[ISN] Symantec Voices Security Concerns over Vista's Use of Tunneling Protocol

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Sun Mar 18 2007 - 21:33:51 PST


http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2105001,00.asp

By Lisa Vaas
March 16, 2007

Updated: Security company Symantec says new research supports fears that 
Vista's use of the IP tunneling protocol Teredo is potentially insecure.

Security company Symantec says new research supports fears that Windows 
Vista's use of the IP tunneling protocol Teredo is potentially insecure.

Microsoft is using Teredo to enable a transition from IPv4, which is the 
traditional version of the network layer protocol for packet-switched 
networks now used as the Internet's background, to IPv6, an updated 
protocol whose biggest benefit is the exponential increase it will bring 
in the number of IP addresses available for networked devices.

Symantec, based in Cupertino, Calif., first brought up concerns about 
Teredo in November 2006. As the company points out in its latest report, 
"Windows Vista Network Attack Surface Analysis" (PDF), Microsoft rewrote 
the network stack from the ground up in Vista. By doing so, Symantec 
said, Microsoft has "removed a large body of tested code and replaced it 
with newly written code, possibly introducing new corner cases and 
defects."

Oliver Friedrichs, a director at Symantec Security Response, said the 
introduction of Teredoone of those newly written, potentially buggy 
pieces of codehas "a number of security implications."

"Many firewalls and intrusion detection systems are not Teredo-aware," 
Friedrichs said in an interview with eWEEK. "They're not familiar with 
the protocol or how to decapsulate the protocol. That means, for one, 
when we're talking about a firewall, Teredo may allow attacks to 
circumvent or bypass the firewall."

Friedrichs said Teredo also presents a problem in that IDSes (intrusion 
detection systems) are "generally good" at looking at TCP and UDP (User 
Datagram Protocol) traffic, which are the traditional protocols that 
transport Web and e-mail requests. If attacks on a system are tunneled, 
however, they'll be invisible to IDSes, he said.

"Any security device needs to be aware of Teredo in order to look into 
it and analyze traffic traveling over it," Friedrichs said. "For 
enterprises, this presents, obviously, a serious concern. Attackers can, 
for one, tunnel through perimeter devices without being seen and tunnel 
attacks over [Teredo] without being seen by perimeter devices."

Such perimeter devices include firewalls and routers, such as those from 
Linksys, he said. "The firewall is traditionally there to filter 
traffic, but with Teredo it's rendered in many cases ineffective," he 
said.

Friedrichs said Symantec expects most enterprises to disable Teredo. 
"That said, we expect it to be enabled on consumer desktops," he said. 
"It's dormant by default but can be turned on easily." As a matter of 
fact, Friedrichs said, Symantec found in testing that Teredo is easily 
activated when a Windows Vista application attempts to use IPv6. "Our 
findings have shown that Vista in some cases enables Teredo on its own, 
with no intervention, soon after Vista has been installed," he said.

Friedrichs said Symantec expects attackers to concentrate on hacking 
Vista with third-party applications as well as directly.

"Microsoft has done some good things in that they've made the core 
operating system far more secure, so that will have the benefit of 
eliminating some widespread attacks against Windows like we've seen in 
the past," he said. "That causes attackers to move from the operating 
system to third-party applications, such as drivers. Attackers will 
focus on those to find vulnerabilities."

Others in the security field, including Coseinc Security Researcher 
Joanna Rutkowska and BreakingPoint Systems Security Researcher HD Moore, 
say they agree that drivers are a weakness. "It can be a graphics card 
with a stupid bug" that opens Vista to attack, Rutkowska said during a 
panel at Ziff Davis Enterprise's Security Summit 2007. "You can't do 
anything about it. You can't sue the vendor for introducing a bug. You 
can't prove it was done intentionally."

"It's certainly a much larger problem than protecting [even] a large 
operating system," Friedrichs said. "We're looking to every third-party 
software vendor to secure their products. Attackers are just going to 
move on" if Vista proves too hard to hack, he said.

One example of a third-party service that has been compromised running 
on Vista is CA's BrightStor backup. Vulnerability researchers at 
penetration-testing software maker Core Security demonstrated the 
exploit at the RSA conference in February.

Jim Hahn, a product manager for Microsoft's Windows Client Team, said in 
a statement that Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., "is aware of a 
report issued several weeks ago by Symantec that provides another 
analysis of both Beta and RTM versions of networking technologies in 
Windows Vista. We believe many of the most recent third-party [analyses] 
of Windows Vista, including this paper, [validate] many of the key 
design decisions made in the product. We look forward to further 
discussing the areas where Symantec has noted improvements could be made 
to benefit customers."

Editor's Note: This story was updated to include additional information 
from Symantec.


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