As solutions to managing cybersecurity threats increase, surprisingly few metrics are available on how well these methods work to secure organizational assets. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has pioneered information security performance measurement models that can produce metrics. (Note: NIST’s work in this area is now being updated.)

Aside from government agencies’ requirements to produce information security performance measures, the measurement models NIST recommends can also be used for internal overall IT improvement efforts. Either way, NIST recommends considering four factors while developing and implementing an information security measurement program:

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Authentication remains one of the most painstaking challenges faced by CISOs in organizations large and small. This longstanding, fundamental element of security continues to cause headaches for security leaders seeking to identify and authorize users and devices often spread across different states, borders, and time zones. Meanwhile, persistent risks associated with ineffective authentication strategies and processes threaten businesses as they become more agile and remote, requiring security teams to rethink approaches to authentication in the modern landscape.

Authentication a significant obstacle for modern CISOs

Authentication continues to test CISOs for several reasons, with its modern definition being the first to address, Netskope CISO Lamont Orange tells CSO. “We use lots of terminology to describe what is meant to address the authentication and authorization methods required for devices, applications and systems, in addition to supporting security policies that govern this interaction. In the past, we have implemented authentication in very basic construct: If I need access, I must pass credential tests (login/password) for each user/service request without the use of MFA in most cases,” he says.

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Every day, I see the failure in our technology. I’m sure you see it as well. Since the day we started receiving email, we have failed at protecting recipients from scams, phishes and other email messages that they don’t want. I remember the infamous email-based computer worm, the “ILOVEYOU virus,” that infected fellow IT friends back in 2000.

Those victims should have known better than to click on an email that said ILOVEYOU, but they did and had to clean up afterwards. We hope that our antivirus or endpoint protection software alerts us to problems. In reality, it often does not. When technology fails, it’s likely because the attacker made an end run around it by targeting humans. Here are four ways they do it.

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Software supply chain attacks realize researchers’ worst fears

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Shodan is a search engine for everything on the internet — web cams, water treatment facilities, yachts, medical devices, traffic lights, wind turbines, license plate readers, smart TVs, refrigerators, anything and everything you could possibly imagine that’s plugged into the internet (and often shouldn’t be). Google and other search engines, by comparison, index only the web.

The best way to understand what Shodan does is to read founder John Matherly’s book on the subject. The basic algorithm is short and sweet:

1. Generate a random IPv4 address
2. Generate a random port to test from the list of ports that Shodan understands
3. Check the random IPv4 address on the random port and grab a banner
4. Goto 1

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CrowdStrike discloses container escape vulnerability affecting CRI-O for Kubernetes. Here’s how Tenable.cs can help you detect vulnerable pods.

Background

On March 15, CrowdStrike published technical details and a proof-of-concept for CVE-2022-0811, a vulnerability they have named cr8escape, in the CRI-O Container Engine for Kubernetes. CRI-O is an open source container runtime engine that is used to share kernel resources among applications running on a container node. There have not been any reported exploitations in the wild of this vulnerability at the time of publication.

CrowdStrike identified Red Hat’s OpenShift 4+ and Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes as two products that integrate CRI-O and warns that other software and platforms may deploy the engine by default.

Analysis

CVE-2022-0811 is a container escape vulnerability in CRI-O that can lead to elevation of privileges. According to CrowdStrike, this vulnerability was introduced in CRI-O version 1.19 and allows an attacker to bypass the standard security controls that typically prevent one pod from changing the kernel parameters of others, allowing them to set arbitrary kernel parameters to the host.

An attacker with “rights to deploy a pod on Kubernetes cluster that uses the CRI-O runtime” could elevate their privileges and potentially execute code on other nodes in the cluster with root permissions. This could further allow the attacker to spread malware or exfiltrate sensitive data, making it a useful flaw for ransomware groups in particular.

Proof of concept

As part of their technical write up, CrowdStrike walked through a proof of concept that exploits CVE-2022-0811 to execute malware.

Solution

The vulnerability was introduced in CRI-O version 1.19 in September 2020 and impacts all versions since. On March 15, version 1.22.3 was released to address CVE-2022-0811. Both Oracle and Red Hat have deployed the fixed version as part of updates to Oracle Linux and OpenShift.

How Tenable.cs can help

To exploit this vulnerability on clusters running vulnerable versions of CRI-O, an attacker has to create a pod with a ‘sysctl’ containing “+” or “=” in the value.

Tenable.cs can help you detect such misconfigurations in your Kubernetes clusters by scanning your infrastructure as code (manifests, helm, or kustomize), as well as your runtime cluster.

Tenable.cs uses policy as code (open policy agent Rego) to find the misconfigurations in all your cluster workloads. Let’s take a look at the code that helps detect this misconfiguration.

Before CVE-2022-0811 was reported, Tenable.cs was already scanning your workloads against kernel level syscalls. The policy to check for these misconfigurations looks like this:

kernelLevelSysCalls[pod.id] {

pod := input.kubernetes_pod[_]

forbiddenSysctls = [“kernel.*”]

sysctl := pod.config.spec.securityContext.sysctls[_].name

forbidden_sysctl(sysctl, forbiddenSysctls)

}

forbidden_sysctl(sysctl, arg) {

arg[_] == sysctl

}

forbidden_sysctl(sysctl, arg) {

startswith(sysctl, trim(arg[_], “*”))

}

In the above policy, we are checking for the name of sysctl if it includes “kernel.” However, to detect CVE-2022-0811, we have added another policy which will first verify for kernel level calls through name as in the above policy, then it will check for the value in the sysctl and alert you if it contains [“=”, “+”].

{{.prefix}}{{.name}}{{.suffix}}[pod.id] {

pod := input.kubernetes_pod[_]

forbiddenSysctls = [“kernel.*”]

sysctl := pod.config.spec.securityContext.sysctls[_].name

forbidden_sysctl(sysctl, forbiddenSysctls)

disAllowedValues := [“=”, “+”]

sysctlValue := pod.config.spec.securityContext.sysctls[_].value

contains(sysctlValue, disAllowedValues[_])

}

Note: The above policies are an example used just for kubernetes pods, Tenable.cs can scan the same for all different kinds of workloads, such as, Deployment/ReplicaSet/DaemonSet etc.

Now, let’s look at the Tenable.cs results for the scan of the pod used by CrowdStrike in its proof of concept.

Tenable.cs provides an issues tab with all the violations specific to the infrastructure one has scanned. The screenshot above shows the results of a failed CVE-2022-0811 policy check in Tenable.cs. For every violation, Tenable.cs provides technical details and remediation advice.

Identifying affected systems

A list of Tenable plugins to identify this vulnerability can be found here.

Get more information

CrowdStrike’s Blog Post on CVE-2022-0811
CRI-O GitHub

Join Tenable’s Security Response Team on the Tenable Community.

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