Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Vulnerabilities Detection in the Configurations
of MS Windows Operating System
Peter D. Zegzhda, Dmitry P. Zegzhda, and Maxim O. Kalinin
Information Security Centre of Saint-Petersburg Polytechnical University,
P.O. Box 290, K-273, Saint-Petersburg, 195251, Russia
{zeg, dmitry, max}@ssl.stu.neva.ru
Abstract.
This paper addresses to the technique of the vulnerabilities detection.
The proposed methodology is applicable to verify property of the operating
system configurations safety. Using our technique it becomes possible to
discover security drawbacks in any secure system based on access control
model of 'state machine' style. We discuss the Vulnerability Criteria Processing
Unit, the automated detection tool, working in MS Windows and calculating the
set of vulnerable settings. Through our case study of model checking in Sample
Vulnerability Checking (SVC), we show how the proposed technique is applied
to verify system security.
1 Introduction
The most important aspect of the computer system is
secrecy
of information stored in
a system. A secrecy violation was defined in [1] as "an unauthorized person is able to
read or take advantage of information stored in the computer". Reasons of poor data
protection are concealed at abundant errors that expose during system designing,
coding, and administrating. The well-known lacks of security are those of
programming origin, but they are successfully resolved with regular patches and
service packs. At the same time, sophisticated analyses of the operating systems made
by the world-renowned organizations, e.g.
CERT
or
Secunia
, testify to the 20 percents
of vulnerabilities caused by incorrect security configuring and adjustment arranged by
users or administrators. We consider errors made at the time of security
administrating as reasons of
operating system configuration vulnerabilities
(
OSCV
).
The OSCVs take place after:
•
ignoring the security requirements, published by vendors or security experts;
•
setting the different security adjustments that implicitly may conflict with each
other or alternate other settings;
•
keeping the security settings that may contradict to the company security policy.
The most typical examples of the OSCVs are using of default system security
configuration, accidental folder permissions for the system files, and software
installation to the default paths. For instance, in MS Windows 2000, if there is a
shared folder created by administrator, the system grants '
Full Access
' to new object
for '
Everyone
'. If administrator is a novice in security, she or he could miss such fault
