WPA Wi-Fi encryption cracked!

If you are using a wireless network, especially in office environment, you should be well awared that running Wi-Fi without any encryption is a big no-no, and that the depreciated Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption is extremely weak and can be cracked within seconds. As such, you probably are using Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption to protect your Wi-Fi from unauthorized access and/or information stealing/leaking.

But now, bad news is that 2 German researchers - Martin Beck and Erik Tews - have found a way to crack the Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP, which was supposed to fix all problems with WEP) of WPA encryption within minutes, and they are going to share their cracking tools to the public during the PacSec Conference in Tokyo this 12-13 November 2008. In fact, some of the code used in the attack was already quietly added into the Aircrack-ng Wi-Fi encryption hacking tool about two weeks ago.

In short: WPA is no longer secured!

So what can you do to safeguard the security of your wireless network? Ensure that your wireless access points and equipments support WPA2, and switch over to it. WPA2 implements the mandatory elements of IEEE 802.11i standard, and is still uncracked by now, if it doesn't make use of the TKIP, and is instead set to use Advanced Encryption System (AES) with its Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol (CCMP).

Click here to read more about this new crack on WPA Wi-Fi encryption.

Hardening PHP security with Suhosin

Suhosin (수호신) is a Korean word that means “guardian-angel”, originally developed by Stefan Esser, a German developer who loves Korean language.

Originated from the Hardened-PHP project, Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations. It was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core.

There are 2 parts in Suhosin:

• Patch to PHP that hardens the Zend engine to protect from possible buffer overflows and related vulnerabilities.

• Standalone Suhosin extension module for PHP to provide many security features that are not present in PHP itself.

Both of them can work together, or the extension module alone can be used.

Some of the features of Suhosin are:

• Logging of errors to syslog or arbitrary logfiles
• Create blacklists and whitelists per virtual host
• Filter on GET and POST requests, file uploads, and cookies
• Transparent encryption of sessions and cookies
• Set memory limits
• ... and many more
  

If your web applications are developed in PHP, you should seriously consider installing Suhosin to harden its security. It is already included in most major Linux distributions. Search for "php5-suhosin" or "php-suhosin" in your Linux distribution to install it.

For more information about downloading and installing Suhosin, click here.

Securing Apache web with ModSecurity

If you are hosting your websites with Apache web server, which is mostly the case if your web server is running on Linux platform, you should seriously consider installing ModSecurity to provide intrusion detection and prevention for your web applications.

ModSecurity is an open source, free web application firewall (WAF) Apache module. According to Forrester Research, it is the most widely deployed web application firewall nowadays.

WAFs are deployed to establish an external security layer that increases security, detects and prevents attacks before they reach web applications. It aims at shielding web applications from known and unknown attacks, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, path traversal, etc.

Features of ModSecurity includes:

• HTTP Traffic Logging - ModSecurity makes full HTTP transaction logging possible, allowing complete requests and responses to be logged.
• Real-Time Monitoring and Attack Detection - ModSecurity can monitor the HTTP traffic in real time in order to detect attacks. In this case, ModSecurity operates as a web intrusion detection tool, allowing you to react to suspicious events that take place at your web systems.
• Attack Prevention and Just-in-time Patching - ModSecurity can also act immediately to prevent attacks from reaching your web applications.

ModSecurity supports the following security models:

• Negative Security Model - Looks for known bad, malicious requests. This method is effective at blocking a large number of automated attacks, however it is not the best approach for identifying new attack vectors.

• Positive Security Model - When positive security model is deployed, only requests that are known to be valid are accepted, with everything else rejected. This approach works best with applications that are heavily used but rarely updated.

• Virtual Patching - With ModSecurity, applications can be patched from the outside, without touching the application source code (and even without any access to it), making your systems secure until a proper patch is produced.

• Extrusion Detection Model - ModSecurity can also monitor outbound data and identify and block information disclosure issues such as leaking detailed error messages or Credit Card Numbers, etc.

ModSecurity is included in all the major Linux distributions. Look for "libapache2-mod-security" or just "mod_security" in your Linux distribution to install it.

Click here for detailed documentations about ModSecurity.