On 10/11/07, Nelson Brito <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > This is always something that exists as a threat by stateless
> > protocols, it matters not that it is a null payload or a real payload,
> > the result is the same, as is the reality that this is malicious
> > traffic on the wire. I would argue that using a null payload is
> > actually falling short of the goal of resource exhaustion in so far as
> > the analyst can easily eliminate it. Sourcefire (Creators of Snort)
> > also provides more automatic methods to do this work for the analyst
> > by determining if the payload has any chance of affecting the target
> > and adjusting the events accordingly. This serves to highlight the
> > important events that need review and lower the relevance of the rest
> > of the events.
>
> That is the point here. NULL bytes shouldn't fire any event, due to the fact
> that the end-point - the vulnerable server - ignore the NULL bytes, i.e.,
> the SQL Server will respond as a valid request showing you the information
> you have requested, but in this scenario the SNORT or any other that doesn't
> check correctly the payload and the content will fire an attack event -
> false positive. That is so old school, since the release of the evasion,
> insertion and DoS bible, that any IDS/IPS mjust have protection against this
> kind of attack.

It is trivial to filter out post fact and is not normally occurring, I
consider the alert successful at detecting nefarious activity. Simple,
practical, effective.

>
> As I said, and that is my last reply for this thread, if you cannot see or
> see more than you should, you are not able to protect your network. Some of
> the IDS/IPS has a protection "threshold" that when you reach the # the
> IDS/IPS will shutdown the signature. Is that good? Can we consider an
> IDS/IPS technology that protects itself instead of your network?
>
> > There are several classes of thresholds available within Snort, which
> > one used depends entirely on the need. From
> > http://www.snort.org/docs/snort_htmanuals/htmanual_280/node330.html#Event_
> > Thresholding
> >
> > There are 3 types of thresholding:
> >
> >     * limit
> >
> >       Alerts on the 1st m events during the time interval, then
> > ignores events for the rest of the time interval.
> >
> >     * threshold
> >
> >       Alerts every m times we see this event during the time interval.
> >
> >     * both
>
> You are missing the real thing here... You cannot fix this using thresholds,
> because doing this you will fix the result when you should consider to
> attack the cause of this: the signature.

We are talking right past each other here. So what if it is a null
payload, if your goal is resource exhaustion then use a real payload.
You have achieved absolutely nothing using the null payload, except
perhaps to make it easily filtered out of your result set.

Have you met Caswell?
http://www.shmoo.com/~bmc/

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