Category Archives: Public safety

Public safety, Under our observation

The book of Revelation – OPC UA will be the target for next phase of SCADA system attack.

 

Preface

A fascinating, unusual story which creates an eerie atmosphere. The security report issued by Kaspersky on 10th May 2018 driven my interest to do this study. So the report equivalent to enlightenment my conception.

Background

A tremendous potential cyber attack found by Cisco. Thereby it announced to public last week. They reveal this unknown story to the world. And therefore the major security focus shift to a new malware. As a result, we know the technical specifications of malware so called “VPNFilter”. However, similar cyber attacks was encountered in past. A similarity of those cyber attacks are focusing the public facilities especially nuclear power facility , gas and water supply system as the major target. We bring your attentions today for OPC UA (Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control Unified Automation) to OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) system vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities are not running in high profile. But it requires technical people for attention.

About OPC & OPC Unified Architecture

OPC is an industry standard, it defines methods for exchanging realtime automation data between PC-based clients using Microsoft operating systems. The organization that manages this standard is the OPC Foundation. OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a machine to machine communication protocol for industrial automation developed by the OPC Foundation.

Overview of OPC Unified Architecture

Kaspersky technical findings

Referring to technical report announced by Kaspersky on 10th May 2018. The key critical design flaws are shown as below:

  1. Quote: OPC UA was designed to support data transport for two data types: the traditional binary format (used in previous versions of the standard) and SOAP/XML. Today, data transfer in the SOAP/XML format is considered obsolete in the IT world and is almost never used in modern products and services. The prospects of it being widely used in industrial automation systems are obscure, so we decided to focus our research on the binary format.

………………………….

It turned out that part of the network services in the system we analyzed communicated over the OPC UA protocol and most executable files used a library named “uastack.dll”. ………

…………After developing a basic set of mutations (bitflip, byteflip, arithmetic mutations, inserting a magic number, resetting the data sequence, using a long data sequence), we managed to identify the first vulnerability in uastack.dll. It was a heap corruption vulnerability, successful exploitation of which could enable an attacker to perform remote code execution (RCE), in this case, with NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM privileges.

Hints –  See whether below assembly language source code (call OpcUa-memory_Alloc@4) can provides any idea to you in this regard.

2. In the process of analyzing the application, found that it used the XmlDocument function, which was vulnerable to XXE attacks for .NET versions 4.5 and earlier.

Hints: What is XXE attack? Below picture shown traditional XXE attack for reference.This XXE attack so called billion laughs attack .

Remark: By disabling DTDs, application developers are also able to strengthen the parser’s ability to protect itself against DoS (denial of service) attacks.

My observation:

Upon inspection, the OPC UA requires the following library files.

libeay32.dll, ssleay32.dll, and uastack.dll

The above library file (ssleay32.dll) belongs to OpenSSL 1.0.2j. It was configured and built with the options no-idea, no-mdc2, no-ntt, and no-rc5 to avoid patent issues. If bugs are found in the version of OpenSSL. You may compile and use your own version because this is a open source program.

Reminder: Kaspersky Labs identified 17 zero-day vulnerabilities in OPC Foundation open source code. For more details about the report, please refer below url for reference.

https://opcfoundation.org/news/press-releases/review-kaspersky-labs-report-confirms-opc-foundations-transparent-open-source-opc-ua-implementations-strategy-improves-security/

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Potential Risk of CVE, Public safety, Under our observation

Vulnerabilities – Waiting for vendor response – 23rd May 2018

The cyber attacks are wreak havoc today. In order to protect the power facility, water supply, Gas supply and petroleum industry daily operations. The SCADA control system vendor implemented security control in their system infrastructure. However when vulnerabilities encounter on their products. The remediation step of the vendor response sometimes not in effecient. For instance, Advantech one of the key player of SCADA WebAccess. But it lack of motivation to drive the remedation solution on their products. There is no official announcement how to do the remedation on their products so far. Vulnerabilities are shown as below:

CVE-2018-7499 – buffer overflow vulnerabilities which may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code
CVE-2018-7503 – a path transversal vulnerability which may allow an attacker to disclose sensitive
CVE-2018-7505 – information on the target TFTP application has unrestricted file uploads to the web application without authorization, which may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
CVE-2018-10591 – allow an attacker can create a malicious web site, steal session cookies, and access data of authenticated users.
CVE-2018-10590 – exposure vulnerability through directory listing has been identified, which may allow an attacker to find important files that are not normally visible.
CVE-2018-10589 – WebAccess Scada Node versions prior to 8.3.1, and WebAccess/NMS 2.0.3 and prior, a path transversal vulnerability has been identified, which may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
CVE-2018-7497 – several untrusted pointer dereference vulnerabilities have been identified, which may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
CVE-2018-8845 – a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability has been identified, which may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
CVE-2018-7495 – an external control of file name or path vulnerability has been identified, which may
CVE-2018-8841- allow an attacker to delete files.
an improper privilege management vulnerability may allow an authenticated user to modify files when read access should only be given to the user.
CVE-2018-7501 – several SQL injection vulnerabilities have been identified, which may allow an attacker to disclose sensitive information from the host.

Potential Risk of CVE, Public safety

Siemens – (CVE-2018-4832): Siemens Security Advisory by Siemens Product 18th Apr 2018

The Gas and Petroleum industries requires automation to enhance their overall operation in last decade. And therefore the automation system setup requires Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). We noticed that hackers targeted SCADA system installed in nuclear power facilities. We are living in digital age and therefore electricity power supply similar air and water. So system automation hardware vendor has responsibility to hardening their system design. Siemens found vulnerability in their Automation Technology Process control systems (PCS 7) on April last month. For more details, please refer below url for reference.

Vulnerability details

https://cert-portal.siemens.com/productcert/pdf/ssa-348629.pdf

My Speculation:

1. A denial of service vulnerability exists in the remote procedure call (RPC) facility due to a failure in communicating with the NTLM security provider when performing authentication of RPC requests. An anonymous attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending a specially crafted RPC authentication request to a computer over the network. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could cause the computer to stop responding and automatically restart.

2. GetMachineName ( ) copies machine name to a fixed 32 byte buffer causes problem occurs.

Application Development, Public safety, Under our observation

Attention: Stay Alert – Multiple Vulnerabilities in PHP Could Allow for Arbitrary Code Execution

2 Comments

Preface:

PHP is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Security concern by security experts

The security issues are typically exposed when PHP code makes use of system-level calls.

Found critical security problem today! – Original release date: April 27, 2018

The Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) has released an advisory on multiple Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) vulnerabilities. An attacker could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

NCCIC encourages users and administrators to review MS-ISAC Advisory 2018-046 and the PHP Downloads page and apply the necessary updates.

See whether any short term remediation can take before upgrade?

1.Restrict PHP Information Leakage

expose_php=Off

2.Disable Remote Code Execution

Allow_url_fopen=Off

allow_url_include=Off

3.Not show errors to the visitors

(/etc/php.d/security.ini file)

log_errors=On

error_log=/var/log/httpd/php_scripts_error.log

4.Disable Dangerous PHP Functions (php.ini)

disable_functions =exec,passthru,

shell_exec,system,proc_open,popen,curl_exec,

curl_multi_exec,parse_ini_file,show_source

5.Upload Files (/etc/php.d/ directory)

file_uploads=Off

6.Control File System Access

always keep the open_basedir directive set to the /var/www/html directory.

open_basedir=”/var/www/html/”

7.Control the POST Size (/etc/php.d/security.ini)

post_max_size=1k

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Public safety

Nuclear headache – It is better stores the older warheads (old plutonium) on moon or other planet.

1 Comment

As a world justice leader it is hard to avoid to enhance the military setup. From the cold war till today, international atmosphere not significant change the protection definition. This circumstances match the logic since that man kind will be protect himself and his belongs. However a problem encountered was that how to despose or handle the big power killer weapons especially outdate nuclear bomb. Headline news (REUTERS) yesterday said that America’s has nuclear headache. For more details, please refer below url for reference.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nukes-plutonium-specialreport/americas-nuclear-headache-old-plutonium-with-nowhere-to-go-idUSKBN1HR1KC

Remark: Send that radioactive stuffs to moon and other planet looks a possible solution. However it is hard to avoid incident occurs during transportation. A reminder is that Plutonium has a radioactive half-life of 24,000 years. So where can they go?