Re: Cisco CTR

[Ron Gula <rgula () tenablesecurity com>]

Thanks,

Congratulations on the release of RNA.

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.

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


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