SystemsSec 2016W Lecture 5

Class discussion: threat models and attacker goals

Remote attacker, authenticated

Group 3

Members

• Dania Ghazal
• Ankush Varshneya
• Olivier Hamel
• Michael Aaya
• Ryan Morfield
• Daniel Vanderveen
• Jess Johnson

Example Scenario

Targeted System

• CIA database - find out who killed Kennedy?

Attackers

• remote authenticators
• contractors (non CIA)

Goals

• “exfiltrating data”
• exfiltrate the CIA database to find out who killed Kennedy

Means

• someone at the CIA left a node.js server running in the background :)
• ssh credentials
• use outdated emacs (implementing a root privileged mail daemon) to inject a password into etc/passwd to escalate attacker’s privileges
• look around the system for more vulnerable/outdated services to exploit
• generate a race condition to create a file that you know a root user would create, then let the root user put their “sensitive data” into attacker’s file (such as files in /temp)
• social engineering - submit a help ticket to someone within the CIA to gain higher privileges for a seemingly innocent reason

Attack Strategies

Where are the Accessible Weaknesses?

• outdated services
• any service that lets attacker execute a task as another user

How Do You Attack Them?

• user privilege escalation
• abusing service vulnerabilities