My Solution for SANS Holiday Hack Challenge

Late last year I decided to spend some time during the holidays to work on the SANS Holiday Hack Challenge. I’ve looked at a few of their challenges in the past, but never during the actual competition period, and never going through an entire year’s challenge. I’m very happy I did. Ed & team put together an awesome narrative, full of a variety of infosec-related puzzles, covering everything from web pentesting to forensics. Now that the competition is over, I thought I’d share a copy of my solution, in case anyone wants to compare; I’m sure everyone’s process was a bit different, and it is great to have several ideas of how to solve a problem.

My write-up is themed as a pentest report, since that’s the format I am most comfortable with. I hope you enjoy it. You can download it here.

Pentesting

ShmooCon 15

I had a lot of fun meeting many folks, catching up with old friends, and hearing some great talks at ShmooCon. I was fortunate to not only get to do a book signing at the No Starch Press booth, but also take home the second place trophy from the TOOOL DC Locksport Village! Thanks to everyone who came to the signing, or who stopped me just to say hello. I hope to see you all again soon.

  • Book Signing Poster
  • Open!
  • TOOOL Trophy
  • Book Signing
  • Book Signing
  • View from the flight
Azure Book / Locksport / Speaking

Pentesting Azure Apps in a Humble Bundle!

Exciting news! My book, Pentesting Azure Applications, is in the No Starch Hacking for the Holidays Humble Bundle! For the next two weeks, a donation of $15 or more will support the EFF and get you a collection of No Starch’s security titles. Check it out!

Azure Book

Vote & Win a Signed Copy of Pentesting Azure Applications

Are you excited to vote on Tuesday? To sweeten the deal, I’ll be giving away a signed copy of my book, Pentesting Azure Applications, to someone who votes! Just send me a photo showing you voted (selfie in line, “I voted” sticker, WA ballot stub, etc.) by Wednesday, 5 PM PST. I’ll randomly pick a winner. You can send it to me on Twitter @mattburrough or by email matt {at} (my last name) .org.

Azure Book

Join me at the Seattle Cloud Security Alliance Conference

I will be speaking next week at the 2018 Seattle Cloud Security Alliance Conference “Securing the Digital Horizon @ Cloud City”. My talk is Best Practices for Securing Cloud Deployments, where I will be discussing some key threat vectors against cloud deployments, and the various ways you can mitigate the risks.

The conference is in Bellevue on September 21st. More information and registration is available at csaseattlechapter.org.

Azure Book / Speaking

Lock Picking Timer

I recently built a timed lock picking competition, based on a similar design created by @dossman33. It consists of four deadbolts (plus two spares), all pinned identically, that, when opened, trigger a switch wired to a Raspberry Pi. The Pi has a UI written in Python that shows the current elapsed time, plus the time that each station opened. I’ve shared the code at https://github.com/mburrough/locktimer.

 

(BSides Lockpick Village images from @deviantollam)

Continue Reading“Lock Picking Timer”

Locksport

Master Key Collusion Attack Simulator

As both a locksport enthusiast and a professional red teamer, I spend a good deal of time thinking about locks. One fascinating subset of locks is master keyed systems. These are primarily used by large businesses to create a hierarchy of locks and keys: individuals can have a key that works for the building front door and their own offices, managers can have keys that work on any of their subordinates’ offices, janitors can have keys to their assigned floors’ offices, while security guards and maintenance can have keys to any room.

Depending on how these systems are implemented, they may suffer from an inherent weakness. Often, the bitting (key cuts) used for the top master key (e.g. the one used by security) cannot be used in any individual user key. For example, if the top master key code is 6-3-4-2-2, a valid user key may be 4-1-6-4-5, but could not be 4-1-6-2-5. This means that given the codes for enough user keys, an attacker could eliminate most/all possibilities except for the master key bitting, thereby decoding the master key.

This may sound like it would take a large number of keys to find the master (especially for keys with 6 or 7 cuts and 7+ possible cut depths per position), there is another feature of many key systems that helps narrow the space: MACS. MACS are the Maximum Adjacent Cut Specification for a given brand/model. These are standards that say a key cannot go from a very small cut in one position to a very large cut in the next position, as the key could be too weak and might break off in a lock (or pocket, or purse).

Similar to MACS, some systems also restrict user keys from being within a certain offset (e.g. +/- 1) of the master. In such a system, 4-1-6-1-5 might also be invalid with the above example master key.

For this kind of attack, the attacker would either need to covertly view users’ keys and eliminate cuts, or work with insider co-conspirators to view their keys. But would the number of keys needed to be viewed be feasible? To answer this, I created a computer model that simulates the attack and displays the number of keys needed for that attack. Simply input the specifications for the key system in question, plus the number of runs desired for the model, and it will display the average, minimum, and maximum number of keys needed across the test executions.

You can get the code from https://github.com/mburrough/MasterKeySim.

Locksport