Skeptikal.org

Thursday, June 11, 2009

GuestCentric Systems- Not Really That Secure.

I ran across a press release from GuestCentric Systems dated April 20, in which they announced their partnership with McAfee to put the McAfee Secure logo on all their client's pages.

GuestCentric offers a booking management service to independent hotels, and from the looks of things, it's actually a pretty cool app. They appear to be awfully proud of that system, and the fact that it was certified as secure. Now we all know that the McAfee Secure certificaton has serious deficiencies, but that horse doesn't appear to be dead yet, so I'll keep flogging.

The video on GuestCentric's press release essentially mimics the hype from McAfee- put the logo on your website, watch your sales jump 14%. It says nothing about the actual state of security in the app, and is purely marketing fluff. This always irritates me, but it doesn't surprise me. Of course, it also should come as no surprise that GuestCentric has XSS holes on their website, or that the booking application itself contains XSS holes as well. It also has CSRF holes and more.

What is interesting to me in this instance is that the GuestCentric app is almost completely AJAX. While McAfee secure is terrible at finding XSS and CSRF holes in the first place, it certainly does not parse AJAX and does not intelligently fuzz for these vulnerabilities. Short of detecting out of date software on the server, scanning this application with McAfee Secure is particularly useless.

The really amazing thing to me is that McAfee values their brand so little. Their name and logo are put on so many websites that they have so little to do with, nobody actually trusts (or in most cases, even sees) their certification.

McAfee keeps citing their 14% number. While I have doubts about the validity of that study (and real data has never been released), I have to wonder whether those numbers would be the same today. Something tells me that the answer is a resounding "no."

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Thursday, May 7, 2009

How to Fix the ASVs

McAfee has been hit very hard this week, and the vulnerabilities in the other ASVs that I published are starting to make waves as well. While it's fun (and it really is) to point a finger and say "LOL! McAfee Fail!", this really isn't helpful. It's time we take this as an opportunity to look at things that are seriously wrong with PCI and the way that it is implemented.

I don't claim to be an expert on the PCI standards. I am just one of many people who is trying to improve the security of his company and the internet as a whole. In my view, achieving compliance should be an afterthought. While any business executive worth his paycheck should understand and value security from a risk-management perspective, the fact is that most respond better to industry requirements. Regulation is a dirty hack, but it at least gets the attention it needs.

Since the service providers already understand that they need to comply with these regulations, we may as well fix them so that they are effective. In my view, here are the major changes that need to be made:

Better Education
For many small service providers, the PCI testing process is the first time they look seriously at their own security. Having them sign a few forms and running a scan on their servers does not educate them, and it does not prepare them to deal with security properly. This sets a poor precedent for a growing company, and in my experience, it invariably causes problems down the road. Having an expert consultant educate the service provider about how to design a security program would do more to protect cardholder, customer and company data than any set of prescriptive security regulations. This phase of the process is usually skimmed over by a company trying to get the not-so-elusive compliance certificate. In my opinion, it may be the most important part.

Better documentation
Without clear definitions of the standards and recommendations for compliance, we'll never get far. Most service providers do not even have a clear understanding of which standards they are expected to comply with, much less how to do so. Instead, they speak with the sales department at the cheapest ASV they can find, perform a scan, and send the vulnerability reports to their system administrators.

To be fair, there is documentation out there, but there's a lot of misinformation too. The official PCI FAQ (which is itself vulnerable to XSS) doesn't provide much useful information beyond the standards themselves and a few supporting documents. Several unofficial forums have sprung up, but the information contained within isn't always reliable.

More Responsibility
To my knowledge, this week's McAfee issues, as well as the issues with other ASVs, have not affected their status as a PCI scanning vendor at all. Given that some of the ASVs' XSS holes have still not been fixed, I find this extremely shocking. PCI companies need to treat customer data responsibly, and need to be held responsible when they do not. Revoking their ability to perform PCI scans would be disastrous to their business, but the stated goal of the PCI standards isn't to keep poorly managed companies in business. If the true goal of these standards is to "help organizations proactively protect customer account data", then the ASVs need to be held responsible when they do not.

PCI ASVs should be held to much more rigorous standards than the Service Providers they certify. I was shocked to find out that regular third-party penetration tests are not a requirement for ASVs. From what I understand (and I may be misinformed), they essentially fill out paperwork and assure the PCI board that they are themselves compliant. Does this strike anybody else as insane?

More Transparency
While the PCI Council provides documentation of proper scanning procedures, they do not go into much depth. In particular, they barely touch on web application scans, while in my biased opinion, this is one of the most vulnerable and therefore critical parts of most Service Providers' systems.

No data is available to the public regarding the relative efficacy of the scans. I'm not aware of anybody with a truly effective web app scan, but I've run several on the same servers (in a rather unscientific fashion), and come up with vastly different results. The free PCI scan offered by nCircle took less than an hour, and only did a cursory inspection of my web application. By contrast, McAfee's scan took close to 3 hours, most of which was spent testing the web application. Neither found the rather basic XSS and SQLi holes that I deliberately put in.

While neither app was up to par, the McAfee scan was clearly superior- at least at finding web application holes. At the time, I was more interested in finding problems with the scanning services, rather than doing a direct comparison of the two. However, it would not be difficult to design a system for measuring the effectiveness of ASV scans. The PCI council should do so. They should make the results of these tests public, and should make scanners' status as an ASV dependent upon them.

Better Enforcement
An end user has a right to know whether the company he is doing business with is PCI compliant or not. A verification process, even as simple as a list of compliant companies on the PCI website, is essential to an effective certification program. Of course, when problems are found, the Service Provider in question should have their certification revoked.

I have come across many companies with poor security practices, and many simply do not care. The financial institution that I bank with used to have its access logs publicly accessible. I first alerted them to the issue over a year ago, and no action was taken. In the course of my PCI research, I coincidentally found out who their auditor was, and after alerting them to the issue, the logs were removed almost immediately.

Ideally, I should not be able to find out who performs the auditing on a company (lest I perform attacks through the ASV). However, only by reporting this issue to the auditor was I able to get it fixed. If I were able to report it directly to the PCI board, and a system were in place for getting that report to the right people, this would not have been a problem.

Better Testing
Finally, we arrive at the elephant in the room: the testing performed by the ASVs sucks.

Scanning has a place in security- it can find unpatched software, poor configuration, and other issues that often go unnoticed. However, until we have strong AI in the scanners, it will never have the ability to detect logic flaws or reliably fuzz for application vulnerabilities.

James Lester (Senior Security Analyst for McAfee, of all places) touched on this last month, and I think he's right- scanning is not effective in and of itself, and should not be relied on as the sole method of testing for PCI compliance. A full-scale audit will find issues that no scanner can, and more importantly, it will give auditors a reliable "feel" for the security of a Service Provider. Any provider that builds their own applications for payment and customer data management should be required to perform a QSA audit, regardless of the scale of the application.

Those Service Providers that cannot afford a full audit should not be allowed to build their own applications. Instead, they should use one of the already approved applications, on a sandboxed or private system. Scanning should still be required, but this way we can limit the scope of this scan to finding out-of-date software, unpatched holes, and configuration issues- things that the scanners are already very good at.

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Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Abusing PCI Scanners

My company has a client with a small but successful ecommerce site. This site is a prime example of what I'd like all ecommerce sites to look like- thoroughly tested code, FTP disabled and no other unnecessary services running. The client is careful to make sure that patches stay up to date, and system logs are regularly reviewed.

It's one of the few companies that I would trust to handle security themselves. Unfortunately, this client needs to have his website tested for PCI compliance. He signed up with an ASV, and they started running scans. When the results came back, it showed every port on the server as being closed. A bit of research determined that the IDS had kicked in during the initial portscan and blocked the scanner from accessing his website at all- exactly as it should have. I received an email from the client:
They told me that [their server] needs to be 'whitelisted' - Their IP address needs to be listed as 'friendly'.

Essentially, we had to whitelist their IP on both IDS and firewall in order to get the PCI compliance certificate. This is pretty common throughout the industry, and I've heard this request from clients using a variety of ASVs.

Any security person should notice the problem though- the scanning system could not get past the IDS, so we opened the door and invited it to come in and break things.

I don't think many people have looked into the implications of this. Security administrators routinely poke holes in their own systems for the purpose of achieving PCI compliance. If that scanner were to be compromised in any way, it would leave my client's system (and thousands of others) vulnerable.

On Monday, I published details about a critical McAfee CSRF hole. Yesterday, I disclosed vulnerabilities in a handful of PCI ASVs' web sites and customer portals. Compromising the security administrator's account with web exploits is just one way to abuse the scanning service. Here are a few more-

  • Client credentials can be compromised through offline attacks. In a recent weekend trip, I was driving by an ASV's office. On the top of their dumpster was a stack of customer signup forms with usernames, passwords and contact info- faxed in, entered into the system and discarded without even a trip to the paper shredder.

  • The auditors themselves can be compromised in the same way- next to that customer information were printed pages from the administrator side of the ASV's website. Sales scripts, emails, and everything necessary to perform a social engineering attack were there too.

  • Once the client or auditor accounts are compromised, the attacker gets lists of servers-including "secret" database, backup, infrastructure, development servers and others that shouldn't be publicly known. Along with the servers, they get nicely-formatted reports of all the vulnerabilities found

  • In general, A few servers will perform the scans on all an ASV's clients. If compromising accounts isn't to your taste, you could just sign up and pay for the service. In most cases, all that's keeping you from scanning systems other than your own is a service agreement. As one employee at an ASV noted: "I am...waiting for a rogue account to use an ASV to scan sites that they don't have privileges to scan...to assist them with identifying vulns." Would they know if it had happened? With IDS disabled and scans already performed at random intervals, who would notice? It may not have happened yet, but it's bound to happen eventually.

  • Knowing the source IP of the scanner (and knowing that it has full access to the target system), packets may be spoofed and a malicious payload delivered.

  • Many ASVs use Nessus to perform these scans. It would be theoretically possible to piggyback a targeted, malicious payload with a normal plugin update. This probably wouldn't be worth the effort, but the idea of subverting the entire security community to execute a single attack appeals to me in a sick way.

I understand the good intentions and even the necessity of performing website scans. I should be clear: I am all for the testing of applications and systems, and I think that by and large, most systems are better off because they perform these PCI scans. The problem is that when we are trying to get that compliance certification, we approach it with an engineer's mindset ("How can I make it work?") rather than an auditor's mindset ("How can I make it fail?"). Even in the process of securing our systems, we need to stop at every step and consider the implications of our actions.

Assuming that the PCI ASVs treat clients and data with due care, these attacks are mostly not practical. Considering how irresponsible these security companies often are, inviting them to attack your server is likely a Bad Idea.

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Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Risky.biz Podcast Interview

I just finished an interview with Patrick at Risky.biz for a podcast about my McAfee CSRF and the other PCI ASV vulnerabilities. If you're into this kind of thing (and the traffic spikes I've seen this week indicate you probably are), go give it a listen.

http://risky.biz/netcasts/rb2/rb2-mcafee-bug-finder-mike-bailey-speaks-riskybiz

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Most PCI Companies Are Insecure

The McAfee XSS got slashdotted. I think that all this attention is a good thing, putting a spotlight on XSS issues, but I have to say, I'm surprised by it. It's not like XSS attacks are news anymore, and it's not as if this is the first McAfee XSS to be published. Last night, I found an XSS hole in the verification script for their SiteAdvisor service (for extra irony).

McAfee SiteAdvisor XSS

But really, focusing on these XSS holes is missing the point. I never thought I'd say this, but in my experience, McAfee is one of the better ASVs out there. This isn't a compliment to them, it's an insult to the entire industry. Here are a few examples of other ASVs.

Until last week, atsec.com was vulnerable to XSS.

Until last week, secureconnect.com was vulnerable to XSS.

Until last week, ncircle.com was still vulnerable to XSS.

sungard.com is still vulnerable to XSS.

controlcase.com is still vulnerable to XSS.

support.foundstone.com (McAfee's premium brand) is still vulnerable to Cross-site Framing.

Up until a few weeks ago, there were also open redirects on the websites of Qualys, SecurityMetrics, and others. Is it any wonder I'm not at all shocked at a few XSS holes in McAfee's web site?

Some of these companies should be commended for handling the vulnerabilities correctly- nCircle, SecureConnect, Qualys, and even McAfee responded admirably- sometimes the issue was fixed within minutes of my vulnerability report. Others- Foundstone, ControlCase, and Sungard, belong in the doghouse- none of them even responded.

However, the glaring fact is that the entire PCI scanning industry is, frankly, bad at scanning for vulnerabilities. Most of these websites use their own scanning service on their own websites. While I still hold that in-depth audits for these sites should have taken place long ago, the scanners should have caught the problems as well. Some of these domains contain the portals for customers to manage their PCI compliance scans.

People, let's take the focus off of McAfee, and put it where it belongs. The PCI scanning industry as a whole is a joke, and across the board, these Web Security companies are themselves bad at security.

Edit 5-6-2009: nCircle was one of the fast-responders.
I mistakenly listed them as one of the "doghouse" ASVs.

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Monday, May 4, 2009

Epic Failure from McAfee

When you outsource all your PCI scanning to another company, you'd expect that company to be careful with your data. First off, there's the fact that security is what they do- if that data were to get leaked, you'd expect the damage to reputation alone to be crippling.

Second, (and probably the least important, really), the PCI ASV validation requirements (section 4.5.1, if you're interested) make it pretty clear that client data should be kept very confidential.

Finally, the data contained on those servers- lists of vulnerabilities on all their clients' systems, along with security administrators' passwords and more, is pretty high on the list of Things You Don't Want Getting Out.

You know what's coming.

We've found problems with McAfee time and time again. I was saving this for a post later this week, but given recent events, I think the time is right.

Until last week, McAfee Secure was vulnerable to critical CSRF holes. Not little ones, or ones that were difficult to exploit- basic, zero-kowledge, classic GET-based total-account-compromise holes. I think the pictures tell the story:

Logged in, 3 Accounts

iframed CSRF Attack

Malicious User Added

Account Confirmation Email

I sent a vulnerability report to a contact at McAfee and they responded quickly, communicated with me, and fixed the issue. They also began reviewing their entire codebase for similar holes. I commend them for that, but I cannot overlook the fact that this vulnerability never should have existed in the first place.

It's not going to be a surprise to anybody, but this is solid proof that McAfee Secure is mis-named. Their failure here is on an epic scale:

  • They did not comply with PCI requirements for ASVs

  • They did not use a secure software development lifecycle in building this application

  • An in-depth penetration test should catch an issue like this, so I presume that no such audit has taken place

  • Until I reported it, they had never performed a full code review for web vulnerabilities

  • As you can see in the 1st and 3rd screenshots, the application was itself certified as McAfee Secure when I performed this demonstration.

  • At no point in five weeks from me finding the vulnerability and it being fixed was that McAfee Secure logo removed from their own website.

The ultimate and obvious irony, however, is that McAfee Secure is in the business of testing others' web applications. I'll be the first to say that they are not equipped to do so.

I have a lot more information coming on this and related issues. Try the veal, tip your waitress, I'll be here all week.

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Is Mass Hosting PCI Compliant? (Biting the hand that feeds me)

If anybody actually pays attention to what I have to say, there's a good chance that this post is going to make a lot of people awfully mad. It needs to be said.

Most web sites built by my company are mass-hosted on cPanel servers. We're not the only company around that does this- there are many more. On the internet, there are hundreds of thousands of mass hosting servers, with hundreds of users on each server. On our systems, about 1/3 of those accounts have some kind of ecommerce software. I don't know whether that fits with industry averages, but it paints a pretty interesting picture.

The internet has a massive number of ecommerce web sites, all processing credit card transactions, hosted on servers with at least a few hundred other users. Let's presume one thing for the sake of this post: breach of one account can lead to compromising another account through local attacks (world-readable configuration files, local file inclusion, and a whole host of others that I haven't publicly disclosed yet) as well as web-based attacks (see my previous post on server and client attacks via mod_userdir). I'll be posting a lot more ways to attack shared hosting in the future, but humor me and take it for granted if you must.

I've seen some debate as to whether PCI standards apply to ecommerce apps that outsource the payment processing to a third party like PayPal or Authorize.net, but I honestly don't think it should matter. First off, any site that handles CC data, even if they are not stored on the system, can be abused. If I can break into your Zen Cart installation and 'customize' your payment module to email those numbers to me, it doesn't matter who does the payment processing. If you have a payment form, the PCI standards should apply to you.

But here's the thing: every one of my company's servers gets scanned for PCI compliance. Every one of them passes, and I've got the certificate to prove it. When you hit a cPanel server directly (via IP address), only one website will come up, and it is usually a default cPanel page, which is pretty minimal. Each of these servers has hundreds more accounts that don't even get touched by McAfee's web app scanner.

Finding XSS holes on at least one of those accounts is practically guaranteed. In fact, when I first started in my current position, I was able to gain shell access on any given server in less than 5 minutes. I've since been able to make incredible progress with mass patchings and my own vulnerability research, but there are enough unknown issues and custom code that I'll never be able to fix them all.

So why are these servers being certified as PCI compliant?

Now, my company don't actually advertise that our shared servers are PCI compliant, but we do test them as part of our own merchant agreements. In addition, we've greatly improved our processes and sales practices to make sure that new code is reviewed and apps with sensitive data go on VPSes, but that does nothing for all the old clients, and even less for the millions of other sites out there.

The main point here, of course, is that these servers are consistently tested as PCI compliant. This isn't really a attack on McAfee. Many of our clients use other ASVs for their own sites, and none have a problem with the fact that these sites are mass-hosted, nor the fact that other sites on the same server are not PCI compliant (though if they tried to scan the other sites on the server, I'd put a stop to it pretty quickly, for obvious reasons).

Can somebody with more background in PCI weigh in on this? Is this just a massive oversight on the part of every ASV out there? When my company gets big enough that they need a PCI QSA audit rather than the ineffective ASV scans, are we going to be have to rebuild all of our customers' websites? Are we going to be completely screwed compliance-wise?

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Wednesday, February 18, 2009

The New McAfee Secure Standard

Despite my vocal criticism, I really had a lot of hope for the McAfee Secure Standard. I certainly think there's a need for well-defined and comprehensive web security guidelines. The PCI-DSS is a good start, but very few website owners know when it applies to them, much less how to comply. Enforcement of PCI compliance is, let's face it, a joke. Considering that Visa, American Express, and the PCI-DSS's own FAQ have been having XSS holes lately, that's not really a surprise.

Of course, I didn't expect McAfee Secure to have any consequences for noncompliance (besides not being able to display that shiny logo on your site). What it can provide, though, is a set of guidelines for the web developer and administrator to realistically get a feel for his own security. You know, all that stuff that you can already get over at owasp.org. Those guidelines, combined with a reliable (keyword: reliable) certification system could actually be pretty helpful to the web security world. I'm of the opinion that is a project for the nonprofit sector, but I was willing to give McAfee a chance.

But, they've proven again with their newly published standard, that they either don't understand or don't care about web security. It's a shame, really.

To begin with, the published standard reads more like a sales brochure than a standard. I'm convinced that's really all it is. There's not really much on there that we haven't already seen on their website. The only real new thing is a list of security risks that are identified in the scans and, we assume, risks that would prevent one from being certified.

Interestingly, they compare their own standard with the PCI-DSS as well as... somehow, with a SSL certificate. Seeing as an SSL certificate is not a standard, this doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm really trying to wrap my head around this comparison, but I'm not getting it. According to the "Standard", either implementing SSL encryption is required to aquire a certificate (It's not), or McAfee Secure somehow provides SSL encryption (it doesn't). I guess there's a third option- they're comparing apples to oranges and hoping we don't know the difference.

In that same chart, they compare themselves directly to the PCI-DSS. They make a point of the fact that they have many things PCI doesn't, like checking for "Misuse of Personal Information". Apparently, the PCI-DSS doesn't have anything to say about that... oh, wait. That's the whole point of PCI. Here's the first full sentence of the PCI-DSS: "The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) was developed to encourage and enhance cardholder data security and facilitate the broad adoption of consistent data security measures globally".

Here's a thought- McAfee is a PCI Qualified Security Assessor. Shouldn't they, of all people, understand the PCI-DSS? Are they implying that their standard is superior? Under McAfee's "Required for Certification" section, the following items must be handled for PCI Compliance, but are only "Optional" for McAfee Secure:
  • Error Handling
  • Session Exipration
  • Directory Indexing
  • Client Side Vulnerabilities
  • Server Misconfigurations (a broad category if I've ever seen one)
  • SSL Encryption (Seriously, that's not a requirement.)
Maybe more information from McAfee is required, but they aren't providing it. This is obviously only an outline of a standard at best. No details are given about what exactly "Sever Misconfigurations" are, and I hope that a standard including actual descriptions of what is required for certification is forthcoming. The standard that they published is a joke.

I was awfully disappointed.

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Thursday, October 9, 2008

More McAfee Snake Oil

The McAfee Secure certification is useless.

Over at holisticinfosec.org, Russ McRee has been covering this in depth, but I've had the fortune to know the inside story.

Russ has been making snake oil vendors' deficiencies public for some time. A few weeks before Black Hat, he and I were talking about this, and he showed me a handful of "McAfee Secure" sites. All of them had XSS holes, and many had much worse- SQL injection and other serious issues. Over the next few weeks, we traded more vulnerabilities as we found them, and he amassed a pretty impressive list of weak, but certified secure sites. To top all of this off, we found XSS holes on McAfee's own domain.

We also got our hands on a PCAP dump of one of their scans, which revealed quite a bit of insight into the scanning process. We were able to prove that they do not revoke PCI compliance or McAfee Secure certifications for XSS, though the engine does indeed fuzz for (and occasionally even find) them.

While they were being awarded their Pwnie, Russ put together a paper detailing these findings. He sent the paper to McAfee before publishing, in order to give them a chance to address the issues before they were made public. They surprised us both by responding positively. Some of McAfee's top people spoke with Russ in person a few weeks later, resulting in him publishing this blog post.

That was some time ago, but we still haven't seen any progress. A published standard for what exactly "McAfee Secure" means was promised after 2-3 weeks, and we're now pushing five. The information that we have isn't encouraging- it appears that McAfee Secure will have a different set of standards for enterprise websites and the smaller "Ma and Pa" shops. The latter will not be required to fix XSS issues and the former will not have to do so until an arbitrary time period has expired. What this means is that, to a user looking for evidence that a site can be trusted, the "McAfee Secure" badge on a website will mean exactly what it does now: Absolutely nothing.

I suppose that anybody can offer their own meaningless certifications (and some people have), but as Rafal noted yesterday, calling these sites "McAfee Secure", "Hacker Safe" or anything of the sort is in poor taste at best- fraudulent on the other end of the spectrum.

This brings us to today.

It appears that McAfee intendes to leverage their brand recognition and captalize on the trust of the ill-informed. They have a new service advertised on parts of their website. Found at secureshopping.mcafee.com, it is basically a meta-search engine which will allow one to "shop with confidence at McAfee SECURE certified merchants", according to the text on the site. This actually doesn't strike me as a bad idea, provided the certification is worth something. Considering the certification isn't, the whole thing is rather laughable.

I first stumbled across this site just before Black Hat. The app was probably not intended to be public then, but I immediately (accidentally, actually) discovered an XSS hole in it (this was one of the holes on McAfee's domain mentioned above). While that hole has since been fixed, the situation really isn't any better now.

To begin with, the application doesn't use transport-layer encryption, and is therefore vulnerable to sniffing, tampering, and all the man-in-the-middle attacks that we already know and love. But who bothers with SSL these days?

The shopping application itself seems to be based on the same code as that of become.com. Actually, they appear to have partnered for this service, because when you click a link from McAfee's site to a particular product, you are given a 302 redirect to partner.become.com, then to stat.dealtime.com (whoever that is). From there you are 302-ed anywhere from one to three more times before landing on the requested product page, provided by a McAfee Secure merchant.

In theory, at least.

For the sake of breaking things, let's build a link that will take us through the McAfee Secure gateway to an uncertified website. We'll go to www.become.com, find a product, then deconstruct the link and pass its unique identifier to McAfee shopping center (which, being based on the same code, uses the same format for its links). Lo and behold, the following link will take you directly to the product on Amazon.com- which according to McAfee Secure, is not McAfee Secure.

Next, let's take a look at the app's session ID generation. Admittedly, sessions don't appear to be used for anything in the site (except maybe tracking user activity), but I have to assume that session functionality was added for some reason, and it nicely demonstrates their own lack of understanding of web application security. Can you find the pattern?
1223516988361-0-9IDB
1223516989602-0-gnpY
1223516990254-0-SZPR
1223516990913-0-F9jC

That's right folks, they're using timestamps as session IDs. Now, I've seen this practice used by banks, mortgage companies, and ecommerce sites, but I never expected to see such poor practices on the website of the "world's largest dedicated security technology company" (their boast, not mine).

Finally let's look at the partners, who we have to assume will help provides us "a secure online shopping experience with thousands of McAfee SECURE sites". The sites at become.com and dealtime.com are themselves riddled with XSS and open redirect holes (not to mention storing the answer to a CAPTCHA within the form to be submitted).

With such poor decisions being made, can we really expect McAfee Secure to live up to its name?

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Wednesday, August 6, 2008

McAfee takes the Pwnie

At Black Hat tonight, McAfee won the Pwnie Award for lamest vendor response.

Good for them. I have to say, they deserve it.

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