René Freingruber - Bypassing Application Whitelisting in Critical Infrastructures
Channel: NorthSec
Date: 2016-08-12

https://www.nsec.io/2016/01/bypassing-application-whitelisting-in-critical-infrastructures/

Application whitelisting is a concept which can be used to further harden critical systems such as server systems in SCADA environments or client systems with high security requirements like administrative workstations. It works by whitelisting all installed software on a system and after that prevent the execution of not whitelisted software. This should prevent the execution of malware and therefore protect against advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks. In this talk we discuss the general security of such a concept and what holes are still open for attackers. After explaining different general bypass techniques the techniques will be shown in practice by bypassing McAfee’s application control. This includes different techniques to bypass the application whitelisting to achieve code execution, bypass read- and write-protections as well as a discussion on user account control (UAC) bypasses on such protected systems. Moreover the security of the memory corruption protections will be discussed. At the end some product related design flaws and vulnerabilities will be presented.