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Security Leftovers

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 3rd of March 2020 05:09:13 AM Filed under
Security
  • Security updates for Monday

    Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium and webkit2gtk), Debian (collabtive, dojo, firebird2.5, gst-plugins-base0.10, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, openjdk-7, php5, python-bleach, and rrdtool), Fedora (kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, mingw-openjpeg2, and openjpeg2), Mageia (hiredis, kernel, rsync, wireshark, and zsh), openSUSE (cacti, cacti-spine, libexif, proftpd, python-azure-agent, python3, and webkit2gtk3), Oracle (ppp), SUSE (permissions), and Ubuntu (libarchive).

  • PSA: jQuery is bad for the security of your project

    For some time I thought that jQuery was a thing of the past, only being used in old projects for legacy reasons. I mean, there are now so much better frameworks, why would anyone stick with jQuery and its numerous shortcomings? Then some colleagues told me that they weren’t aware of jQuery’s security downsides. And I recently discovered two big vulnerabilities in antivirus software 1 2 which existed partly due to excessive use of jQuery. So here is your official public service announcement: jQuery is bad for the security of your project.

    By that I don’t mean that jQuery is inherently insecure. You can build a secure project on top of jQuery, if you are sufficiently aware of the potential issues and take care. However, the framework doesn’t make it easy. It’s not secure by default, it rather invites programming practices which are insecure. You have to constantly keep that in mind and correct for it. And if don’t pay attention just once you will end up with a security vulnerability.

    [...]

    You might have noticed a pattern above which affects many jQuery functions: the same function will perform different operations depending on the parameters it receives. You give it something and the function will figure out what you meant it to do. The jQuery() function will accept among other things a selector of the element to be located and HTML code of an element to be created. How does it decide which one of these fundamentally different operations to perform, with the parameter being a string both times? The initial logic was: if there is something looking like an HTML tag in the contents it must be HTML code, otherwise it’s a selector.

    And there you have the issue: often websites want to find an element by selector but use untrusted data for parts of that selector. So attackers can inject HTML code into the selector and trick jQuery into substituting the safe “find element” operation by a dangerous “create a new element.” A side-effect of the latter would be execution of malicious JavaScript code, a typical client-side XSS vulnerability.

    It took until jQuery 1.9 (released in 2013) for this issue to be addressed. In order to be interpreted as HTML code, a string has to start with < now. Given incompatible changes, it took websites years to migrate to safer jQuery versions. In particular, the Addons.Mozilla.Org website still had some vulnerabilities in 2015 going back to this 1 2.

    The root issue that the same function performs both safe and dangerous operations remains part of jQuery however, likely due to backwards compatibility constrains. It can still cause issues even now. Attackers would have to manipulate the start of a selector which is less likely, but it is still something that application developers have to keep in mind (and they almost never do). This danger prompted me to advise disabling jQuery.parseHTML some years ago.

  • FuzzBench: Google Gets Into Fuzzer Benchmarking

    Google's latest work on the code fuzzing front for improving code security is FuzzBench, a benchmark for fuzzers.

    Google has made many contributions to code fuzzing and improving open-source security from continually fuzzing the Linux kernel to acquiring GraphicsFuzz to developing OSS-Fuzz. By Google's own numbers, they say they have found tens of thousands of bugs thanks to code fuzzers.

  • FuzzBench: Fuzzer Benchmarking as a Service

    Fuzzing is an important bug finding technique. At Google, we’ve found tens of thousands of bugs (1, 2) with fuzzers like libFuzzer and AFL. There are numerous research papers that either improve upon these tools (e.g. MOpt-AFL, AFLFast, etc) or introduce new techniques (e.g. Driller, QSYM, etc) for bug finding. However, it is hard to know how well these new tools and techniques generalize on a large set of real world programs. Though research normally includes evaluations, these often have shortcomings—they don't use a large and diverse set of real world benchmarks, use few trials, use short trials, or lack statistical tests to illustrate if findings are significant. This is understandable since full scale experiments can be prohibitively expensive for researchers. For example, a 24-hour, 10-trial, 10 fuzzer, 20 benchmark experiment would require 2,000 CPUs to complete in a day.

  • Wi-Fi kit spilling data with bad crypto – Huawei, eh? No, it's Cisco. US giant patches Krook spy-hole bug in network gear

    It looks like Switchzilla is moving swiftly to clear up the Krook bug discovered by ESET.

    Just hours after the researchers delivered their findings in a report, Cisco gave its own advisory on the Wi-Fi data snooping flaw.

    "Multiple Cisco wireless products are affected by this vulnerability," the advisory stated.

    "Cisco will release software updates that address this vulnerability. There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability."

»

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