IDS mailing list archives
Post Script RE: Definition of Zero Day Protection
From: "Drew Copley" <dcopley () eEye com>
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 14:37:25 -0700
PS, I should have also noted to relieve confusion... there are chokepoints for actual vulnerabilities as well as their exploit code. These chokepoints can also be gated. In this model... binary examination or behavior examination... there will be chokepoints, there will be possibilities for gating these checkpoints, and there will be enough commonality across malware and vulnerability data to create an effective gate. Generally, castrating exploit code will be enough to stop zero day, but you can never depend on this. You must also attempt to castrate actual vulnerabilities. One specific example of this performing RFC compliancy checking, such as what we do with secureiis. Many of our IIS security vulnerabilities - as many web server security holes - have involved doing something not RFC compliant. Further, there is no rational reason to send a one thousand character string in many places with web servers. Why allow it? And so on. And so on. Until you have a fairly broad based system which is actually very usable. With subtle configuration errors... such as what is found in many Internet Explorer holes, it can be more difficult to address the security hole at the vulnerability level. But, then you still have the exploit level to rely on. And with these same attacks, you can generally stop them all across the board on some level. Had people merely applied some registry fixes last September, for instance, they would have been immune to most of the tens of IE attacks which came in the subsequent ten months. I was literally immune to Scob because I had already killed these dangerous activex components I never use. And I was immune already to many other attacks which were floating around well before Scob. For instance. I have avoided going too far into specifics, for a number of reasons, but I believe this covers the general direction enough for the community.
-----Original Message----- From: Drew Copley Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 2:10 PM To: 'Teicher, Mark (Mark)'; Drew Simonis; focus-ids () securityfocus com Cc: Seanor, Joseph (Joe) Subject: RE: Definition of Zero Day Protection Apart from semantical differences over the term "host based", there are a wide range of heuristic security applications which provide some degree of protection from zero day. We have, for instance, long used a "class based" system, in SecureIIS, which we have greatly expanded in Blink. We have further added multiple api gating layers and are continuing to greatly expand in this direction. Systrace is an example, among many, of api protection systems. There are many products in this class. Most of them have limited but realistic effectiveness against unknown vulnerabilities. How? They limited their potential destructive influence. In fact, one of our researcher's [now former] did a presentation at Black Hat on breaking some of these systems (Seattle). He showed how a payload could take over a process and spawn new threads, creating an effective sniffer and trojan agent which by all appearances to most api protection systems would be the invaded process -- iis. Regardless, these systems remain our best direction for complete protection. The hardest trick is not in hardening the system -- it is in allowing the system to be completely hardened and regulated and to have it still be usable. Heuristic AV has long been in the running, though, and many if not most implementations have detection properties for zero day attacks. AV generally will not be designed to detect all attacks. The malformed packet coming in, might not be detected, the resulting shell code may be. But, the webpage, email, or IM is very likely to be detected. Heuristic AV has many problems, however. It is "work in progress". I made such an agent -- it profiled binaries by apis they used and certain signatures, such as those for encrypted or packed binaries. Effectively, I was trying to do what I did manually. And, to some success. The reasoning is rather simple, if you look at your most common trojan and malware agents and look for the commonality there. Granted, many virii, unfortunately, do not have any such common api traits... and it is always possible not to use typical apis or apis at all to cause damage. BTW, I mentioned "class based systems". What is that? Ultimately, it fits in with the "commonality" I was just mentioning. There are certain commonalities we can find in shell code, in virii, in trojans. I like to call them "chokepoints", and I like to "gate" these chokepoints. For instance, spyware. A vast majority of spyware uses the BHO registry key. Many use the run registry key on top of that. One can harden these keys and typically detect and therefore eliminate every spyware which attempts to use either of these keys -- they are rare enough outside of the malware world that one might do this. There are many such chokepoints or commonalities to be found which can be used as a guide. The trick is to reduce false positives and keep the system usable. **FYI, I will be unable to answer replies, no offense intended to anyone that might do this. I believe this post was comprehensive.-----Original Message----- From: Teicher, Mark (Mark) [mailto:teicher () avaya com] Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 12:15 PM To: Drew Simonis; focus-ids () securityfocus com Cc: Seanor, Joseph (Joe) Subject: RE: Definition of Zero Day Protection Drew, What host based products would fit this category based on the definition ?? Do they really work ?? -----Original Message----- From: Drew Simonis [mailto:simonis () myself com] Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 01:07 PM To: Teicher, Mark (Mark); focus-ids () securityfocus com Cc: Seanor, Joseph (Joe) Subject: Re: Definition of Zero Day Protection ----- Original Message ----- From: "Teicher, Mark (Mark)" Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 19:47:48 -0600 Subject: Definition of Zero Day ProtectionWhat is Zero Day ProtectionIt is, as you stated, another marketing blurb, but it isn'tjust that.Usually, this bit of jargon is applied to a detection/prevention system that uses things like heuristic detection techniques, behavior based detection, protocol anomoly or some other advanced methods. These allow the activity to be blocked or alerted on, as opposed to the specific event. So, for example, a worm can be characterized by certain activity. Say, opening connections to lots of remote hosts in a shortperiod of time.This behavior can be blocked (e.g. the process can be killed) even without knowing that it was WormX. hth, -Ds -------------------------------------------------------------- ------------ Test Your IDS Is your IDS deployed correctly? Find out quickly and easily by testing it with real-world attacks from CORE IMPACT. Go to http://www.securityfocus.com/sponsor/CoreSecurity_focus-ids_04 0708 to learn more. -------------------------------------------------------------- ------------
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- Post Script RE: Definition of Zero Day Protection Drew Copley (Aug 10)