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PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

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Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some dev environments aren't local, and sometimes this is faster, especially if you have to document the changes for future updates that don't include your fancy tools.

Sequel Pro's built-in SSH tunnel has worked for me in every remote development situation I've encountered. It seems like a really bad idea to place a web-based database tool on a public-facing host when technology exists to route MySQL through SSH. Even shared hosts support SSH these days. If yours doesn't, maybe it's time to find another shared host!

It's been a while but I'm pretty sure you can do so with PHPMyAdmin.

I seem to remember installing it on my own workstation, setting up the ssh tunnel and then pointing PHPMA to localhost.

It's not my favorite tool and I've avoided it due to security concerns but I've set it up for others as described and I recall it worked fine. Like I said though it's been a while and I'm fuzzy on the details.

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#52
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert in this field, but we recently did a security audit. The auditors get access to the code in order to evaluate it for vulnerabilities. In our ruby application, they also check gems that we are using (through open source tools albeit). They also did an in-app audit where they tried to break the application however they might see that. Having access to the code helps with this. When you get audited by…

> When you get audited by potential customer, it usually involves not having code access and trying to penetrate the app without that access. Is this in reference to on-prem / enterprise software and is this typical? I haven't heard of customers doing this but it certainly makes sense (might as well invest thousands to test before spending magnitudes more on the product itself only to find it having a huge security h…

We just signed a big deal with a Google subsidiary, and part of that deal required us to go through a third party penetration test (no code access).

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#53
post #6

And in the PDF, the auditors complain that they didn't have enough time to even fully analyze the impact of the vulnerabilities found. I wouldn't read too much into it.

This is not relevant. An audit cost a substantial amount of money, you wouldn't expect your consultants to spend a lot of time exploiting or building Proof-of-Concepts. If you have a time-boxed assessments, you want the consultants to cover the most ground and not spend too much time on a finding.

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#54
post #48
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. It can be all or none of the above. Here's what happens at a high level: Once a company decides it needs a security assessment performed on an application, it engages with a consulting firm. Consulting firms generally offer a variety of services, from web and mobile application penetration tests, to cryptanalysis (implementation and design), to reverse engineering and binary penetration testing, with s…

Thanks for your response, great to see how it works from a business side. I'm going to use this opportunity and ask you another question. What happens if after 2-3 weeks of consulting you don't find any "high impact" issue? Are your customer angry, happy?

The smart clients are usually unhappy, unless they've set expectations in advance that you're not expected to find anything (which is rare).

As consultants, you are always very unhappy when your project ends with no sev:hi findings. That, too, is rare.

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#55
post #48
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. It can be all or none of the above. Here's what happens at a high level: Once a company decides it needs a security assessment performed on an application, it engages with a consulting firm. Consulting firms generally offer a variety of services, from web and mobile application penetration tests, to cryptanalysis (implementation and design), to reverse engineering and binary penetration testing, with s…

Thanks for your response, great to see how it works from a business side. I'm going to use this opportunity and ask you another question. What happens if after 2-3 weeks of consulting you don't find any "high impact" issue? Are your customer angry, happy?

That almost never happens. I can count on one hand the number of times it has happened in ~100 past assessments. Generally speaking, the maxim, "There is no such thing as a secure system" is valid. Competent security consultants should be capable finding something actionable in all but the most exceptional circumstances if you throw them into a room to search for vulnerabilities for a few weeks.

That said, I have had assessments where there were no findings. This is generally because there are informational observations that can't be escalated to vulnerabilities in the given assessment time, or because the application has a very security-conscious development team. If it happens, it might be a sign that the application is not sufficiently mature to require an assessment yet, or it's just too simple to really analyze. It can also mean that the consultant is not sufficiently competent to perform the assessment.

To give an example, I worked at a large consultancy where we had a giant public company hold us on retainer to perform assessments on "brochure websites" - they were not interactive at all. There wasn't even a login interface. The company wanted to check off that it had security assessments performed on all webpages it hosted, but realistically there were never any actionable findings. (This is about as much detail as I can give because it's NDA'd, but it's not the sort of thing I'd take on in my own practice).

A more recent example is a YC company I worked with a few weeks ago. Their development team is very well educated on security matters. While I found security vulnerabilities, there were no high severity findings because the quality of peer review and paranoid development was very high there. They were very familiar with every Ruby/Rails gotcha and pretty thoroughly avoided them.

To answer your question, I've never had anyone "angry" at me for not finding anything. They're not "happy", but as long as they can verify that the work they paid for was done, they aren't angry. It doesn't happen often, and when it has happened the consultant should provide enough information to demonstrate that competent work was done.

However, I personally don't feel very good about it. My understanding is that competent security engineers in general are not happy about it. It is much more likely that the assessment either shouldn't have happened (because the application is not mature or complex enough) or that the consultant was simply insufficiently competent than that the application is really completely secure.

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#56
post #35

Stupid question, how does a security audit work? Do the consultants just read through the code? Do they try to find security bug like they do on bug bounty programs?

Yes. The way it works is that two smart hackers go into the office each day and spend eight hours trying to think of as many creative ways of tapping on the target application as possible. Nothing is off-limits except what is agreed up front, but you're obviously expected not to interfere with production operations. The client is generally expected to set up a testing environment substantially similar to production,…

They're a very worthwhile process for SMEs and companies that haven't had one before. At one of my previous employers (I won't say which) they were marvelling at the ways in which the contractor was able to do privilege escalation by editing a form to change their user level from the "3" or "4" in the drop-down to "1".

The fact that they got full rights so quickly really drove home the need for security to be a feature and for code reviews.

Now the cynical would point out that standard pen testers would have found that, and maybe they would, but the speed at which a contractor could find these issues and then see the full breadth of the surface compared to pen testers was great. And the fact they could explain back what the problem was in terms of code and how it should be rewritten rather than just "found rights escalation in form x" leaving the client to perhaps improperly deal with that.

Overall I was far more impressed watching an auditor doing a few days work than any of the regular pen testing companies I've seen since who mostly seem to point fuzzers at any endpoints they find.

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you get audited by potential customer, it usually involves not having code access and trying to penetrate the app without that access. Is this in reference to on-prem / enterprise software and is this typical? I haven't heard of customers doing this but it certainly makes sense (might as well invest thousands to test before spending magnitudes more on the product itself only to find it having a huge security h…

We just signed a big deal with a Google subsidiary, and part of that deal required us to go through a third party penetration test (no code access).

Well today I learned. Thanks!

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#58
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of much reason to use it over Workbench or Sequel Pro.

Workbench has some great features that I can't do without, but when it comes to just browsing around a DB I much prefer PhpMyAdmin's interface over it. That said I haven't really tried any of the other offerings in the space, so I expect that's a big part of my opinion.

I agree with this comparison but Navicat is well worth the price. I use their data backup and synchronization (data and/or structure) all the time and it works extremely well. The "find in database" text search is a life saver too.

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#59
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because of the large amount of global variables... NCC Group was unable to fully determine the impact of this vulnerability. In other words, "This project is too full of potential security holes to find the definite ones."

No, it means we understand there are theoretical security issues with global variables, but cannot determine if they're actually applicable or exploitable in this software.

You just repeated exactly the same thing he said as if you were disagreeing.

Re: PhpMyAdmin Project Successfully Completes Security Audit

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't postgresql community just annouced pgadmin4 lately and it seems to come with a modern webclient https://www.pgadmin.org/

Do any of these web-based DB tools come with autocomplete? I'd say that's the feature I value most when using desktop DB tools.

TeamPostgreSQL[1] is a pretty good web interface for Postgres. It has SQL autocompletion too, with completion for schema objects as well as SQL keywords. It is free.

[1] http://www.teampostgresql.com

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