Chapter 7: Host, Data, and Application Security

Question 1

Relational Database

Answer 1

Allows data to be viewed in dynamic ways based on your needs. If you need to look up patients who have not had a checkup this year and also have a history of eye surgeries, you can do that.

Question 2

Structured Query Language (SQL)

Answer 2

Most common query language used to communicate with database servers.

Question 3

One-Tier vs. Two-Tier vs. Three-Tier model

database

Answer 3

<b>O</b>ne-Tier
-Database and application are located on the same machine
<b>T</b>wo-Tier
-A client system runs an application that communicates with the database
-This is most common
<b>T</b>hree-Tier
-You have a middle-tier server that processes communication requests between the client and the database. Kinda like a proxy database, almost.

Question 4

NoSQL

Answer 4

A database that’s not relational, and not easily scalable. It can handle less-structured data, but to expand you’ll need to add more servers rather than just upgrading the hardware in existing ones.

Question 5

Big Data

Answer 5

When you have crazy amounts of data of data, you’ll need to store it on a SAN because that’s the only thing big enough once you get into petabytes of information. Dell will soon have capital on this following their acquisition of EMC.

Question 6

Storage Area Network (SAN)

Answer 6

A separate network made to look like storage on another network. You probably want to secure it with a firewall, maybe even an IDS. It’s usually connected via fiber, maybe iSCI.

Question 7

Fuzzing

Answer 7

Flooding an application with unexpected or incompatible information (usually a huge stream of random bits) for the purpose of crashing the application and/or elevating your privileges.
-Avoid these attacks by validating all incoming traffic.

Question 8

Secure Coding

Answer 8

The best (read: only) way to prevent attacks like SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows.

Question 9

Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP)

Answer 9

A voluntary organization centered around coding standards for web applications.
The most fundamental is input validation (either client side or server side)

Question 10

Client-side vs. server-side validation

Answer 10

<b>C</b>lient-side validation
-Checking the client inputting information and validating it to make sure nothing shitty is going on.
<b>S</b>erver-side validation
-Validating data as it is being received by the server. It’s not common to <b>only</b> have server-side validation.

Question 11

Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Secure Coding Standards

Answer 11

• CERT has complete language-specific standards for Java, Perl, C, and C++
• They address exception handling
• The best way to address this is to give the user good information about a crash, but log the specifics so a hacker can’t easily access the information

Question 12

Different kinds of patches

Answer 12

<b>H</b>otfix
-An immediate and urgent fix, generally due to security errors
<b>P</b>atch
-Non-urgent fix or additional functionality. It can be optional.
<b>S</b>ervice pack
-All hotfixes and patches to date. Big overhaul kind of thing.

Question 13

Access Control Lists (ACLs)

Answer 13

Who can access which resource and at what level?

You can use a whitelist or blacklist system, whichever is more convenient.

Question 14

How do I harden a web server?

Answer 14

Web servers are popular targets for attackers because of their immense reach.

• Set up filters to make sure only the traffic you need is happening
• Make sure you block out the access to executable scripts as much as you can

Question 15

How do I harden an email server?

Answer 15

Make sure to run regular virus scans. If you’re running an Exchange server, you’ll need special software for this.
Use ACL to block specific attacking sources.

Question 16

How do I harden an FTP server?

Answer 16

FTP is garbage for security. You can make it less shitty by using it with a VPN or with SSH. FTP is very commonly used to exploit systems.
-Use virus scanners, implement separate accounts, and disable the anonymous account.

At the end of the day you should really just be using SFTP instead. It’s not 1997 anymore.

Question 17

How do I harden a DNS server?

Answer 17

DNS attacks are rare, but usually come in these flavors:

• DNS DoS
  
  • Make sure to keep your shit up to date and enable two-factor authentication
• Network Footprinting
  
  • Network footprinting can exploit a lot of data about your network from your DNS. Keep the DNS datastore to a bare minimum.
• Compromising Record Integrity
  
  • Make sure all DNS servers require authentication before changes are propagated. We have DNSSEC now to add security.

Question 18

Full Backup

Answer 18

You save all data. Very system intensive, time consuming, and you’ll need an incredible amount of storage space if you want to remain scalable.

Question 19

Differential backup

Answer 19

You do a full backup and then backup the changes that get made. Every increment will be bigger, more system intensive, and more time consuming.

Question 20

Incremental backup

Answer 20

You have a full backup and then little increments that you must restore in order. This is not resource intensive, but it is complex.

Question 21

RAID Types

Answer 21

RAID 0-Striped
RAID 1-Mirrors
RAID 3 or 4-Striped Disks with dedicated parity
RAID 5-Striped disks with distributed parity
RAID 6-Striped Disks with Dual parity
RAID 1+0-Mirrored Set which is then Striped
RAID 0+1-Striped Set which gets mirrored

Question 22

Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Answer 22

• Monitors your systems to make sure critical files are not modified or deleted
• Monitors who uses the data, and who’s transmitting it. Kind of similar to an IPS that way.
• MyDLP is a common, open source application that runs on most Windows Operating Systems

Question 23

Trusted Platform Module (TPM)

Answer 23

Hardware-based encryption device that takes over for the BIOS. It can assist with hash key generation.
It stores cryptographic keys, passwords and/or certificates.
-TPM can be used on a wide range of devices, and can be configured for lots of things, including whole-disk encryption with, say, bitlocker. You can use bitlocker without a TPM, but you shouldn’t.

Question 24

Transparent Data Encryption

Answer 24

Transparent Data Encryption (often abbreviated to TDE) is a technology employed both by Microsoft and by Oracle to encrypt database files. TDE offers encryption at file level. TDE solves the problem of protecting data at rest, encrypting databases both on the hard drive and consequently on backup media.