Re: Cisco CTR

[Ron Gula <rgula () tenablesecurity com>]

Somehow I get the feeling we're going to be talking about false
positives with passive scanners a few years (months) from now on
the security focus passive-vuln list.

RNA may have worked as it was programmed in this case, but I
know from the Nessus side of things that when a vuln scanner is
wrong, it's much more serious than an IDS false positive. I
would not be happy if I were the system admin of the OS-X box
and I had someone from security telling me I was still vulnerable.

I've seen similar configuration issues on Windows servers as
well where the app is patched, but the OS remains unchanged.

For example, NeVO can see actual changes in the traffic patterns
of IIS server and we can equate this to the overall patch level
of IIS server. The OS passive fingerprint signatures never
change, but the vulnerability and patch level reported for IIS
does. In this case, when you hook something like Lightning,
NeVO and Snort together, we end up correlating attacks against
really vulnerable systems.

BTW, there is no passive-vuln list, but from the email I've
received, maybe there should be?

Ron Gula
Tenable Network Security
http://www.tenablesecurity.com



At 05:30 PM 11/17/2003 -0500, Martin Roesch wrote:
> On Nov 17, 2003, at 3:32 PM, Ron Gula wrote:
>
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Congratulations on the release of RNA.
>
> Thanks.
>
> > My confusion was with if RNA finds specific vulnerabilities or if
> > it says that you may have a whole class of vulnerabilities. For
> > example, in the screen shot you have of RNA on Sourcefire's home
> > page, (BTW, I thought you liked Apple), it shows a Mac OS-X running
> > Apache version 1.3.27 and below a list of vulnerabilities. One of
> > the vulnerabilities is "OpenSSLv2 malformed client key remote buffer
> > overflow vulnerability". If you visit the Bugtraq record on this:
> > http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/5363 , it does not list Apache
> > 1.3.27 as being vulnerable to this flow. If you were doing VA/IDS
> > correlation, this would cause a serious, contextual, well qualified
> > sort of event, when in fact there would be no vulnerability there.
>
> Little SNAFU there, our web people used the wrong screenshot (I love
> Apple, I'm typing this from my PB15 as a matter of fact).  We just put
> up the new website this morning, if that's the only problem that gets
> found I'll be happy.
>
> I suspect the reason that the RNA image showed the vulnerability
> information for OpenSSL because it identified the O.S. and since there
> are security updates for OS-X pertaining to this issue, it really
> should list that vulnerability.
>
> Here are the links to Apple:
>
>    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120139
>
>    http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120141
>
> The affected systems do not list Apache 1.3.27 as you stated, however
> the fact is that Apple issued updates to  OS X so I think RNA did the
> right thing in alerting the user. The updates from Apple also contain
> updates to Apache as well as mod_ssl and OpenSSL.
>
> We're working continuously to make sure the quality of the data in the
> system is as high as we can make it, this is an evolutionary process
> however and it'll get better as the product matures.
>
>      -Marty
>
>
> > Ron Gula
> >
> >
> > At 03:03 PM 11/17/2003 -0500, Martin Roesch wrote:
> > > Hi Ron,
> > >
> > > Actually, RNA went out the door this morning after a year of
> > > development and another 2 years of research and planning as an early
> > > availability release and it will be GA in a couple weeks.  From what
> > > I can see, RNA and Nevo have different missions, Nevo is being billed
> > > as a passive vulnerability "scanner" whereas RNA is being billed as a
> > > passive network discovery system.  We have multi-mode passive OS
> > > fingerprinting, topology discovery, active service identification,
> > > flow monitoring, real-time change analysis and passive vulnerability
> > > inference mechanisms built-in to RNA.  The version of Nevo that I saw
> > > a couple months ago was doing OS fingerprinting in support of passive
> > > vulnerability analysis, I'm unfamiliar/unaware of how it has evolved
> > > since then.
> > >
> > > I don't know what you mean by "looking for unique vulnerabilities",
> > > we're doing vulnerability inference by looking at platform and
> > > application data and inferring classes of vulnerabilities that can be
> > > available.  This capability is primarily there to support dynamic
> > > prioritization of IDS events and to gauge potential impact of attacks
> > > that we see on the network.  We're planning on leveraging the
> > > information in the future for a variety of purposes, but RNA's focus
> > > is much broader than providing vulnerability analysis solely.
> > >
> > > We've also wrapped RNA with a variety of supporting management and
> > > analysis technology.  We've got a full web-based management and
> > > analysis GUI built-in to the appliances that incorporates a common
> > > look and feel with our new version 3.0 ISM (IDS) product line, we can
> > > manage multiple RNA sensors from the Sourcefire Management Console
> > > and provide data aggregation and topology analysis from a central
> > > point, we've got a 3D visualization GUI for data analysis,
> > > administration tools for system maintenance, etc etc.
> > >
> > >      -Marty
> > >
> > > On Nov 17, 2003, at 10:52 AM, Ron Gula wrote:
> > >
> > > > I know RNA has not officially shipped yet, but from the web site,
> > > > it looks very similar to NeVO. It does similar OS fingerprinting,
> > > > traffic profiling, security vulnerabilities and so on.
> > > >
> > > > The question I've not been able to get a good answer for is if
> > > > RNA looks for unique vulnerabilities, or if it using the operating
> > > > systems or application fingerprint to determine which vulnerabilities
> > > > are active.
> > > >
> > > > Ron Gula
> > > > Tenable Network Security
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > At 09:41 PM 11/13/2003 -0500, Martin Roesch wrote:
> > > > > Vendor Alert: I work for Sourcefire.
> > > > >
> > > > > RNA is not a passive vulnerability scanner, vulnerability analysis
> > > > > is
> > > > > only a subset of what it can accomplish.  I've taken to calling RNA
> > > > > a
> > > > > passive network discovery system (PNDS) since that's a more accurate
> > > > > description of what it does.
> > > > >
> > > > > BTW, the demo that Joe saw was from a beta of RNA that we were
> > > > > running
> > > > > in-house, production versions should only be set to discover your
> > > > > internal network so you don't accidentally start mapping other
> > > > > people's
> > > > > networks with it.  We had our internal sensors tuned that way for
> > > > > testing of preproduction units only, we don't condone mapping other
> > > > > people's networks with RNA.
> > > > >
> > > > >      -Marty
> > > --
> > > Martin Roesch - Founder/CTO, Sourcefire Inc. - (410)290-1616
> > > Sourcefire: Snort-based Enterprise Intrusion Detection Infrastructure
> > > roesch () sourcefire com - http://www.sourcefire.com
> > > Snort: Open Source Network IDS - http://www.snort.org
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
> > Network with over 10,000 of the brightest minds in information security
> > at the largest, most highly-anticipated industry event of the year.
> > Don't miss RSA Conference 2004! Choose from over 200 class sessions and
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> > priority code SF4.
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
> --
> Martin Roesch - Founder/CTO, Sourcefire Inc. - (410)290-1616
> Sourcefire: Snort-based Enterprise Intrusion Detection Infrastructure
> roesch () sourcefire com - http://www.sourcefire.com
> Snort: Open Source Network IDS - http://www.snort.org


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