Penetration Testing mailing list archives

Re: computer/vulnerability database


From: etd <etd () nomejortu com>
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:16:29 +0000

Hi,

My first thoughts about the vuln. db included tables for: hosts,
protocols (tcp/udp/icmp/..), services-ports. Then to each service you
could add notes (and each note belonged to a category). This
crystallised  in the 1.x release of an open source tool called dradis
(i). It is a tool we use when doing security reviews, the result looked
something like (ii).

However, soon we found that while this architecture was great for
network-level pentests, it wasn't ideal for application security, you
ended app with one host, port 80, an then a huge list of notes. Say for
instance you have to different apps in the same host and port and want
to keep track vulnerabilities for both of them, this needs to be done at
a note level (maybe add '/app1/' and '/app2/' categories and assign
notes to each). So we did the architecture over to try to make the tool
useful for any type of security assessment / vulnerability tracking.
Now, in the 2.x branch, we have 'nodes' and 'notes'. A node can be
anything, a host, a port, an application level, and each node has many
notes. The result in (iii), there is also a flash video of the web
interface (iv).

The bottom line is, if you want your tool to be useful in a number of
assessments (apps, wifi, etc.) and not only in network-level ones, the
underlaying database has to be a little more flexible.

Hope this helps,

etd


  (i) http://dradis.sourceforge.net/
 (ii) http://dradis.nomejortu.com/images/screenshot/client_v1.1_04.png
(iii) http://dradis.nomejortu.com/images/screenshot/client_v2.0-vegas_01.png
 (iv) http://dradis.nomejortu.com/videos/dradis2-01.html

John Kinsella wrote:
I wrote most of the vuln reporting module at my last gig.  This depends
a little on if you're reporting for internal use, or in a consulting
role, but here's the things people are interested in, in general:
 * Unique identifier for vuln: some sort of 3rd party ID that you can
look up to provide specifics about the vuln.  Either an CVE ID, OSVDB
ID, Bugtraq ID, Secunia, etc.
 * When the vuln was detected
 * Vuln severity
 * Valuation of machine - this plays in with CVSS
http://www.first.org/cvss/cvss-guide.html
 * Ability to mark a finding a false positive would be handy
 * Ability to make notes also would be handy

So, what this leaves you with is 3 tables:
 * Machine definition
 * Vuln definition
 * Link between those two tables

For bonus points, I could see having a 4th table that could allow you to
group collections of vuln instances together.

Anybody think there's interest in coming up with a formal spec for this?
Just thinking randomly, I could see either a module for drupal, or some
sort of stand-alone vuln tracker package...actually something like that
must exist, already?

OSVDB's schema is pretty well done - overkill for what you want, but
will get the brain thinking: http://osvdb.org/database_info

(NIST's isn't bad, either...)

John

On Jan 9, 2009, at 5:01 AM, Shenk, Jerry A wrote:

Does anybody have any thoughts about a database for an audit to contain
current vulnerability issues and subsequent updates?

I imagine that it should have at least two tables - one table for
computers and another table for vulnerabilities.  Obviously, each
computer can have multiple vulnerabilities and it would be nice to be
able to generate a report for each vulnerability.  I also think it would
be good to have the ability to note when vulnerabilities are resolved as
an additional note.


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