Announcing VASTO 0.2

The new version of VASTO, now with Cloud tricks! VASTO 0.2 includes attacks against the Abiquo and Eucalyptus private cloud systems, and improved versions of the previously released VMware-targeting modules. You can grab a copy here.
VASTO 0.2 was released at SyScan 10 Singapore: the slides are embedded at the end of the article.

As usual, feedbacks are warmly welcome.

Standing on the clouds

View more presentations from Claudio Criscione.

By the way, I'm also uploading some videos of my demo.

Announcing VASTO beta

Today at Troopers10 I released the first beta of VASTO, the Virtualization ASsessment TOolkit. VASTO is being developed at Secure Network and wants to be the reference in penetration testing in virtualized environments.
You can find more information in the attached presentation, and download the binary here.

By the way, Troopers 10 was really an amazing conference, wonderful venue and great people.

[Confidence0902] The Glass Cage - Virtualization Security

My trip in Poland has been very interesting: I've met a lot of people, got back in touch with Ikki and got some weird flu which taught me that giving a presentation when you've got high fever might not be the brightest idea.
This is presentation I gave at Confidence 0902, with an overview on various attack paths against virtualization technologies. One of the most interesting things, I think, is the mitm to remote code execution attack against Virtual Infrastructure Client. I've also announced VASTO, a project we're working on at Secure Network.
Any comment is warmly welcome, but please if you were at confidence do not ask me how many coffee I had before the presentation (10 people already asked).

[Confidence0902] The Glass Cage - Virtualization Security

View more documents from Claudio Criscione.

Virtual Appliances forensic - Part1

In the last months I've been most busy exploring virtualization security issues, which anyway I'm going to present at CONFidence and IT Underground Warsaw in a couple of weeks. However, I wanted to share with you an interesting piece of information I've uncovered while exploring some common virtual appliances.

As you surely know, it's really, really hard to make sure that a file is gone from your file system. You have to remove every reference, every tiny bit of information, or it might be uncovered: data structures, actual data left on the disk, backups of the data structures and so on. File System forensics is concerned with precisely this matter, and forensic software are capable of doing wonders when it comes to recovering deleted that from disks.

Well, the same is true for virtual appliances. While some vendors might decide that it's worth cleaning up and shrinking the disk before shipping virtual appliances, most will not. As a result, you can find gold inside those disks: setup scripts, configuration and installation stuff and all sort of "backend knowledge". This is quite hard to extract from actual machines, which are often disk-imaged and quite hard to reach with traditional tools (some are missing cd roms, for instance, and vendors do not really like you opening up their boxes). However, with virtual appliances it's really really easy to do so.

An example? VMware Studio virtual appliance, the virtual appliance which should be used to build other virtual appliances, has got references of the internal deb repository used to install the - custom - VMware Studio software on it, and traces of the actual debian packages as well.

More data on VA security in the near future, likely after my talk!