It doesn’t matter what business you are in, but #$*(‘ing with your customers by releasing advisories and threatening them to buy your product or services is just plain dumb. For those that are following the TCP-split-handshake epic #fail saga, I have to say, the vulnerability itself is a clever hack. By using double-SYN’s or simultaneous connections (which is incredibly rare and non-existent on most modern networks), one can trick firewalls and IPS’ in not tracking state. This is reminiscent of the original classic Insertion, Evasion and Denial of Service that covered lots of grounds in the pitfalls of deconstructing application state in real-time completely based on the packets that are flowing through.
Archive for Rants
Re-Create vs. Re-Play
I have been struggling how best to convey the idea of how Mu Studio’s approach of dynamically re-creating new, real sessions is different than re-playing old sessions. It’s a tricky concept, but I think that René Magritte said it best when commenting on his painting of a pipe that is labeled “this is not a pipe”: Full Post »
Bing, Google and OMG you copied me!
Okay, this is just plain dumb. Google writes a blog about how Microsoft is copying its search results and how it spent a gazillion map/reduce patents/technologies/code/algorithms to come up with those wonderful results (disclaimer: I use google search) when all it took was a simple MiTM to intercept what the user was doing.
This is brilliant hacking on Microsoft’s side and Google’s blog sounds exactly like when one of my kids complains that the other is looking through his window when we are driving.
Testing an Application, Infrastructure and a Service
This one’s been in the works for a while. I keep comparing application testing to infrastructure testing and then pondering where the major revolution is happening right now and I can’t help but talk about it. Since I don’t do well with numbers and tables (*yawn*), I thought I’ll doodle a few graphs to visualize the differences. Besides, paraphrasing Calvin, a blog is authoritative and written by a professional when it has charts! :-)
Don’t use dumb packet-replay to test modern firewalls
I felt a Déjà vu moment today when one of our customers came to us asking if we can help them test Outlook Exchange traffic through their firewall with ALG and NAT turned on. They had tried to re-purpose bit-blasters, load generators, open-source and commercial packet replay tools only to find that nothing was working. Way back when I was building the IDP at OneSecure, my pre-screen interview question was this:
If you only had an [ any, any, tcp/21, allow ] rule in your packet filter, why wouldn’t FTP uploads/downloads work?
Net Neutrality, GPL, Packets and Privacy
Just read the net neutrality article on Comcast. I have mixed feelings about this and wanted to find out what you thought. There seems to be a fine line when data becomes information and directly affects corporations and fellow humans. What I don’t know when looking at packets traversing the network as little bits of information, where exactly that boundary lies.
Google chrome vulnerability
There was a post earlier today on Daily Dave about a DoS vulnerability in Chrome which supposedly was caused by a Microsoft runtime library when trying to access URL schemes that are bogus. It reminded me of this:
Categories: Rants
Zen and the art of fixing P1 bugs
Just finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for like the 100th time. I responded to a recent post on Daily Dave and somehow it seemed to trigger some thoughts about romantic and classical perspectives on software bugs. If you’ve read the book at all, neither perspective is right or wrong, except they are just different ways of looking at the same problem and both are equally valid since Quality is what drives them and more importantly creates them.
Categories: Rants
PERversity in Numbers
Take a number and think of all the possible ways you can encode them. Make up some new rules because you feel like it. Oh wait, maybe you should throw in some custom encoding because it feels right. That pretty much sums for the 50 ways you can encode numbers in Packed Encoding Rules.
Full Post »
Categories: Rants
PERversity at it’s worst
Every now and then you look back and think about all the time you spent working on something that was so pointlessly convoluted and intentionally perverse, you wonder what’s wrong with the world. You heard me kvetch about ASN. Well, it’s another incarnation of the same beast, except it’s PER. It, BTW, stands for Perverse Encoding Rules. The true 50-ways-to-encode-your-lover.
Categories: Rants
