Re: Security Audit

From: Renaud Deraison (deraisonat_private)
Date: Thu Sep 06 2001 - 20:52:28 PDT

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    On Thu, Sep 06, 2001 at 02:41:35AM -0400, Wertheimer, Ishai wrote:
    > An e-commerce site is supposed to have an application layer or isn't it ?
    > What about auditing the application on top?
    > 
    > Many e-commerce sites have been hacked although you wouldn't find any
    > vulnerability by running Nessus or such !
    
    
    <off topic, self promotion>
    Actually, Nessus 1.1.x has some plugins dedicated to the analysis of
    CGIs. This is not as good as a humain brain with at least a two-digit
    IQ, but that's better than just doing nothing. 
    (it will catch trivial things such as param=../../../../etc/passwd%00
    and such, but not dir=/etc&file=passwd, even though the later seems
    trivial to any human being).
    </off topic. Sorry for that>
    
    
    But I agree with you - no automated tool can do a security _audit_. 
    
    There's more to a security audit than just flashing redlights and
    showing /etc/passwd to the management. Policies have to be read and
    correlated with the real life on the network. Services that do not match
    the policy should be told to be disabled, even if they're not vulnerable
    to anything.
    
    A security audit is first a matter of checking that kind of thing rather
    than licensing the list of vulnerabilities on a network. Vulnerabilities
    appear and disappear every day. The policy never changes.
    
    
    
    				-- Renaud
    
    -- 
    Renaud Deraison
    The Nessus Project
    http://www.nessus.org
    
    
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