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Google Hands Out Web Security Scanner
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently feeling generous this week, Google has released for free another of their internally developed tools: this time, a nifty web security scanner dubbed skipfish. A vendor-sponsored study cited by InformationWeek discovered that 90% of all web applications are vulnerable to security attacks. Are Google's security people trying to change this?"
Considering how many web apps use Google APIs in some form or another these days, I'd say it's in their best interests to ensure those sites don't all become a liability to eachother by way of their centralized cloud.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
How's the weather under that tinfoil hat?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
If you want the internet to remain free, you'll have to get off your lazy ass. Start by going and downloading the skipfish source - it's under an Apache license - and audit it for us. Tell us if it's got any phone-home reporting, if it leaves out any major items from it's scans, etc.
We all know we should question everything, including Google's intentions. We're pretty smart, we get that. Instead of offering blind, childish rhetoric, you could offer proof and/or solutions. Just sayin'; calling Google a major privacy invader doesn't stop them.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Google is one of the most anti-privacy, intrusive evil corporations out there, second only to Facebook. They make a living over promiscuous sharing of personal data. Why should I trust them?
Have they ever lied to you about what they do? I don't use Google under any misinformed idea that they *don't* track everything I do. I go into it knowing that this *is their business*.
Where you under some other impression?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They want to promote to use more their services. One way to make that is to make the web safer, helping more sites to flourish, and so compelling users to do more things online, what will only help them. So for this case, even if they are doing it by their own selfish motives, they are actually trying to helping you. So, in this particular case, your privacy won't get harmed and you will get a good tool. Why don't take it? Want that the real bad guys instead of google get your personal and job data instead?
I could just bury your comment by modding you a troll, but I'd rather correct the misinformation.
Microsoft has patents on how to sell your personal information to the highest bidder. Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL all handed over your personal search histories to the US government. They all play ball in China. Yahoo handed over bloggers to the Chinese government.
Google targets ads to you, but they don't share your personal data out to anyone. Google tracks your information to serve up ads, but this is all machine controlled. It isn't like Google employees sit around all day reading your email.
If you don't want Google to have your information, then don't use their services. I happen to really like their services. I want the convenience of being able to get to my mail from any device without having to try and run my own mail server (dealing with SSH attacks, whitelisting, backups, etc. can be a pain). Google provides me a free service I enjoy, and thusly I willingly accept the trade-off of targeted ads.
They are VERY upfront about what they do, and they also provide tons of great open source products. They are the primary funder of Firefox, and they fund a decent chunk of Linux development. I'm sick of people calling them evil every single day without providing one single piece of evidence.
Either provide some evidence, or stop spouting FUD and lies. Personally, I'm sick of it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Is VERY fast, been observed 500 request/seconds against responsive internet servers, 2000/sec when in the same lan, and of course, is targetted against dynamic apps, not exactly static images/content. With that speed the first vulnerability that they will find is vulnerability to DoS attacks. The good news: when the bad guys try to find your application vulnerabilities using this tool, that will be the only one that they will find. Worst case scenario: the code gets included in a botnet,
What article?
"The" - is there another?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-deal-with-google-for-3-years/
The ACLU has an interesting video regarding data retention and proliferation: http://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza
It's not quite all here yet, but it's definitely not outside the realm of probability.
Someone sends me an email from a gmail acct, poof, there I am. And I can't reply without using gmail, because that is all they use.
True, but not really relevant -- if they weren't using Gmail, they'd be using something else. Do you trust Yahoo or Hotmail any more than Google? How about some random ISP?
And it's not like they can track much from that, other than your conversations with someone who already keeps all their other conversations with Google.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Google didn't start the censorship in China, it wasn't their idea, and they weren't the first group to comply with what is, in China, local law. They've also been pretty clearly repulsed by the rule, hence the issues they are now having with the Chinese government. They went into a crappy situation thinking that maybe they could improve things, or at least tolerate them until it had enough time to change (and it is just a matter of time, really)... apparently they were wrong, have seen the error of their ways, and are getting the heck out while they still can.
You seem to think that isn't good enough. So do you believe that because a nation makes laws which you don't agree with, private companies should be obligated to violate those laws in those countries? That failure to do so constitutes evil?
You can't possibly think that would end well.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
We configured skipfish and pointed it at our custom platform with full administrator rights. Entered our systems custom file extensions into the skipfish dictionary.
Overall the performance is quite good (>3k HTTP requests per second) after tweaking concurrent connection count. Orders of magnitude better than any scanner we have ever used.
The report UI seemed polished and provided quite a bit of useful data with summaries and drill down to detail. It would really help if instead of simply posting raw request/response data it would highlight sections of the response that lead it to make an assumption WRT a particular vulnerability.
In terms of scan results they look for quite a number of common vulnerabilities, some of the checks are quite creative. I especially liked the check for "interesting" contents. Some of our test data tripped them - this was perfectly reasonable given content.
Aborted the scanner at the 5 million http request mark ~20mins later.
In terms of actual results against our system out of the several dozen possible vulnerabilties reported from XSRF, injection..etc there were no actual problems discovered - 100% false alarms.
There is something really odd about some of the requests being made .. I don't know if its intentional to discover bugs but the folder/file parsing looks to be broken and its building stupid path names with the filename /subfolder.. This seems to be causing most of the UI not to crawl as it seems to be ending up in the 404 category. Maybe this is my fault on dictionary configuration but the system wastes way too many requests throwing the dictionary at each resource and not nearly enough time crawling the site and discovering whats available for expliot.
I then took a cursory glance at the source code.. all of the rule checking is hard-coded in C. (See analysis.c) ... which to me seems quite stupid and useless.
The tool is a start already better than many freebie tools I have used over the years.
My advice is to first and foremost abstract the analysis details out of C code. Focus more on walking even if its dynamic content and bolt in some intelligence/expert system to direct activities.
There's more to the internet than other people's web sites. The design of the web is intended for each server to control and serve its own information. This is broken by the fact that the vast majority of internet users want to share information via the web but do not run their own servers. The web was simply not designed for this use-case and cannot handle it sanely in the case of information that is private to a group of people who do not run their own servers.
That may be a good reason to assert that currently the prospects for privacy on the internet look rather bleak, but other methods for sharing information involving encryption and/or friend-to-friend networks, etc. could be developed. Even without key verification being commonplace, they could make spying on the everyday communications of ordinary citizens untenable.
Centralization breaks the internet.
I just wanted to point out that many organizations and people are trying to resolve the global web-insecurity issue caused by many things including application insecurity. Google is just one participant in this effort. What is frustrating is that when Google talks people call it news. When these other organizations make contributions, nothing is heard.
Wasn't script kiddies that attacked Google in China. It was, as they said, a "nation-state" attack. With plants/spies on the inside of Google China. That's why Google is getting consulting from the NSA now. Google can handle any script kiddie, any botnet, any DDoS, any virus. What they don't have skill in is handling nation-state attacks. Ones that rely on not just attacking from the outside via the internet, but also attacking simultaneously from the inside with pro spies. The NSA, being in the spook biz, has that experience.
All the focus about The Virus? That's virus' makers and virus researchers spin on the story. They only focus on that because that is what they sell. Yes, it was one part of the infiltration. But only one very, very small part. They (the people that actually deployed the virus, not that poor patsy Uni student that the Chinese gov chose as their scapegoat) had inside help. It wasn't the work of script kiddies. It was the work of pro spies. With government resources as their disposal.
While they do censor in countries in compliance with laws (for example, no Nazi stuff in Germany), the difference is that in China, you have to "self-censor" and self-police. The government doesn't tell you what's bad and what isn't. It lets you guess and if you guess wrong, they pull the plug and you lose money. Also, there's no legal process for the censorship. It's all guesswork.
Baidu invites government censors into their office and they sit and work there "as contractors." Google didn't allow that. Google.cn was the least censored of the Chinese search engines. Because all the other companies "self-policed" too much. Google.cn self-censored the least.
Don't get me started the corruption. Baidu and other domestic Chinese have connections with Chinese politicians. When a competitor does too well, they go through back doors to get the competitor censored or slowed down by the firewall, so their share of traffic goes down.
China will never let a foreigner win through free competition. They will rig the game (through the firewall) so that all the local Chinese companies are first. THEN the foreigners can compete for whatever spots are left over.