Ethical Hacking

Learn to find vulnerabilities before the bad guys do! Gain real world hands on hacking experience in our state of the art hacking lab. Course designed and taught by expert instructors with years of penetration testing experience. 12 student maximum in every class. Certification attempt included in every package.
Computer Forensics Training at InfoSec Institute

Gain the in-demand skills of a certified computer examiner, learn to recover trace data left behind by fraud, theft, and cybercrime perpetrators. Discover the source of computer crime and abuse at your organization so that it never happens again. All of our class sizes are guaranteed to be 12 students or less to facilitate one-on-one interaction with one of our expert instructors.




Network Security Web-App-Sec
[Top] [All Lists]

On sandboxes, and why I ... don't care.

Subject: On sandboxes, and why I ... don't care.
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 00:15:44 +1100
Hi there,

I must have missed a memo or something. I don't know about you, but I've reviewed many J2EE apps which had far greater things wrong than not running in a verified / trusted environment. I've never seen an attack which is realistic or usable for such attacks.

If I find (say) 100 things wrong, the business can afford the time and resources to fix 65 of these and the inclination to fix none. Any fix is a good fix from my point of view, but I need to be careful in what I strongly recommend to be fixed, and what I'll let go through to the keeper.

I'm sorry, but I can't recommend turning on the verifier and asking the devs to go through the painful effort of figuring out exactly what perms their code will require when there are actual exploitable issues (those 65 - 80 or so) which may cause actual financial loss. Ditto asking for "final" and other modifiers to be used. Turning on the verifier / forcing the assertion of required privs requires a complete re-test. For many larger apps, testing can cost millions of dollars. How much has been lost with this attack? Ever?

Remember, the mitigant to many risks may not be a technical control; it may be reactive (audit), legal (T&C's / contracts), or it may be process driven, such as settlement periods.

I'm interested - has *anyone* seen an attack (.NET or J2EE) which aims at the trust model of the underlying VM? Has it lost anyone any money / reputation / shareholder confidence? I'm happy to hear if there has been, but otherwise, I'd like to think we have more important things to educate devland on than worrying about a risk which doesn't really rate.

thanks,
Andrew

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>