege escalation attacks   

are very serious with attacks such as Dirty Cow and CVE-2016-3135.   

A way to tackle the problems of running applications with a low privilege user without   

that application being able to interact with other running applications is to use *user namespaces*.      

Using user namespaces you can hide process id's to the applications and provide a more sandboxed environment.   

Alex wanted to the distribution of multiplatform applications easy 

which led him to sandboxing and namespaces, today he   

maintains the "chroot on steroids" project *bubblewrap* which is a sandbox platform for running    

sandboxed applications in different namespaces.    

Alex is also a long time user of Linux, with 20 years working for Redhat.   

He started to code on the commodore 64 and has been a developer ever since. In school he  

got introduced to Solaris and jumped deeper and deeper into Linux rabbit hole.   

Working on Linux allows Alex to work from home in the suburbs of Stockholm  

and work on programs that get used by a global user base.

In this episode, we talk about how it has been to work on sandboxed   

desktop applications and how flatpak has grown.    

So far there a has been a handful of different CVE's for bubblewrap 

that we talk about.

Flatpak has gotten bigger and bigger and "flathub" has come to see the light

, flathub is a place where all Linux users can get sandboxed desktop

applications.

Flathub is running on a stable Rust backend, Alex picked Rust to be the backend as one of his first larger Rust projects.  

We of course talk about how Rust is becoming more part of our daily lives  

as more and more applications are being ported to it, like librsvg journey from being written in C to now being a rust code base, as well as libraries  

being written in Rust.  

If you are maintaining an application with a graphical user interface and you target 

an audience that is running Linux on the desktop, we recommend   

that you get your application on flathub.   

Here is a guide on how you can do that:   

https://github.com/flathub/flathub/wiki/App-Submission

This podcast was made possible with running zoom with flatpak:   

$ flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo   

$ flatpak install flathub us.zoom.Zoom 

$ flatpak run us.zoom.Zoom

External links:  

https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap  

https://flathub.org/home 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp  

https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns   

https://podman.io/    

https://github.com/GNOME/librsvg   

https://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/ 

https://twitter.com/gnomealex

https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/3/9/555

https://lwn.net/Articles/657744/  

https://blog.firosolutions.com/   

Tarsnap is a backup service running with the slogan "Online backups for the truly paranoid".   

The service has well earned its slogan as a secure backup option.   

Created in 2006 by at the time FreeBSD's security officer Dr. Colin Percival, who was responsible for FreeBSD's security advisory.   

Colin is not only a successful entrepreneur but also a dedicated FreeBSD user.   

Colin has been getting his hands dirty with FreeBSD in the late 1990'ies when the firewall in his family house   

running openbsd crashed due to disk failure. After changing the disk he did not manage to   

figure out how to install OpenBSD so he went with FreeBSD.   While studying for his doctrine, he got concern   

about security, that led him to use freebsd where he later jumped on as FreeBSD security officer.   

Being the FreeBSD's security officer gave him knowledge of security holes before anyone else did and   

he needed a secure backup solution for storing his files.   After some head scratching, he decided to   

go the startup route and create his own backup solution. After getting several user requests about having  

password-protected key storage, Collin created Tarsnap's secure cryptographical solution for 

protecting keys called "Scrypt", which later got picked up by several opensource 

projects such as the cryptocurrency project Litecoin.    

Colin is a very intelligent and trustworthy person, to improve security when connecting   

and staying connected between machines he creates spiped. Adding a layer of safety on top of just using regular   

ssh, to mitigate attacks and weaknesses caused by OpenSSL.   

Because scrypt has a heavy resource need, making it hard for attackers to crack, it became a more secure alternative then the standard hash functions we use in modern systems such as sha1 and md5.   

The project started to growth and it was soon adopted by various larger companies   

such as stripe.  

If you are interested in finding and submitting bugs in Tarsnaps own code base, Colin has put up a Bug bounty

rewarding the people that find all kinds of bugs in the code base, a fun fact is that a majority of the security bugs   

that gets submitted is not found by security researchers looking for holes but by average developers looking at   

the functions in the code.  

Today Tarsnap runs on a large set of different systems by a diverse crowd, providing secure storage of   

data thanks to its stable code base and amazon s3.  

Colin also donates Tarsnap's December profit to the opensource community sponsoring the FreeBSD foundation, the EuroBSD  

conference, the bsdcan conference, bsdnow podcast and several other projects.   

We are super happy to have Colin as a guest on Security Headlines!

External links:   

https://github.com/Tarsnap/spiped  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarsnap    

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrypt   

https://www.Tarsnap.com/spiped.html   

https://www.Tarsnap.com/kivaloo.html   

https://github.com/Tarsnap/spiped  

https://www.Tarsnap.com/open-source.html   

https://github.com/mendsley/bsdiff   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)   

Stay up to date at:

https://blog.firosolutions.com