Operation n

A serious blackberry flaw was squashed and patched up by RIM.

Google have introduced another web proxy assessment tool in the form of
Ratproxy. The good thing about it, it roots out potential vulnerabilities, even in Javascript snippets and considers browser oddities. However, the proof of the pudding would be how it handles authenticated sessions. Something that I know Paros proxy does not particularly do well.

Earlier in the month (July 2008), it was reported that vendors had released a fix for a then undisclosed problem with DNS. Even now the big ISP players are still dragging feet in terms of this critical patch. They really should hurry up because an attack code has magically appeared on the multi-purpose testing tool, metasploit. Well the reason for this, is the apparent disclosure of the dns issue when the security firm, Matasano leaked information on their site about it, forcing Dan Kaminsky to openly provide details about it.

The nominees are in for the security’s answer to the Oscars.

Just an off-the-cuff article here from personal experience. I’ve seen a number of privilege escalation of issues with web applications. Nothing strange in that. Except that they have been happening in Microsoft .Net applications. The .Net framework does have some mature security get-out-jail-for-free cards but it does cover everything. I’ve seen id enumeration available on query parameters. This ID enumeration lead to different pages for a completely different user being displayed. Also one application had an “admin” query parameter set to “false” for a standard user. Can you guess what was attempted to gain privilege escalation?
Access control should be set somewhere in the code as well the data that lies behind your application (at an OS/database level).