Hot answers tagged sandbox
22
Oh, but they are, good sir! Sandboxing is not a new concept and has been around since the 1980s; however, as you have probably gathered, the limits of those types of sandboxing have been pushed to the point from a security point of view they look inadequate.
About sandboxing and the permissions model
Let me explain. When your computer boots, it starts up ...
11
A "sandbox" is a play area for young children: it is supposed to be safe for them (they cannot hurt themselves) and safe from them (it is sand, they cannot break it). In the context of IT security, "sandboxing" means isolating some piece of software in such a way that whatever it does, it will not spread havoc elsewhere.
A common Unix way of sandboxing is ...
10
Chroot wouldn't give you any security anyway, it's only designed for very specific use cases. See Debian unstable chroot security issues and chroot "jail" - what is it and how do I use it?.
Any application that has access to the X server can do a lot of things. It can snoop on other applications that display windows on the same server. It can log key ...
7
Codepad explains how they provide security on their about page:
codepad.org is an online compiler/interpreter. [...] The strategy is to run everything under ptrace, with many system calls disallowed or ignored. Compilers and final executables are both executed in a chroot jail, with strict resource limits. [...]
Rather than rely on just the chroot ...
7
According to the diagram on the NACL site, the NACL code runs with the same privileges as the renderer which is a reduced privilege process.
If NACL fails, an attacker can take over the renderer, giving them access to resources in the same renderer process (set of frames that could be in the same domain after some set of document.domain sets).
"The ...
7
Ok, so firstly, how do applications run?
On a standard operating system of the kind you're likely to be using right now, applications are launched by users. When an application is launched it is loaded into memory and given time to run on the cpu.
In order to get things done, rather than controlling the computer hardware directly, the application makes ...
7
The term "sandbox" is wide, generic, and often misused and misunderstood.
Let's consider a type of sandbox, a virtual machine running under control of an hypervisor. The guest system is nominally isolated and cannot "see" the host system. However, this is relative to the implementation of the hypervisor, which is a combination of software and hardware, both ...
7
Honestly some people need a wake up call before they take responsibility for their mistakes.
Give the company a set time, like one month from today to release a patch. If they do not comply post information about the vulnerability on the Full Disclosure Mailinglist. By not making this information public then you are risking that organized crime will ...
6
The most secure approach is to run the proprietary software in a virtual machine (VM). This is pretty simple to set up, and you can find free VMs (e.g., VirtualBox). However, since you mention games, this may not work for games (it may produce unacceptable performance degradation in some graphics-intensive games).
Another possibility is to install a ...
6
If yes, Is there another reliable, secure method of "monitoring" system calls (and, maybe receiving signals), that process can not break (assuming proper Linux implementation) ?
To re-iterate in a slightly different way what D.W. has already said, ptrace is a system call that strace, gdb and the like make to monitor a processes' actions. There are two ...
6
The implementation of the virtual machine is a kernel for the kernel.
In a typical operating system, there is application code (aka "userland") and kernel code. They use the same set of instructions; however, the CPU knows, at any time, whether it is executing application or kernel code. When application code tries to execute some opcodes which access the ...
6
There are two approaches, the quantitative and the qualitative.
The quantitative consists of fuzzing the input to the sandboxing driver. Use a fuzzing framework like Peach, Sulley or other to fuzz that input and look for crashes or file operations outside the sandbox.
The qualitative approach involves reverse engineering and understand the sandboxing ...
5
Why aren't applications sandboxed by default on Windows? I don't know, but I'm guessing it is a mixture of the following reasons:
Sandboxing breaks many applications, in complex and subtle ways. Users will be unhappy if Windows turns on a new feature by default that breaks even one of their applications. It is very, very difficult to design an ...
5
On Linux, you can reliably monitor a selection of system calls or file accesses with the audit subsystem. Make sure the auditd daemon is running, then configure what you want to log with auditctl. Each logged operation is recorded in /var/log/audit/audit.log (on typical configurations).
You'll find simple examples of auditctl usage on this site, on Server ...
5
It doesn't matter where your run your browser from. You can run it off of your USB drive or off a network share, it still goes into system memory. Malware that would exploit that browser would have the privileges of the user that ran the browser.
Use Chrome or any other browser to browse to file:///C:/ or about:memory. The browser like any other process, ...
4
As a quick starter for 10, see this page:
The driver component of Sandboxie could not complete initialization. This message indicates that Sandboxie asked the system to provide notifications when processes (applications) start and stop, but the system was not able to accomodate this request.
In technical terms, Sandboxie is asking to register a ...
4
I'm far from being a PHP expert, so my comments are more general rather than specific.
Probably not entirely, but it depends. I don't think that any whitelist/blacklist approach can ever be 100% accurate. There will always be a case of false positives or false negatives. So you're always balancing between hits (of a script being able to still penetrate ...
4
You can make a timeline
First of all, they may be working on testing and rolling-out a fix. Before you go public, you may want to let them know your timeline and see if they respond. They may be more willing to communicate if they have an incentive to do so.
You can be vague
Your typical "black-hat" is not as bright as he wants to appear. As a rule, the ...
4
In addition to the excellent guidance from Rook and tylerl - are you certain you have the correct contact at the company?
Large corporates can be useless at passing information internally, or even being aware of who to pass it to, so make sure you are sending the information to the correct team.
Consider sending it to a wider audience at that company - ...
4
If you simply replace eval() with something like file_put_contents() in each de-obfuscation step you will be able to get the actual malicious code and be able to analyze it. Just make sure you don't output the results to the browser because at some point actual malicious code will be executed in the browser and your machine might get compromised. Write the ...
3
No. Sandboxes aren't overrated. They've very useful. They are not a silver bullet -- they don't solve every security problem -- but they do have substantial value.
Really, don't think this is especially new. If you read the original paper describing the Chrome security architecture, it clearly explains why sandboxing is valuable while also elucidating ...
3
You said you are going to load the third-party content in an iframe, but will the third-party content be hosted from the same domain as your main content, or will it be served from a separate domain?
If the third-party content is hosted on the same domain as your main page, then no, your approach is totally insecure. Content in an iframe has full scripting ...
3
Conceptually, a virtual machine is an emulator. Have you ever seen the Nintendo emulators, where you stick an old Nintendo game in and it emulates the Nintendo console? It works like this: the emulator repeatedly reads an instruction from the game, then emulates the effect of executing that instruction (simulating the Nintendo hardware, but using software ...
3
Very common implementation is sharing sessions in the same process. E.g: you are logged into your bank account in tab A. When you copy the URL and paste it in the tab B (of the same browser-window), then: you are still logged in. The situation should be different when you start another process of your browser and paste the URL into another browser-window.
...
3
What you need to understand instructions are the Intel software Developer Manuals. For what it's worth, I sometimes find them a bit opaque - so I contrast what I read on google and in the AMD Manuals as they both implement the x86/x64 architecture.
Specifically, for this you need Vol 3C: Virtualisation. As of the current manual you want page 293 ...
3
Pokki is secure the same way that chrome is.
A Pokki process is severely limited and thus no malicious software can infect your system from within a Pokki without breaking several security layers simultaneously (very unlikely).
There are no tests because the application itself doesn't have anything to do with the sandbox architecture except it runs ontop ...
3
This would all depend on the privileges that the browser (portable or not) had whilst it was running.
The Google Chrome Sandbox is pretty secure, but there are ways that Malware can infect a system.
I think that this article will be of use.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/09/google_chrome_pwned/
2
This posting on Getting Started with Basic Malware Analysis was almost built to answer to this question.
The author of the blog post explains using Remnux with fake DNS, fake services, etc as the gateway to a malware infected Windows XP machine. He also mentions putting a Dionaea instance on the network as well, to see if the infected host attacks it.
2
Yes. strace is a reasonable way to monitor system calls and their arguments, as long as the process being monitored is not malicious. If the process being monitored is malicious and was written to evade strace, I expect that it can do so. strace was not written as a security tool, and I can hypothesize several ways that the process might defeat it. See, ...
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