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Top 10 Critical Findings of 2014 – Thick Applications

2014 has come and gone, so we thought we’d put out a list of some of the most common critical findings that we saw during thick application penetration tests over the past year. We keep a massive amount of statistics for every assessment we do and in this blog I’ll cover high level trends and the top 10 vulnerabilities we found.  This should be interesting to application penetration testers and large companies that develop and manage their own code in house.

High Level Trends

Most of the thick applications we looked at were older and primarily written in Java, C#, and C/C++.  It’s still pretty common to see companies making them available over the internet via Citrix and Terminal service web interfaces. I also want to point out that when assessing newer thick applications we spend almost 90% of our time reviewing web service methods and configurations, because thick clients are basically just a wrapper for backend web service methods.

Below are the top 10 critical thick application findings for 2014 list in order from most to least common.

Cleartext Credential Storage

This is by far the most common thing we see across all of the thick applications we test. From our testing, credentials are usually stored in configuration files within the installation directory of an application, a local user preferences directory, or within the registry.  If you’re doing this, consider using integrated authentication and moving away from the two-tier architecture model.

Hardcoded Credentials in Source Code

Along with storing credentials on the operating system itself, we see applications with hardcoded credentials within their source code almost 100% of the time. This is mostly a problem in applications that use managed code: Java and C#/VBscript with .NET, for example. The most prevalent credentials? Database usernames and passwords. It’s very easy for a developer to hardcode them into source code and leave them there in production.  More times than not this results in the full compromise of the database and the backend database server.  Once again, if you’re doing something like this, consider using integrated authentication and moving away from the two-tier architecture model.

Hardcoded Encryption Keys

If an application uses encryption to protect sensitive information such as credentials, it is at least one step ahead of the curve. However, encryption is only as strong as where the key is held. Often times an encryption key is stored in an encryption function within the source code of an application. Again, hardcoded keys affect the majority of managed code applications that we see. If a static key is used on installation of an application, a user could use that key do decrypt data that someone else may have.  If this sounds like something you’ve done, consider moving the encryption of data to the server side were evil users can’t get their hands on your encryption keys.

Hardcoded or Nonexistent Salts

When using encryption, it is always a good idea to use a salt. However, if that salt is hardcoded in an application with an encryption key, it becomes pretty much useless. When it comes to encryption being a salty S.O.B. is a good thing.  Randomize! Randomize! Randomize!

Unencrypted Transmission of Data

We see a lot of applications that do not use encryption when transmitting data. Keep in mind that most of the applications that we test are used by the healthcare and financial industries, where sensitive information needs to be protected. While it is most common to find this over HTTP (web services), we see a fair amount of unencrypted TDS traffic for SQL data. If you don’t have encryption at the transport layer make sure to SSL (TLS) all the things!

SQL Injection

SQL Injection has been around for a long time and still affects many applications and services. Most of the applications we test access SQL databases on the backend, usually MSSQL and Oracle.  A lot of the backend processing for thick applications just don’t implement proper sanitation and parameterization of queries. As a result, it isn’t hard for a malicious user to attach a proxy to intercept HTTP and TDS requests.  Tools like Burp Suite and Echo Mirage make it pretty easy. Often times just inserting a single tick in an input field can cause a SQL error to pop up to the user. Make sure to enforce the principal of least privilege and sanitize your input everywhere!

Authorization Bypass

A lot of thick application employ security through GUI controls but leave web services completely wide open. A user that may not be able to access a piece of functionality through the GUI of a thick application, but can usually request what they need through a web service without any authorization checks.

XML External Entity Injection

Many thick applications employ XML for configuration files, HTTP requests and responses, and exporting and importing data. A lot of applications were simply created before the influx of entity injections attacks and thus were never properly protected against them on the client side or server side.  XXE often results in read access to files on the server, and UNC path injection that can be used to capture and crack credentials used to on associate web server. Most XML parsing libraries support disallowing declared DTDs and entities. This should be set as the default when reading XML to help prevent injection.

SQL Query Manipulation

It is not uncommon to see the use of direct SQL queries within an application that a user can freely edit for their use. We see this most often in custom search windows where a user is given the ability to search tables as they please. Executing SQL queries almost always leads to a complete takeover of the backend database server and, from there, movement within the environment.  The general recommendation is don’t do that unless your required use case is “allow users to take over the network”.

Custom Encryption

This has come up a couple of times within the past year where an application rolls its own encryption algorithms. More often than not this ends up being some type of substitution cipher where every character is replaced with another one. Simply reversing the algorithm gives you back the cleartext format of whatever was encrypted. NEVER ROLL YOUR OWN CRYPTO!

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