What follows is our initial report, outlining areas of concern and guidance for organizations adopting cloud computing. The intention is to provide security practitioners with a comprehensive roadmap for being proactive in developing positive and secure relationships with cloud providers. Much of this guidance is also quite relevant to the cloud provider to improve the quality and security of their service offerings. As with any initial foray, there certainly will be guidance that we can improve, and we will likely modify the number of domains and change the focus of some areas of concern. We seek your help to improve this guidance and make version 2.0 an even better asset to the security practitioner and cloud provider. (more…)

With the release of Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003, Win32 auditing, exploitation and research became far more complex. Data Execution Protection, a host of new security measures within the compilers, and the .NET Framework’s implications on development as a whole all signaled the end of “simple” core system exploits. This paper focuses on these architecture changes-which were made to prevent exploitation of win32 processes-and how to break them. It reiterates what the author learned about general Win32 exploitation and provides detailed techniques to evade stack protections in Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003.

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To mitigate the possibility of one computer virus crippling an entire region’s transportation, emergency services, and power, the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protection Standards (CIPS) requirements 002-009 describe the cyber security standards with which bulk electric power providers must comply. As part of this compliance effort, power providers must identify their Critical Cyber Assets (CCA) and applicable corresponding Electronic Security Perimeters (ESP). This document provides a detailed methodology for determining ESPs and CCAs. (more…)

Research unveiled in December of 2008 showed how MD5’s long-known flaws could be actively exploited to attack the real-world Certification Authority infrastructure. This August 2009 presentation demonstrates two new collision classes: the applicability of MD2 pre-image attacks against the primary root certificate for VeriSign and the difficulty of validating X.509 Names contained within PKCS#10 Certificate Requests. It also calls out two possibly unrecognized vectors for implementation flaws that have been problematic in the past: the ASN.1 BER decoder required to parse PKCS#10 and the potential for SQL injection from text contained within its requests. (more…)