Both software quality, and the mechanisms that support its improvement, are critical to the security of people’s personal data.

In education, protecting sensitive personal data is an integral part of safeguarding those for whom we are responsible.

It isn’t good enough to shrug our shoulders if sensitive data about the children in our care could easily be compromised and leaked.

It isn’t good enough to idly preside over a plethora of vulnerable smart things sending who-knows-what to who-knows-where and say we are keeping people safe online.

Unfortunately, we know that software quality in a lot of sectors is… patchy. With the broadest brush strokes, we can separate software into these categories:

• Really great work, made with great care;
• Work that will need ongoing extrinsic motivation to deliver and maintain quality;
• Software that is so badly designed it should not be out there.

The particular challenge is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, from marketing materials, to determine which category a given product is in and make an informed decision about whether to invest in it or not. Proprietary code, licence agreements that forbid investigating how things actually work, software supply chains that are opaque even to the vendor… It is even less likely you will be successful at that assessment when it’s software as a service, a.k.a “in the cloud”, because you can’t see any of it.

Throughout the software industry, there exists this problem: without regulation and enforcement of professional standards (where are the professional standards?), and because customers can’t accurately assess quality for the reasons I’ve just stated, many get away with delivering inadequate quality. Or, they could and would do the right thing, but don’t have the expertise or the extrinsic motivators that help to identify problems and incentivise improvement. Because competitors aren’t held to a higher standard either, there is a race to the bottom of the barrel for software quality in order to compete.

The best tools today we have to address critical security issues include vulnerability disclosure programmes (bug bounties), actively soliciting the support of others to identify and fix vulnerabilities. Even if a rewards programme isn’t part of the picture, the Enlightened Vendor does have a process and responds appropriately to good-faith security researchers.

However, education is an area that often suffers from a lack of computer security expertise, and certainly doesn’t have enterprise budgets. Today, education vendors generally do not fit into the “Enlightened Vendor” category, because people are not yet asking the questions.

“No-one’s ever asked us that before”… well, a lot of the time people should have asked that before.

Where I see myself fitting into this equation: I would like to be someone who can help drive this improvement in education software. My interest and experience with computer security, and being in the position to influence this as a school IT Manager puts me at the crossroads of safeguarding in education and computer security.

So, I will be asking the difficult questions that “no-one has ever asked before”. I will indeed be observing how software actually behaves in practice when trialling software. I will be asking SaaS vendors why they don’t have a vulnerability disclosure policy and making sure they are thinking about emerging threats.

This isn’t going to be particularly easy.

But, if we say we care about keeping those in our care safe from online threats to their safety, growth and development, computer security is an area we should no longer ignore.

Today’s malware-loader-du-jour, Bumblebee, has been seen achieving initial access through phishing sites that convince a user to mount a downloaded ISO image. This may be a reaction to Microsoft’s recent improvements to macro-enabled document security.

Adversaries push ISO files through compromised email (reply) chains, known as thread hijacked emails, to deploy the Bumblebee loader. ISO files contain a byte-to-byte copy of low-level data stored on a disk. The malicious ISO files are delivered through Google Cloud links or password protected zip folders. The ISO files contain a hidden DLL with random names and an LNK file. DLL (Dynamic Link Library) is a library that contains codes and data which can be used by more than one program at a time. LNK is a filename extension in Microsoft Windows for shortcuts to local files.

https://cloudsek.com/technical-analysis-of-bumblebee-malware-loader/

One of the things that we can do to help our users avoid this new initial execution foothold is by blocking the mounting of ISO images, as long as you can be confident this will not break anything they actually need to do! I am fortunate enough to be able to do this.

(Djordje Atlialp shows us how to achieve this with classic GPOs, and also a more comprehensive neutering of ISO files.)

Here is what I have rolled out as an Intune PowerShell Script to block the mounting of ISOs. No reboot is required. Users will see the Mount option disappear from the context menu of an ISO file within File Explorer and will be unable to double-click to mount a malicious ISO. Or, indeed, any ISO. 😉

We will head to Microsoft Endpoint Manager admin center, go to Devices > Scripts and create a new Windows 10 and later PowerShell script.

The Intune Script

UPDATE: I have made some improvements — namely, the previous one liner will cause failures to be reported in Intune on subsequent runs. We will now only add the value where it does not exist, and we will add support for Windows.VhdFile as well. It’s no longer a one-liner!

$items = @(
    @{
        path = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Classes\Windows.IsoFile\shell\mount"
        valueName = "ProgrammaticAccessOnly"   
    }
    @{
        path = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Classes\Windows.VhdFile\shell\mount"
        valueName = "ProgrammaticAccessOnly"
    }
)

foreach($item in $items) {
    if ($null -eq (Get-Item -Path $item.path).GetValue($item.valueName)) {
        New-ItemProperty -Path $item.path -Name $item.valueName -Value ""
    }
}

The body of the script can be as follows:

New-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Classes\Windows.IsoFile\shell\mount" -Name ProgrammaticAccessOnly -Value ""

(This REG_SZ value need only exist, with a blank string as its Data, for this to work.)

Assign it to the device group and you are all set.

Removal

To undo this change, we can reverse what we’re doing and Remove-ItemProperty on the items we added:

$items = @(
    @{
        path = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Classes\Windows.IsoFile\shell\mount"
        valueName = "ProgrammaticAccessOnly"   
    }
    @{
        path = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Classes\Windows.VhdFile\shell\mount"
        valueName = "ProgrammaticAccessOnly"
    }
)

foreach($item in $items) {
    if ($null -ne (Get-Item -Path $item.path).GetValue($item.valueName)) {
        Remove-ItemProperty -Path $item.path -Name $item.valueName
    }
}

Conclusion

This doesn’t make you bulletproof, but will, if tolerated by your users, provide a substantial degree of protection, at the time of writing, from any number of current malware loaders that are using the ISO image technique to achieve initial code execution. The nature of the separate filesystem within the ISO presently prevents it from being marked as being from the Wild Wild West World Wide Web.

Inspired by Davy Wybiral’s demonstration (explanation) of how web pages can often enumerate services running on localhost using JavaScript, I put together Socky and SockyNotifier.

The idea is that you have Socky listen on target ports, and any connection attempts that come in to those target ports will fire a user notification at the top right of your screen (that’s the job of SockyNotifier — to show those notifications).

Note: that this is not particularly serious or practical, but I wanted a project that let me work directly with the Core Foundation APIs in C, and this seemed a good opportunity.

Keeping an eye on failed logins and the user accounts that are being targeted is an important part of being responsible for an Office 365/Azure Active Directory tenant.

If you can afford the higher-level O365/Azure AD plans, there are great tools built in to the Azure Portal that allow useful intelligence into your security posture.

For The Rest of Us(tm), we sometimes need to be a little creative to gather the information needed. For on-premises Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) servers, I put together a simple, quick and, perhaps slightly hacky script to extract the usernames from recent failed login events from the Windows Event Log and dump them, along with the rest of the Windows Event, to a CSV file for later analysis.

This specifically searches event logs from the past 12 hours (43200000 milliseconds in the $query).

Note that this is heavily dependent upon the format of the event message having the username on the (zero-indexed) line 14. Works for us — no warranties, etc. etc.!

So, the iOS 12.1.4 and MacOS Mojave 10.14.3 Supplemental updates are out, fixing Grant Thompson’s reported FaceTime groups bug. You know, the one that turned your device into a listening device…

(It’s at least something that Apple acknowledged that the reporting process for security issues from non-developers needs to be improved.)

I note that one of the other security fixes in this release is explained as follows:

Live Photos in FaceTime Available for: iPhone 5s and later, iPad Air and later, and iPod touch 6th generation

Impact: A thorough security audit of the FaceTime service uncovered an issue with Live Photos

Description: The issue was addressed with improved validation on the FaceTime server.

CVE-2019-7288: Apple

APPLE-SA-2019-2-07-1 iOS 12.1.4

It’s good that they thought it wise to do a thorough audit on the rest of FaceTime, but why is this bug so poorly explained? “Uncovered an issue”? Of what scope? Of what severity?

Perhaps security issues Apple discovers internally don’t get disclosed, to provide an additional layer of obscurity if they believe others aren’t yet aware of them? Perhaps this is a server-side bug only? (But if it is, why note it in the client OS release?)

It is an unusual practice (even for a company as secretive as Apple) to provide a line and a CVE reference and so on, but not give any detail at all in the public release notes.

The march of freely available TLS certificates for domain validation continues in the form of the Let’s Encrypt project and I’m very pleased that it does.

I’m very happy with the Certbot client on most systems where I need to deploy Let’s Encrypt, but on hosts facing the big wide world that are Windows-based, Certbot obviously is not an option!

Fortunately, I’ve had success with the ACMESharp library for PowerShell. What’s cool about the library is that it does break down the process into individual commands, meaning you can automate, script and report on your certificate status with a great deal of flexibility.

For simpler scenarios, though, the letsencrypt-win-simple client offers a nice friendly command line interface to the ACMESharp library and is a nice easy way to quickly retrieve and install a Let’s Encrypt certificate on a public-facing IIS instance. Automating the renewal process is easy too — just create a Task Scheduler task.

Yes, it’s a command line client, and there are Windows folks who may not be comfortable with that, but it walks you through every part of the process. No memorising of switches and flags are needed!

There really is no excuse — now is the perfect time to get everything on HTTPS!

I have avoided overt political statements on this blog, unless they fell within the sphere of technology and I felt very strongly. 

But this is beyond political. 

I am appalled at my government’s appeasement of Mr Trump. I am appalled at their willingness to do deals with this new US administration.

Through the factually verifiable acts of this new administration (for example, the dismissal of the Attorney General after opposing the president), there is a clear attempt to dismantle checks and balances that are an integral and essential part of a democratic state. There is an obvious contempt for the rule of law. 

Functioning democracies do not behave in this way.

We must not wait for this US administration to start ‘disappearing’ people who lawfully oppose the administration before we act to say, loudly and clearly, that enough is enough. 

Safeguarding British values (as those values are defined by my government) demands that we condemn and oppose this behaviour.

I demand that my government condemn the Trump administration’s rejection of democratic norms and utilise any and all diplomatic pressure to make this clear.

History will judge us very poorly if we sit around waiting for it to get ‘bad enough’ before we take a stand.

I sincerely hope the UK Government plans to actually debate the “Repeal the new Surveillance laws (Investigatory Powers Act)” petition in Parliament now that it has reached 100,000 signatories, including myself.

Of course, the commitment they made is carefully worded such that attracting that number of signatures merely means it will be “considered” for debate.

Recent events in the United States and elsewhere demonstrate that maintaining the right balance of power between the state and the individual is more important than ever. I would not normally get political here, but the circumstances are anything but normal — the frightening jolt the western world seems to be making towards extreme right-wing authoritarianism means that maintaining that balance is nothing short of absolutely critical.

The list of organisations who can access internet connection records is enormously wide and includes bodies as mundane as the Food Standards Agency! This is way beyond something that could be argued as essential to maintaining the UK’s operational intelligence capabilities for preventing domestic acts of mass violence.

This law would be deeply, deeply troubling at any time, but is even more so as the US election shows us the threat of home-grown extremism that rises through established political bodies and gains the powers of high office.

Personally, I urge everyone to support efforts to mount legal challenges to this legislation.

Please consider supporting organisations like Open Rights Group.

I have written on this subject before, but as suspected, surveillance is back on Parliament’s agenda again.

Is the Investigatory Powers Bill the latest attempt at a “modernising” of existing laws and conventions, as is often claimed, or an unprecedented extension of surveillance powers?

I would argue strongly that the capability for your local council, tax enforcement authorities, and the myriad of other agencies that are proposed to have access to this data, to ‘see’ every thought you might have dared to research online is vastly more than would have been possible in human history. It’s also vastly more than any other country has sought the legal power to access.

Photo by Luz on Flickr. Licensed under CC-BY.

Given what we know in a post-Snowden era, this proposed legislation is quite clearly not about ensuring a continued intelligence flow for the purposes of national security. That has been going on behind closed doors, away from any democratic process and meaningful oversight, for many years, and will no doubt continue. Whether or not the activities of military intelligence agencies have a strong legal foundation has apparently not stopped them from gathering what they need to do their job. It is important for me to note that I don’t doubt the hard work they do, and the success they have had over the last ten years in preventing violence in the UK. However, we know that overreach and abuse have occurred — at the kind of scale that undermines the very values our government and their agencies are there to protect.

It is clear to me that, given the secret and ‘shady’ nature of much of the activities of the security apparatus of perhaps every nation state, what we do not need to do as a democratic society is provide a strong legal protection for such morally ambiguous acts. If a tactic is invasive or aggressive, but genuinely necessary in a “lesser of two evils” sense, the fact that the actor has to take on the liability for it provides an inherent safeguard. If it is easy and low risk to employ that tactic, there is a stronger temptation for its abuse, or for its inappropriate extension into everyday investigations. When these laws are ‘sold’ to the people as being for national security and to keep us safe from violence, it cannot be acceptable that the powers are made available to other agencies for any other purposes, as the Bill proposes.

A nation state does not have the right to violate the sanctity of the boundary of someone’s home without strong justification — a warrant. A nation state similarly does not have the right to violate that boundary in the form of bulk data collection on an entire populace. The Internet connections we open and the data we transfer is something that we can keep private from our government, unless due process is followed to override that on an individual basis.

That must remain. That principle must be protected, or we’ve forgotten why we bother with this ‘free country’ thing.

It must be protected even when we face short- and medium-term risks to our safety. Why? Because it is not hyperbole to say that failing to do so lays the technical and legal foundations of a police state, which is a much more significant long-term risk.

Fortunately, there are many fighting against this Bill, which (even if you disagree with my arguments above) is widely regarded to be completely unfit for purpose.

I wholeheartedly support the Don’t Spy on Us campaign and its six principles, and I stand with them as a supporter of the Open Rights Group, one of the organisations behind the campaign.

Today I release DfontSplitter 0.4.2 for Mac. This is a critical security update that fixes an issue relating to the Sparkle software update framework when the update pages are served over HTTP. As of 0.4.2, the update pages are now, naturally, served over HTTPS. (It was more than five years ago when the last release was made!)

The vulnerability means that in a scenario where an attacker could launch a man-in-the-middle attack during a Sparkle-enabled app’s update detection process, arbitrary JavaScript could execute in the WebView hosting the release notes. Due to the context that the WebView runs in, the app could then be convinced to run local files, expose local files to a remote server and even execute arbitrary code. More details and a full breakdown are at the post on Vulnerable Security.

This update fixes the Sparkle-related security issue by updating Sparkle and requiring HTTPS for all future DfontSplitter app update communications. Due to new build requirements in Xcode 7.2, the application now requires at least OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) and a 64-bit Intel processor.

The automatic updates feature within DfontSplitter should detect the update, but you can also download and install it manually.

Thanks to Kevin Chen for pointing out the existence of the issue with Sparkle and that it affected DfontSplitter. I had somehow missed the original reporting of the vulnerability, so I particularly appreciate Kevin bringing this to my timely attention.

The astute among you may note that in the Info.plist for this update, I explicitly disable the OS X 10.11 SDK’s check for HTTPS forward secrecy in the HTTPS communications to the update server. Once I figure out a cipher suite configuration that I am happy with, and understand, in Pound (my reverse proxy acting as the TLS terminus), I will update the app again to require forward secrecy.