Tag: Security

Reporting Last Patch Dates on Fedora / RedHat / CentOS Systems

I needed to verify the last time a bunch of servers were patched — basically to ensure compliance with the stated quarterly patching interval. This python script pulls the list of installed packages and the date for each package, sorts the info by date DESC, and then reports the latest date on any packages — as well as the number of packages updated on that date. If there’s only one … the system still might bear some investigation. But if a couple of dozen packages were updated in the past quarter … we don’t need to be too worried about turning up on the out-of-compliance report.

import subprocess
import re
import datetime
from collections import OrderedDict

def getFirstElement(odictInput):
    '''
        This function returns the first element from an ordered collection (an arbitrary element if an unordered collection is passed in)
        Input -- odictInput -- ordered collection
        Output -- type varies -- first element of ordered collection, arbitrary element of unordered collection

    '''
    return next(iter(odictInput))

listHosts = ['host01.example.com', 'host02.example.com', 'host03.example.com','host04.example.com','host05.example.com']

for strHost in listHosts:
        dictPatchDates = {}

        objResults = subprocess.Popen(['ssh', strHost, 'rpm', '-qa', '--last'],stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
        for strLine in objResults.stdout:
                strPackageInfo  = strLine.decode('utf-8').rstrip()
                listPackageInfo = re.split(r'\s*([a-zA-Z]{3,}\s[0-9]{2,}\s[a-zA-Z]{3,}\s[0-9]{2,})',strPackageInfo)
                strUpdateDate = listPackageInfo[1]
                dateUpdateDate = datetime.datetime.strptime(strUpdateDate, "%a %d %b %Y").date()
                if dictPatchDates.get(dateUpdateDate) is not None:
                        dictPatchDates[dateUpdateDate] = dictPatchDates[dateUpdateDate] + 1
                else:
                        dictPatchDates[dateUpdateDate] = 1

        dictOrderedPatchDates = OrderedDict(sorted(dictPatchDates.items(), key=lambda t: t[0],reverse=True))
        dateLatestPatch = getFirstElement(dictOrderedPatchDates)
        print(f"{strHost}\t{dateLatestPatch}\t{dictOrderedPatchDates[dateLatestPatch]}")

Fortify on Demand Remediation: Cookie Security: Cookie not Sent Over SSL

This is another one that might be a false positive or might be legit. If you look at the documentation for PHP’s setcookie function, you will see the sixth parameter sets a restriction so cookies are only sent over secure connections. If you are not setting this restriction, the vulnerability is legitimate and you should sort that. But … if you followed PHP’s documentation and passed 1 to the parameter? FoD is falsely reporting that the parameter is not set to true.

In this case, the solution is easy enough. Change your perfectly valid 1

to say true

And voila, the vulnerability has been remediated.

Fortify on Demand Remediation: Command Injection

Any time user input is used to shell out and execute a command, you risk the user executing more than you want. I can string together commands in DOS using &, in Unix using ; … and stringing together commands and then executing them can blow things up spectacularly.

You can add any sort of filter to the user input to sort this … however, it doesn’t absolutely mean the vulnerability doesn’t exist. If your “user” input is trusted (in this case, it’s an automated process where some code calls some other code … so “passing” is good enough), no big. But if there are actual users involved, you should also filter out any characters that are used to string commands together.

Fortify on Demand Remediation — Cross-Site Scripting DOM (JS)

This vulnerability occurs when you accept user input or gather input from a AJAX call to another web site and then use that input in output. The solution is to sanitize the input, but Fortify on Demand seems to object strenuously to setting innerHTML … so filtering alone may not be sufficient depending on how you subsequently use the data.

To sanitize a string in JavaScript, use a function like this:

/**
 * Sanitize and encode all HTML in a string
 * @param  {string} str  The input string
 * @return {string} –    The sanitized string
 */
 var sanitizeHTML = function (str) {
    return str.replace(/&/g‘&amp;’).replace(/</g‘&lt;’).replace(/>/g‘&gt;’);
};

This will replace ampersands and the < and > from potential HTML tags with the HTML-encoded equivalents. To avoid using innerHTML, you might need to get a little creative. In many cases, I have a span where the results are displayed. I color-code the results based on success/failure … in that case, I an replace innerHTML with a combination of setting the css color style element to ‘green’ or ‘red’ then setting the innerText to my message string.

I can bold an entire element using a similar method. Changing some of the text, however … I haven’t come up with anything other than breaking the message into multiple HTML elements. E.g. a span for “msgStart”, one for “msgMiddle”, and one for “msgEnd” – I can then bold “msgMiddle” and set innerText for all three elements.

Fortify on Demand Remediation – Header Manipulation: Cookies

This is a quick one — putting user input into a cookie is bad — they can throw in CRLF’s and add extra “stuff” into the header

setcookie("ECCKTHistoryCookieSamName", $strLogonUserID, time()+86400, "/sampleTool", $cookiescope, 1);

Strip out the CR, LF, and CRLF’s:

setcookie("ECCKTHistoryCookieSamName", str_replace(array("\r\n", "\n", "\r"), ' ', $strLogonUserID), time()+86400, "/sampleTool", $cookiescope, 1);

 

Fortify on Demand Remediation – Password Management: Hardcoded Password and Privacy Violation

These two vulnerabilities occur in the obvious case — you’ve hard coded a password or some sort of private info (e.g. SSN) and then printed it out to the browser. Don’t do that! But it also seems to occur quite frequently when Fortify on Demand doesn’t like your variable name. As an example, I have a string that provides a consistent error message when user authentication fails.

I then print the string to the screen when the user’s logon fails. Fortify says I am disclosing the user’s password. I’m obviously not. Simply renaming the variable sorts it. Now … yes, this is silly. But it’s a lot easier than trying to convince someone in Security to manually review the code, acknowledge that something about a bad password error is a totally reasonable (and descriptive) variable name, and add an exception for your code. Since bad password is error 49, I just used that in the now less descriptive variable name [ (1) Not too many people know the LDAP error codes off the top of their head, and (2) there are actually a handful of ldap bind return codes that will print this error].

Fortify on Demand Remediation – SQL Injection

This vulnerability occurs when you accept user input and then use that input in a SQL query. The basic remediation is to use oci_bind_by_name to bind variables into placeholders.

A query using an equivalence clause

The simplest case is a query with an equivalence clause.

The code:

        $strQuery = "SELECT DISTINCT EXCHANGE_CARRIER_CIRCUIT_ID, CIRCUIT_DESIGN_ID FROM circuit$strDBLink WHERE EXCHANGE_CARRIER_CIRCUIT_ID = '$strECCKT' ORDER BY CIRCUIT_DESIGN_ID";
        $stmt = oci_parse($kpiprd_conn, $strQuery);
        oci_set_prefetch($stmt, 300);
        oci_execute($stmt);

Becomes:

        $strQuery = "SELECT DISTINCT EXCHANGE_CARRIER_CIRCUIT_ID, CIRCUIT_DESIGN_ID FROM circuit$strDBLink WHERE EXCHANGE_CARRIER_CIRCUIT_ID IN :ecckt ORDER BY CIRCUIT_DESIGN_ID";
        $stmt = oci_parse($kpiprd_conn, $strQuery);
        oci_bind_by_name($stmt, ':ecckt', $strECCKT);
        oci_set_prefetch($stmt, 300);
        oci_execute($stmt);

The same placeholder can be used with the like query. Use “select something from table where columnname like :placeholdername” followed by an oci_bind_by_name($stmt, “:placeholdername”, $strPlaceholderVariable).

A query using an IN clause

– is a little tricker. You could iterate through the array of values and build :placeholder1, :placeholder2, …, :placeholdern and then iterate through the array of values again to bind each value to its corresponding placeholder. A cleaner approach is to use an Oracle collection ($coll in this example) and binding the collection to a single placeholder.

            $arrayCircuitNames = array('L101 /T1    /ELYROHU0012/ELYROHXA32C','111  /ST01  /CHMPILCPF01/CHMPILCPHH3','C102 /OC12  /PHLAPAFG-19/PHLAPAFGW22')
            $strQuery = "SELECT CIRCUIT_DESIGN_ID, EXCHANGE_CARRIER_CIRCUIT_ID  FROM circuit$strDBLink  WHERE EXCHANGE_CARRIER_CIRCUIT_ID in (SELECT column_value FROM table(:myIds))";            $stmt = oci_parse($kpiprd_conn, $strQuery);
            $coll = oci_new_collection($kpiprd_conn, 'ODCIVARCHAR2LIST','SYS');
            foreach ($arrayCircuitNames as $key) {
               $coll->append($key);
            }
            oci_bind_by_name($stmt, ':myIds', $coll, -1, OCI_B_NTY);
            oci_set_prefetch($stmt, 300);
            oci_execute($stmt);
Queries with multiple LIKE conditions

Queries with an OR’d group of LIKE clauses can be handled in a similar fashion – either iterate through the array twice or create a collection with strings that include the wildcard characters, then bind that collection to a single placeholder. Create a semi-join using an EXISTS predicate

            $arrayLocs = array('ERIEPAXE%', 'HNCKOHXA%', 'LTRKARXK%');
            $strQuery = "select location_id, clli_code from network_location$strDBLink where exists (select 1 from TABLE(:likelocs) where clli_code like column_value) order by clli_code";
            $stmt = oci_parse($kpiprd_conn, $strQuery);

            $coll = oci_new_collection($kpiprd_conn, 'ODCIVARCHAR2LIST','SYS');
            foreach ($arrayLocs as $strLocation) {
                $coll->append($strLocation);
            }
            oci_bind_by_name($stmt, ':likelocs', $coll, -1, OCI_B_NTY);
            oci_execute($stmt);
A query using DUAL

Queries where values are selected from DUAL – In some of my recursive queries, I need to include the original input in the result set (particularly, this query finds all equipment mounted under a specific equipment ID – I want to include the input equipment ID as well). Having a bunch of ‘select 12345 from dual’ is fine until I need to use placeholders. This is another place where the collection can be leveraged:

     select column_value equipment_id from TABLE(sys.ODCIVARCHAR2LIST('12345CDE', '23456BCD', '34567ABC') );

Adds each of the values to my result set.

Which means I can use a query like “select column_value as equipment_id from TABLE(:myIDs)” and bind the collection to :myIDs.

Fortify on Demand Remediation – Cookie Security: Overly Broad

Cookies are tied to hostnames and paths. This vulnerability occurs because not every site is its own hostname – when you own all of application.example.com/*, this is basically a false positive. But, if you host your app on a shared URL (e.g. look at www.rushworth.us/lisa and www.rushworth.us/scott and www.rushworth.us/owa … these are three different sites on my home web server. Scott, on is web site, could set a cookie with a path of “/” that uses the same name as a cookie I use on my site – my site would then use the stuff Scott stored through his site. Not such a problem in our scenarios, but a huge problem if you’re talking about a hundred different people’s blogs on some shared domain.

To sort the vulnerability, set the cookie path to something more than /