Disambiguation: encryption, hashing, salting What is your legal liability if this data is exposed? Also consider the damage to your reputation.įrom here we can see a number of different crypto angles coming up: Is the right data encrypted? Are the keys protected? Is the source data exposed by interfaces? Is the hashing weak? This is showing us that as with the previous six posts in this series, the insecure crypto risk is far more than just a single discrete vulnerability it’s a whole raft of practices that must be implemented securely if cryptographic storage is to be done well. Typically this information includes sensitive data such as health records, credentials, personal data, credit cards, etc.Ĭonsider the business value of the lost data and impact to your reputation. They usually must exploit something else first to gain the needed access.įailure frequently compromises all data that should have been encrypted. External attackers have difficulty detecting such flaws due to limited access. Use of weak or unsalted hashes to protect passwords is also common. When encryption is employed, unsafe key generation and storage, not rotating keys, and weak algorithm usage is common. The most common flaw in this area is simply not encrypting data that deserves encryption. They break something else, such as find keys, get clear text copies of data, or access data via channels that automatically decrypt. Would they like to gain access to protected data they aren’t authorized for? What about internal administrators?Īttackers typically don’t break the crypto. Here’s how OWASP defines the vulnerability and impact: ThreatĬonsider the users of your system. These are two different things although frequently grouped together under the one “encryption” heading. One thing the summary draws attention to which we’ll address very early in this piece is “encryption or hashing”. Attackers may steal or modify such weakly protected data to conduct identity theft, credit card fraud, or other crimes. Many web applications do not properly protect sensitive data, such as credit cards, SSNs, and authentication credentials, with appropriate encryption or hashing. Having said that, the OWASP summary keeps it quite succinct: Likewise it’s essential that encryption keys are properly protected or again, the encrypted data itself suddenly becomes rather vulnerable. For example, a very secure cryptographic storage implementation becomes worthless if interfaces are readily exposed which provide decrypted versions of the data. When OWASP talks about securely implementing cryptography, they’re not just talking about what form the persisted data takes, rather it encompasses the processes around the exercise of encrypting and decrypting data. NET and what we need to do in order to implement cryptographic storage securely.
Let’s take a look at how this applies to. OWASP sets out to address poor cryptography implementations in part 7 of the Top 10 web application security risks. Then of course we have Sony Pictures where cryptography simply wasn’t implemented at all. Yes, they could stand up and say “We encrypt our data”, but when the crunch came it turned out to be a pretty hollow statement. The thing with both these cases is that their encryption implementations were done poorly. In both of these cases, data was encrypted yet it was ultimately exposed with what in retrospect, appears to be great ease. Take a couple of recent high profile examples in the form of Gawker and. It’s one of those things which appears frequently (or at least should appear frequently), yet is often poorly understood and as a result, implemented badly. This content is now available in the Pluralsight course "OWASP Top 10 Web Application Security Risks for ASP.NET"Ĭryptography is a fascinating component of computer systems.
0 kommentar(er)
