Brakeing Down Security Podcast Blog: 2017-004-sandboxes, jails, chrooting, protecting applications, and analyzing malware

This week, we discuss sandboxing technologies. Most of the time, infosec people are using sandboxes and similar technology for analyzing malware and malicious software.

Developers use it to create additional protections, or even to create defenses to ward off potential attack vectors.

We discuss sandboxes and sandboxing technology, jails, chrooting of applications, and even tools that keep applications honest, in particular, the pledge(8) function in OpenBSD

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Show notes:

Sandboxing tech - https://hangouts.google.com/call/yrpzdahvjjdbfhesvjltk4ahgmf

A sandbox is implemented by executing the software in a restricted operating system environment, thus controlling the resources (for example, file descriptors, memory, file system space, etc.) that a process may use.

Various types of sandbox tech

Jails - freebsd

Much like Solaris 10’s zones, restricted operating system, also able to install OSes inside, like Debian

http://devil-detail.blogspot.com/2013/08/debian-linux-freebsd-jail-zfs.html

Pledge(8) - new to OpenBSD

Program says what it should use, if it steps outside those lines, it’s killed

http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/going-full-pledge

http://man.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man2/pledge.2?query=pledge

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2015-pledge/mgp00008.html

Chroot - openbsd, linux (chroot jails)

“A chroot on Unix operating systems is an operation that changes the apparent root directory for the current running process and its children”

Example: “www” runs in /var/www. A chrooted www website must contain all the necessary files and libraries inside of /var/www, because to the application /var/www is ‘/’

Rules based execution - AppArmor, PolicyKit, SeLinux

Allows users to set what will be ran, and which apps can inject DLLs or objects.

“It also can control file/registry security (what programs can read and write to the file system/registry). In such an environment, viruses and trojans have fewer opportunities of infecting a computer.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seccomp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Security_Modules

Android VMs

Virtual machines - sandboxes in their own right

Snapshot capability

Revert once changes have occurred

CON: some malware will detect VM environments, change ways of working

Containers (docker, kubernetes, vagrant, etc)

Quick standup of images

Blow away without loss of host functionality

Helpful to run containers as an un-privileged user.

https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/getting-towards-real-sandbox-containers/