Headshot of Kevin Burns

Kevin Burns

Kevin has over 7 years of experience in computer security, Linux administration, and Windows administration. As a security consultant he has worked for clients in several industries, including health care and finance. He specializes in web application and network security testing. Recently, Kevin has been focusing on researching memory analysis tools for penetration testing and using built-in tools for network escalations. He has also found numerous high risk issues during penetration testing. In his spare time Kevin participates in various Security CTF events with the team Robot Mafia.

More by Kevin Burns

Web Application Pentesting

Directory Traversal, File Inclusion, and The Proc File System

February 23, 2016

Directory traversal and local file inclusion bugs are frequently seen in web applications. Both of these bugs can be used to read arbitrary files from the server. In most cases, this means that an attacker can read the /etc/passwd file and the shell history files in order to find information leaks.

Learn More
Network Pentesting

Stealing unencrypted SSH-agent keys from memory

July 21, 2014

If you've ever used SSH keys to manage multiple machines, then chances are you've used SSH-agent. This tool is designed to keep a SSH key in memory so that the user doesn't have to type their passphrase in every time. However, this can create some security risk. A user running as root may have the ability to pull the decrypted SSH key from memory and reconstruct it.

Learn More
Network Pentesting

Using strace to monitor SSH connections on Linux

April 7, 2014

As a penetration tester, I like to avoid replacing binaries on running systems as it makes it more difficult to clean up the system after we're done. Occasionally a tester will come across a Linux server that is used to connect to other internal systems. It would be nice to be able to monitor the SSH sessions without replacing the SSHD daemon. This is where ptrace comes in handy.

Learn More