I don't understand this definition of "fair". Things are either good or they're not. Signed XML is not good. That's a fair claim, even if the designers of XMLDSIG didn't know as much as we do.
The DSIG problems are wildly worse than syntax! There's a document object model to contend with, along with invariably-fatal parser differential bugs, and that's before you confront the one global C implementation that almost every DSIG implementation ends up relying on.
Does Tailscale support SAML? If not: why would any other enterprise product need to? Tailscale is like the sine qua non of modern enterprise products, and I believe it's OIDC-only.
I don't believe it's plausible for any non-specialist firm to implement SAML without grave vulnerabilities. I'm not sure I've ever seen it done well. It's been a minute since I've looked (I haven't consulted in several years, but, more importantly: most firms avoid SAML now), but I'm guessing that assertion still holds.
It’s also enormous, I assume from the attempt to have nominally composable parts that could be reused for other flows.
It’s three entire specs bundled as one. One for the XML components, another for the documents you build from them, and another for the authentication flows built on top.
The root problem with SAML is there’s a million and one permutations to do the same thing.
Signed assertions. Signed messages. Encrypted messages. Encrypted assertions. Sign after normalization. Sign before normalization. Encrypt then sign. Sign then encrypt.
"Most classical engineering fields deal with probabilistic system components all of the time. In fact I'd go as far as to say that inability to deal with probabilistic components is disqualifying from many engineering endeavors."
On many systems like Raspberry Pi the <v5.6 kernel /dev/random or /dev/urandom lacked sufficient entropy to properly deploy wifi hostapd WPA2/WPA3 services.
Instead, people used haveged to workaround the issue. Not a conspiracy by some dude, but rather just more budget hardware limitations.
Don't worry about it, there are lots of real dubious things people do already. =3
If you're building a userland XOF RNG to extend the kernel's RNG (that has the same security properties) you are reducing security, not improving it. The kernel has advantages for managing and securing a secret "entropy" pool that you won't replicate in userland.
But if you're using a custom kernel that has a custom KRNG based on an XOF, sure, whatever, I guess.
Can you link to the paper you're thinking of? Maybe people are just talking past each other here. A biased random source can't bias the kernel random pool in any straightforward kind of way.
These CVSS scores don't mean anything and it would be better for everyone if they stopped showing up in headlines. This is a somewhat situational Wordpress RCE that impacts only a couple themes.
Not sure if it’s a couple. Devs routinely make heavily edited copies of the core themes so there will be many, many unpublished themes that use the “page-“ prefix for templates; it was (is?) a reasonably common convention.
(No particular disagreement with the rest of your comment though)
This score specifically means that given some specific conditions, anyone can execute code over the network on a vulnerable WordPress setup. Is this not true?
I'm not saying that the vulnerability isn't severe or important to people running Wordpress, only that CVSS scores are literally a Ouija Board that can come out to whatever the user wants them to.
Yeah give me a vuln and I can make it anything between a 2 and 8 quite easily. I routinely see 10s that are "Critical 10.0 CVE (but only if you're using X language with X setting changed from default, and the attacker can MiTM your traffic)"
> CVSS scores are literally a Ouija Board that can come out to whatever the user wants them to.
Not really. They are very good at describing the technical impact. Sometimes pre-condition is very rare and that reduces overall likelihood but for those few it applies, the impact still could be catastrophic. Who wants to risk it if whole business could go down?
Published CVSS is a base score that gives you a hint of how important the analysis of a vulnerability is to prioritise the patching or mitigation. What you see on websites is only ever the base spiciness so to speak. If you have for example wordpress only running in an isolated environment behind internal firewall rules you‘d downgrade it accordingly. It’s a imperfect metric but so far the best we have to signal priorities. It’s all described in its spec that no one seems to read and websites also communicate it badly.
CVSS is impossible to communicate effectively. We don't need a metric; I'm already going to have to read and assess the vulnerability to decide how I actually want to assess the risk given my infrastructure, so the number's not doing me any good.
This isn't just a CVSS issue: there have been a variety of attempts to reduce a risk score down to a single general number and they all end up as somewhere between marketing material, scare tactic, and junk science.
> We don't need a metric; I'm already going to have to read and assess the vulnerability to decide how I actually want to assess the risk given my infrastructure, so the number's not doing me any good.
Would you say that vulnerability with CVSS score that points to low is equally important to verify and take care of than CVSS which points to critical?
Yes. I believe that using CVSS scores as a first pass to decide which vulnerabilities to review is risky.
The most boring reason, even if you take CVSS scores at face value, is that in many cases it is possible to leverage multiple "low" severity vulnerabilities into a massive impact.
But the bigger reason is that CVSS scores are all over the place, and the people operating roulette wheel that generates them do not have any insight into any specific person's systems.
> These metrics enable the analyst to customize the CVSS score depending on the importance of the affected IT asset to a user’s organization, measured in terms of complementary/alternative security controls in place, Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. The metrics are the modified equivalent of base metrics and are assigned metric values based on the component placement in organization infrastructure.
You need to reason about both probability and impact, not one or the other. In your example, it just means that the probability is very low, perhaps even down to 0 in your specific case. But even at a low probability, the impact of the vulnerability remains very high so it helps you reason about it.
For example, you might react differently to these scores:
- <8/10: check that your systems are indeed secure
- 8.6/10: check that your systems are indeed secure and tell your junior analyst to train on creating a custom monitoring rule for that attack and follow-up with you
- 9.8/10: double-check that your systems are indeed secure, ensure that if you had a hole another security layer would have caught it (if not, that's a problem!), set up a honeypot to get some info on the assholes that have repeatedly attacked you lately and will undoubtedly try to 0-day you in the next few hours, etc.
> This is a somewhat situational Wordpress RCE that impacts only a couple themes.
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That is dangerously incorrect, a whole lot of themes are vulnerable. The main pre-condition, "presence of a top-level directory named 'page-xxx' like 'page-templates' in the theme's directory" is actually an official recommendation in the WordPress documentation.
> As discussed in Organizing Theme Files, WordPress can recognize page templates stored in the theme’s root folder or in a first-level subdirectory of the theme folder. *The page-templates/ folder is a common convention* for organizing global page templates, but it is not required. Page templates can also be stored in other first-level subdirectories, such as templates/ or page_templates/.
I'm not sure I understand. That's the main pre-condition... to include an arbitrary PHP that is already in the server.
On a fresh WP install, a random user can't upload PHP files. Normally you don't even need to allow random users to register an account since avatars on comments come from gravatar anyway.
Yeah not sure why you’re being downvoted when the built in themes are vulnerable as is the default docker image pre php8.5 which a lot of people use as a base and I bet a lot of hosting providers use as well behind the scenes.
It's crazy how many users are standing by this take. Not only is a 9.8 CVSS critical, even if it doesn't affect your config, you should trash any dependency that has so many 9+CVSS vulns that you become numb to them.
When you use a dependency and a 9+CVSS vuln comes out, you read it and respect it. If you come to the conclusion that CVSS don't mean anything because there's just so many vulns, that's saying something of the dependency and your security posture.
Burn Wordpress with a flemmenwerfer, or build a hard virtualization layer around it, give it its own scoped certs, your Wordpress things will get hacked, especially if they use plugins.
The DSIG problems are wildly worse than syntax! There's a document object model to contend with, along with invariably-fatal parser differential bugs, and that's before you confront the one global C implementation that almost every DSIG implementation ends up relying on.
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