in Security, Windows

I mean, you all know Microsoft blows… admit it!

At work we’ve been trying out a wonderful tool from Dave Aitel of Immunity Security called SPIKE. I haven’t tried to actually use SPIKE to generate any DCE RPC calls that would actually cause a Windows box to detonate, but partly it’s because that’s not really my job; I don’t detect the vulnerabilities, I just reproduce them. Also I really don’t give two hoots about Windows and I really couldn’t be bothered to go out there, attach a debugger to something like lsass.exe and see what fails.

Still, SPIKE seems to be a great tool if that (deciphering obscure and complex protocols) is your cup of tea. I’ll spare you the lecture on how shitty Microsoft’s protocols are, except that if you ever analyze a conversation between a bunch of Windows boxes using something like Ethereal, you’ll see how there is very nearly a status flag for everything. Clearly, protocols like LSA over DCE-RPC over SMB over NetBIOS < !!!!> were never clearly thought out by anyone, and this is the result. I joked to a colleague that the only reason we need 100Mbps Ethernet is to carry around all this excess Microsoft baggage whenever Windows boxes need to talk to each other. Honestly, Windows boxes are just as chatty as Netware machines running IPX. All you really have to do is capture the traffic on a Microsoft LAN that’s destined to the broadcast address, and you can glean an incredible amount of information.

Go get SPIKE here and enjoy yourself. (Warning: We had problems compiling under GCC 3.x. Stick to 2.x for now; 2.95.3 seemed a good choice.)

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