Ridin’ that AppSec Bull: OWASP AppSec USA in Austin

OWASP held its annual USA conference on application security last week in Austin. The conference was well run and well attended: more than 800 people, lots of developers and infosec experts. Here’s what I learned:

The Web Started off Broken

Javascript, the browser Same Origin Policy, and what eventually became the DOM were all created in about 10 days by 1 guy back in 1995 while Netscape was fighting for its life against Microsoft and IE. This explains a lot.

Fundamental decisions were made without enough time and thought – the results are design weaknesses that make CSRF and XSS attacks possible, as well as other problems and threats that we still face today.

The Web is Broken Today

We’re continuing to live with these problems because the brutal zero sum competitive game between browser vendors stops any of them from going back and trying to undo early decisions – nobody can afford to risk “breaking the web” and losing customers to a competitor. Browser vendors have to keep moving forward, adding new features and capabilities and more complexity on a broken foundation.

But it’s worse than just this. Apps are being hacked because of simple, stupid and sloppy mistakes that people keep making today, not just naive mistakes that were made more than 10 years ago. Most web apps (and now mobile apps) are being broken through SQL Injection even though this is easy for everyone to understand and prevent. Secure password storage is another fundamental thing that people keep doing wrong. We have to get together, make sure developers understand these basic problems, and get them fixed. Now.

The Web is going to stay Broken

Even crypto, done properly (which is asking a lot of most people), won’t stay safe for long. It’s becoming cheap enough and easy enough to rent enough Cloud resources to break long-established crypto algorithms. We need to keep aware of the shifting threats against crypto algorithms, and become what Michael Howard calls “crypto agile”.

HD Moore showed that the Cloud can also be used for Internet-wide reconnaissance. Not just scanning for vulnerabilities or inconsistencies in different parts of the web. This is opening up the entire web to researchers and attackers to find new correlations and patterns and attack points. With the resources of the Cloud, “$7 own the Internet hacks” are now possible.

Then there are new languages and development platforms like HTML5, which provides a rich set of capabilities to web and mobile developers, including audio and video, threads in Javascript, client-side SQL, client-side virtual file systems, and WebSockets – making the browser into a “a mini-OS”. This also means that the attack surface of HTML 5 apps has exploded, opening up new attack vectors for XSS and CSRF, and lots of other new types of attacks. From a security view point, HTML 5 is really, truly, deeply scary.

But some things are Getting Fixed

There are some things being done to make the web ecosystem safer like improvements to Javascript, ADsafe and the like.

Content Security Policy

But the most important and useful thing that I learned about is Content Security Policy, an attempt to fix fundamental problems in the Same Origin Policy, by letting companies define a white list of domains that browsers should consider to be valid sources of executable scripts.

CSP was mentioned in a lot of the talks as a new way of dealing with problems as well as finding out what is happening out there in the web, even helping to make HTML 5 safer. Twitter is already using Content Security Policy to detect violations, so, with some caveats, it works. CSP won’t work for every situation (consumer mashups for example), it doesn’t support inline Javascript, it only works in the latest browsers and then only if developers and administrators know about it and use it properly, and I am sure that people will find attacks to get around it. But it is a simple, understandable and practical way for enterprise app developers to close off, or at least significantly reduce the risk of, XSS attacks – something that developers could actually figure out and might actually use.

I agree with one of the speakers that CSP is “maybe the single most important thing we've done for security in the last several years” – it was worth going to the conference just to learn more about it. Now I'm looking forward to a Cheat Sheet from OWASP on how people can use Content Security Policy to protect their web sites from XSS.

Devops

Another key theme at the conference was how Devops – getting developers, operations and infosec working together, using common tools to deliver software faster and in smaller batches – can help make applications more secure. Through better communication, collaboration and automation, better configuration management and deployment and run-time checking and monitoring, and faster feedback to and from developers, you can prevent more problems from happening and find and fix problems much faster.

There was a Devops keynote, a Devops panel, and several case studies: Twitter, Etsy, Netflix and Mozilla showed what was possible if you have the discipline, talent, culture, tools, money and management commitment to do this. Of course for the rest of us who don’t work at Web 2.0 firms with more money than God, the results and constraints and approach will be different, but Devops can definitely help break down the cultural and organizational and information walls between Appsec and development. If you’re in AppSec, this is something to get behind of and help with, don’t get in the way.

Other Things Seen and Overheard

You apparently need a beard to work on the manly and furry AppSec team at Twitter.

If you’re asking executives for funding, don’t say “Defence in Depth” – they know this just means wasting more money. Talk about “compensating controls” instead.

“The most reliable, effective way of injecting evil code is buying an ad”.

There was a lot more. Austin was an excellent venue: friendly people, great restaurants, cool bats (I like bats), lots of good places to chill out and enjoy the nice weather. And the conference was great. I'm already looking forward to next year.