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Application Security

HTTPS: The Myth of Secure Encrypted Traffic Exposed

February 5, 2019 — by Ben Zilberman — 0

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The S in HTTPS is supposed to mean that encrypted traffic is secure. For attackers, it just means that they have a larger attack surface from which to launch assaults on the applications to exploit the security vulnerabilities. How should organizations respond?

Most web traffic is encrypted to provide better privacy and security. By 2018, over 70% of webpages are loaded over HTTPS. Radware expects this trend to continue until nearly all web traffic is encrypted. The major drivers pushing adoption rates are the availability of free SSL certificates and the perception that clear traffic is insecure.

While encrypting traffic is a vital practice for organizations, cyber criminals are not necessarily deterred by the practice. They are looking for ways to take advantage of encrypted traffic as a platform from which to launch attacks that can be difficult to detect and mitigate, especially at the application layer. As encrypted applications grow more complex, the potential attack surface is larger. Organizations need to incorporate protection of the application layer as part of their overall network security strategies. Results from the global industry survey revealed a 10% increase in encrypted attacks on organizations by 2018.

Encrypted Application Layers

When planning protection for encrypted applications, it is important to consider all of the layers that are involved in delivering an application. It is not uncommon for application owners to focus on protecting the encrypted application layer while overlooking the lower layers in the stack which might be vulnerable. In many cases, protection selected for the application layer may itself be vulnerable to transport-layer attacks.

To ensure applications are protected, organizations need to analyze the following Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) layers:

  • Transport — In most encrypted applications, the underlying transport is TCP. TCP attacks come in many forms, so volumes and protection must be resilient to protect
    applications from attacks on the TCP layer. Some applications now use QUIC, which uses UDP as the underlying layer and adds reflection and amplification risks to the mix.
  • Session — The SSL itself is vulnerable. Once an SSL/TLS session is created, the server invests about 15 times more compute power than the client, which makes the session layer particularly vulnerable and attractive to attackers.
  • Application — Application attacks are the most complex type of attack, and encryption only makes it harder for security solutions to detect and mitigate them.Attackers often select specific areas in applications to generate a high request-to-load ratio, may attack several resources simultaneously to make detection harder, or may mimic legitimate user behavior in various ways to bypass common application security solutions.The size of an attack surface is determined by the application design. For example, in a login attack, botnets perform multiple login attempts from different sources to try to stress the application. The application login is always encrypted and requires resources on the application side such as a database, authentication gateway or identity service invocation. The attack does not require a high volume of traffic to affect the application, making it very hard to detect.

[You may also like: SSL Attacks – When Hackers Use Security Against You]

Environmental Aspects

Organizations also need to consider the overall environment and application structure because it greatly affects the selection of the ideal security design based on a vulnerability assessment.

  • Content Delivery Network — Applications using a content delivery network (CDN) generate a challenge for security controls which are deployed at the origin. Technologies that use the source IP for analyzing client application behavior only see the source IP of the CDN. There is a risk that the solutions will either over mitigate and disrupt legitimate users or become ineffective. High rates of false positives prove that protection based on source IP addresses is pointless. Instead, when using a CDN, the selected security technology should have the right measures to analyze attacks that originate behind it, including device fingerprinting or extraction of the original source from the application headers.
  • Application Programming Interface — Application programming interface (API) usage is common in all applications. According to Radware’s The State of Web Application Security report, a third of attacks against APIs intends to yield a denial-of-service state. The security challenge here comes from the legitimate client side. Many solutions rely on various active user validation techniques to distinguish legitimate users from attackers. These techniques require that a real browser reside at the client. In the case of an API, many times a legitimate browser is not at the client side, so the behavior and legitimate response to various validation challenges is different.
  • Mobile Applications — Like APIs, the client side is not a browser for a mobile application and cannot be expected to behave and respond like one. Mobile applications pose a challenge because they rely on different operating systems and use different browsers. Many security solutions were created based on former standards and common tools and have not yet fully adapted. The fact that mobile apps process a high amount of encrypted traffic increases the capacity and security challenges.
  • Directionality — Many security solutions only inspect inbound traffic to protect against availability threats. Directionality of traffic has significant implications on the protection efficiency because attacks usually target the egress path of the application. In such cases, there might not be an observed change in the incoming traffic profile, but the application might still become unavailable. An effective security solution must process both directions of traffic to protect against sophisticated application attacks.

[You may also like: Are Your Applications Secure?]

Regulatory Limitations

Major selection criterion for security solutions is regulatory compliance. In the case of encrypted attacks, compliance requirements examine whether traffic is decrypted, what parts of traffic are decrypted and where the decryption happens. The governing paradigm has always been that the more intrusive the solution, the more effective the security, but that is not necessarily the case here. Solutions show different levels of effectiveness for the same intrusiveness.

Encryption Protocols

The encryption protocol in use has implications toward how security can be applied and what types of vulnerabilities it represents. Specifically, TLS 1.3 generates enhanced security from the data privacy perspective but is expected to generate challenges to security solutions which rely on eavesdropping on the encrypted connection. Users planning to upgrade to TLS 1.3 should consider the future resiliency of their solutions.

[You may also like: Adopt TLS 1.3 – Kill Two Birds with One Stone]

Attack Patterns

Determining attack patterns is the most important undertaking that organizations must master. Because there are so many layers that are vulnerable, attackers can easily change their tactics mid-attack. The motivation is normally twofold: first, inflicting maximum impact with minimal cost; second, making detection and mitigation difficult.

  • Distribution — The level of attack distribution is very important to the attacker. It impacts the variety of vectors that can be used and makes the job harder for the security controls. Most importantly, the more distributed the attack, the less traffic each attacking source has to generate. That way, behavior can better resemble legitimate users. Gaining control of a large botnet used to be difficult to do and extremely costly. With the growth in the IoT and corresponding IoT botnets, it is common to come across botnets consisting of hundreds of thousands of bots.
  • Overall Attack Rates — The overall attack traffic rate varies from one vector to another. Normally, the lower the layer, the higher the rate. At the application layer, attackers are able to generate low-rate attacks, which still generate significant impact. Security solutions should be able to handle both high- and low-rate attacks, without compromising user experience and SLA.
  • Rate per Attacker — Many security solutions in the availability space rely on the rate per source to detect attackers. This method is not always effective as highly distributed attacks proliferate.
  • Connection Rates — Available attack tools today can be divided into two major classes based on their connection behavior. The first class includes tools that open a single connection and generate many. The second includes tools that generate many connections with only a single request or very few requests on each connection. Security tools that can analyze connection behavior are more effective in discerning legitimate users from attackers.
  • Session Rates — SSL/TLS session behavior has various distinct behavioral characteristics in legitimate users and browsers. The major target is to optimize performance and user experience. Attack traffic does not usually fully adhere to those norms, so its SSL session behavior is different. The ability to analyze encryption session behavior contributes to protecting both the encryption layer and the underlying application layer.
  • Application Rates — Because the application is the most complex part to attack, attackers have the most degree of freedom when it comes to application behavior. Attack patterns vary greatly from one attack to another in terms of how they appear on application behavior analyses. At the same time, the rate of change in the application itself is very high, such that it cannot be followed manually. Security tools that can automatically analyze a large variety of application aspects and, at the same time, adapt to changes quickly are expected to be more effective in protecting from encrypted application attacks.

End-to-End Protection

Protection from encrypted availability attacks is becoming a mandatory requirement for organizations. At the same time, it is one of the more complex tasks to thoroughly perform without leaving blind spots. When considering a protection strategy, it is important to take into account various aspects of the risk and to make sure that, with all good intentions, the side door is not left open.

Read “The Trust Factor: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustaining Business Momentum” to learn more.

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DDoSSecuritySSL

The Executive Guide to Demystify Cybersecurity

June 20, 2018 — by Radware — 0

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WHAT DO BANKS AND CYBERSECURITY HAVE IN COMMON? EVERYTHING

The world we live in can be a dangerous place, both physically and digitally. Our growing reliance on the Internet, technology and digitalization only makes our dependence on
technology more perilous. As an executive, you’re facing pressure both internally (from customers and shareholders) and externally (from industry compliance or government regulations) to keep your organization’s digital assets and your customers’ secure.

New cybersecurity threats require new solutions. New solutions require a project to implement them. The problems and solutions seem infinite while budgets remain bounded. Therefore, the challenge becomes how to identify the priority threats, select the solutions that deliver the best ROI and stretch dollars to maximize your organization’s protection. Consultants and industry analysts can help, but they too can be costly options that don’t always provide the correct advice.

So how best to simplify the decision-making process? Use an analogy. Consider that every cybersecurity solution has a counterpart in the physical world. To illustrate this point, consider the security measures at banks. They make a perfect analogy, because banks are just like applications or computing environments; both contain valuables that criminals are eager to steal.

 

The first line of defense at a bank is the front door, which is designed to allow people to enter and leave while providing a first layer of defense against thieves. Network firewalls fulfill the same role within the realm of cyber security. They allow specific types of traffic to enter an organization’s network but block mischievous visitors from entering. While firewalls are an effective first line of defense, they’re not impervious. Just like surreptitious robbers such as Billy the Kid or John Dillinger, SSL/TLS-based encrypted attacks or nefarious malware can sneak through this digital “front door” via a standard port.

Past the entrance there is often a security guard, which serves as an IPS or anti-malware device. This “security guard,” which is typically anti-malware and/or heuristic-based IPS function, seeks to identify unusual behavior or other indicators that trouble has entered the bank, such as somebody wearing a ski mask or perhaps carrying a concealed weapon.

Once the hacker gets past these perimeter security measures, they find themselves at the presentation layer of the application, or in the case of a bank, the teller. There is security here as well. Firstly, authentication (do you have an account) and second, two-factor authentication (an ATM card/security pin). IPS and anti-malware devices work in
concert with SIEM management solutions to serve as security cameras, performing additional security checks. Just like a bank leveraging the FBI’s Most Wanted List, these solutions leverage crowd sourcing and big-data analytics to analyze data from a massive global community and identify bank-robbing malware in advance.

[You might also like: Cybersecurity & Customer Experience: Embrace Technology and Change To Earn A Customer’s Loyalty]

THE EXECUTIVE GUIDE TO DEMYSTIFYING CYBERSECURITY

A robber will often demand access to the bank’s vault. In the realm of IT, this is the database, where valuable information such as passwords, credit card or financial transaction information or healthcare data is stored. There are several ways of protecting this data, or at the very least, monitoring it. Encryption and database
application monitoring solutions are the most common.

ADAPTING FOR THE FUTURE: DDOS MITIGATION

To understand how and why cybersecurity models will have to adapt to meet future threats, let’s outline three obstacles they’ll have to overcome in the near future: advanced DDoS mitigation, encrypted cyberattacks, and DevOps and agile software development.

A DDoS attack is any cyberattack that compromises a company’s website or network and impairs the organization’s ability to conduct business. Take an e-commerce business for example. If somebody wanted to prevent the organization from conducting business, it’s not necessary to hack the website but simply to make it difficult for visitors to access it.

Leveraging the bank analogy, this is why banks and financial institutions leverage multiple layers of security: it provides an integrated, redundant defense designed to meet a multitude of potential situations in the unlikely event a bank is robbed. This also includes the ability to quickly and effectively communicate with law enforcement.

In the world of cyber security, multi-layered defense is also essential. Why? Because preparing for “common” DDoS attacks is no longer enough. With the growing online availability of attack tools and services, the pool of possible attacks is larger than ever. This is why hybrid protection, which combines both on-premise and cloudbased
mitigation services, is critical.

Why are there two systems when it comes to cyber security? Because it offers the best of both worlds. When a DDoS solution is deployed on-premise, organizations benefit from an immediate and automatic attack detection and mitigation solution. Within a few seconds from the initiation of a cyber-assault, the online services are well protected and the attack is mitigated. However, on-premise DDoS solution cannot handle volumetric network floods that saturate the Internet pipe. These attacks must be mitigated from the cloud.

Hybrid DDoS protection aspire to offer best-of-breed attack mitigation by combining on-premise and cloud mitigation into a single, integrated solution. The hybrid solution chooses the right mitigation location and technique based on attack characteristics. In the hybrid solution, attack detection and mitigation starts immediately and automatically using the on-premise attack mitigation device. This stops various attacks from diminishing the availability of the online services. All attacks are mitigated on-premise, unless they threaten to block the Internet pipe of the organization. In case of pipe saturation, the hybrid solution activates cloud mitigation and the traffic is diverted to the cloud, where it is scrubbed before being sent back to the enterprise. An ideal hybrid solution also shares essential information about the attack between on-premise mitigation devices and cloud devices to accelerate and enhance the mitigation of the attack once it reaches the cloud.

INSPECTING ENCRYPTED DATA

Companies have been encrypting data for well over 20 years. Today, over 50% of Internet traffic is encrypted. SSL/TLS encryption is still the most effective way to protect data as it ties the encryption to both the source and destination. This is a double-edged sword however. Hackers are now leveraging encryption to create new,
stealthy attack vectors for malware infection and data exfiltration. In essence, they’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

To stop hackers from leveraging SSL/TLS-based cyberattacks, organizations require computing resources; resources to inspect communications to ensure they’re not infected with malicious malware. These increasing resource requirements make it challenging for anything but purpose built hardware to conduct inspection.

The equivalent in the banking world is twofold. If somebody were to enter wearing a ski mask, that person probably wouldn’t be allowed to conduct a transaction, or secondly, there can be additional security checks when somebody enters a bank and requests a large or unique withdrawal.

[You might also like: Cybersecurity & The Customer Experience: The Perfect Combination]

DEALING WITH DEVOPS AND AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Lastly, how do we ensure that, as applications become more complex, they don’t become increasingly vulnerable either from coding errors or from newly deployed functionality associated with DevOps or agile development practices? The problem is most cybersecurity solutions focus on stopping existing threats. To use our bank analogy again, existing security solutions mean that (ideally), a career criminal can’t enter a bank, someone carrying a concealed weapon is stopped or somebody acting suspiciously is blocked from making a transaction. However, nothing stops somebody with no criminal background or conducting no suspicious activity from entering the bank. The bank’s security systems must be updated to look for other “indicators” that this person could represent a threat.

In the world of cybersecurity, the key is implementing a web application firewall that adapts to evolving threats and applications. A WAF accomplishes this by automatically detecting and protecting new web applications as they are added to the network via automatic policy generation.

It should also differentiate between false positives and false negatives. Why? Because just like a bank, web applications are being accessed both by desired legitimate users and undesired attackers (malignant users whose goal is to harm the application and/or steal data). One of the biggest challenges in protecting web applications is the ability to accurately differentiate between the two and identify and block security threats while not disturbing legitimate traffic.

ADAPTABILITY IS THE NAME OF THE GAME

The world we live in can be a dangerous place, both physically and digitally. Threats are constantly changing, forcing both financial institutions and organizations to adapt their security solutions and processes. When contemplating the next steps, consider the following:

  • Use common sense and logic. The marketplace is saturated with offerings. Understand how a cybersecurity solution will fit into your existing infrastructure and the business value it will bring by keeping your organization up and running and your customer’s data secure.
  • Understand the long-term TCO of any cyber security solution you purchase.
  • The world is changing. Ensure that any cyber security solution you implement is designed to adapt to the constantly evolving threat landscape and your organization’s operational needs.

Read the “2018 C-Suite Perspectives: Trends in the Cyberattack Landscape, Security Threats and Business Impacts” to learn more.

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SecuritySSL

High-Performance Visibility into SSL/TLS Traffic

May 2, 2018 — by Fabio Palozza — 8

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Protection of your business’s confidential information and prevention of data breaches are crucial to supporting successful business operations. This necessarily involves taking that extra step to safeguard all forms of communication, including streaming videos, social media interactions, and email messages, against security threats. With SSL/TLS, you can establish secure communication with your business associates and customers. Unfortunately, cyber criminals use SSL/TLS as a tunnel to hide malware from security devices. That’s why even though you may be safeguarded by the most advanced firewall technology and your IDS/IPS is aware of a vast number of vulnerabilities, your existing defense mechanisms may still fail to see into encrypted SSL/TLS traffic. Therefore, you should deploy enterprise security solutions that have the capability to gain visibility into the encrypted traffic and prevent malware from gaining entry into your network.

Application Delivery

Encryption is a Double-Edged Sword for the Healthcare Industry

December 5, 2017 — by Frank Yue — 1

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The healthcare industry must take security and privacy seriously.  They collect and retain personal health information (PHI) and financial information while providing life-saving medical care.  The protection of this information and the networks that manage it is one of the top concerns for IT organizations in the healthcare industry.

Application Delivery

Encryption is a Costume to Hide Threats on the Internet

November 1, 2017 — by Frank Yue — 0

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It is the time of the year where adults and children alike put on costumes and go out to gather candy or create mischief. The costumes are scary or cute, but always achieve the goal of obfuscating the individual and hiding their true identity and intent. The person wearing the costume does not express their goal until they are interacting with their target.

Application DeliverySecuritySSL

5 Key Items for the Digital Transformation of Healthcare

September 20, 2017 — by Frank Yue — 0

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People’s lives are at risk as the healthcare industry transforms patient care with modern IT technologies. Data security and application availability are essential when a patient’s medical information is on the network. Hospitals and medical practices are digitizing healthcare applications like x-rays, CAT scans, medication distribution and surgical procedures using interactive video. In addition, patient care staff are accessing all of this medical information on tablets, phones, and other devices in real-time.

SecuritySSL

Cyber and Securities – Financial Institutions Attack Landscape

August 16, 2017 — by Ben Zilberman — 0

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Recently Italian bank Unicredit suffered two security breaches. Data of 400,000 customers was stolen, including loan account numbers and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). There is a suspicion the breach had to do with interaction with a 3rd party. This incident is the latest reported in a long history of cyber-attacks against financial institutions. Every hack however, can teach us a lesson.

Application DeliverySSL

The ADC is the Key Master for All Things SSL/TLS

July 25, 2017 — by Frank Yue — 0

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In the movies (and real life) one often needs to go through the Key Master to get to the destination. The job of the Key Master is to keep control of the access to the locks and barriers that protect important or sensitive material. Sometimes there is one key to get to the hidden rewards while other times, there is a long string of keys that must be maintained and managed. In other situations, the Key Master is more of a Key Maker, generating keys upon request.

Application DeliverySSL

The World is Changing

June 7, 2017 — by Daniel Lakier — 1

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The world is changing; it always has but the world is changing faster now than it ever has before. This general change is translating into even bigger changes in the cyber world. Some of the key areas that are evolving aren’t new, like availability or security. Others like automation are maturing quickly, and then there is the ever-present need for “easy.” Easy is a nebulous term, but in this case it refers to ease of procurement, ease of set up, flexibility in platform and ease of ongoing management.

This accelerated change is being driven by different market and business drivers. Some of the key market drivers are compliance, time to market, cyber loss risk, and increased competition around the user experience. This change is acutely felt in the ADC space.

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