Project management 2.0

Lo scorso mercoledì 6 Maggio ho partecipato alla prima edizione della conferenza Better Software, a Firenze, con un intervento dal titolo “Project management 2.0”.

L’intervento è dedicato all’evoluzione di questa disciplina anche grazie all’influenza delle metodologie agili e alla nascita di veri strumenti di collaborazione nell’ambito del cosiddetto web sociale.

La presentazione è suddivisa in due parti: nella prima cerco di ripercorrere le tappe evolutive del project management, passando per il manifesto agile e la dichiarazione di interdipendenza del moderno project management. Nella seconda l’approccio è un po’ più pratico e evidenzio quelle che dovrebbero essere le caratteristiche principali degli strumenti software in aiuto dei project manager, passando in rassegna anche qualche prodotto.

Molti dei presenti, che ringrazio per le interessanti discussioni seguite all’intervento, mi hanno chiesto la possibilità di scaricare da qualche parte le slide. Visto però che la presentazione è composta quasi esclusivamente da immagini senza testo, ho pensato di includere anche un commento audio, che trovate alla fine di questa pagina.

Mi sarebbe piaciuto utilizzare l’audio registrato in sala, ma per una mia leggerezza non ci sono riuscito. Gli organizzatori hanno però una registrazione audio e video di tutti gli interventi. Appena saranno disponibili sostituirò l’audio che ho realizzato in casa, decisamente monotono, con quello della conferenza che è sicuramente più interessante.

Alcuni mi hanno anche chiesto come ho realizzato una presentazione di questo tipo, atipica rispetto ai canoni di presentazioni a cui di solito si è abituati. A questo dedicherò il prossimo intervento qui su Fucinaweb (trovate parte della bibliografia che ho usato in Progettare una presentazione).

Per il momento buona visione e buon ascolto.

[flv:https://fucinaweb.com/wp-content/uploads/pm2_screencast_edit.flv 600 450]

Aggiornamento del 15 Maggio 2009: su Slideshare sono in fase di caricamento le presentazioni di Better Software
Aggiornamento del 28 luglio 2009: sono online i video con l’audio preso in sala di tutta la conferenza.

Conclusions – Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

This will be my last post regarding this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, of which i attended the first 2 of 3 days. It’s time for conclusions and votes, but also for some quotes that didn’t fit in my previous posts.

Quotes

I don’t believe in markets – Martin Varsavsky

In today’s scenario I could not have started Fon  – Martin Varsavsky

There are times when markets are prepared to give entrepreneurs ridiculous money and times when their refusals are ridiculous  – Martin Varsavsky

In America many users of Fon are bills, while in Japan they are linuses. That’s because Americans want to earn money, Japanese like to give something to others  – Martin Varsavsky

Developing an interaction audit for Ebay was not like following a strict blueprint – Josh Damon Williams

Adobe AIR sucks! – Alex Stamos (Actually he didn’t tell that, but this is a good summary)

If you do the right thing, it’ll come back to you – Yossi Vardi

“What’s the secret of you success?” “Luck” – Yossi Vardi to Tim O’Reilly

Create more value than you capture – Tim O’Reilly

Great challenges equals great opportunities – Tim O’Reilly

A victory small enough to be organized is too small to be decisive – Eliot Janeway cited by Tim O’Reilly

Business plans and sausages have one thing in common: only those who don’t know how they are made are willing to eat them – Yossi Vardi

Let your web application free for all but one customer. The one that will buy your company – Yossi Vardi

Plus and minuses

On the plus side:

  • Organization
  • Physical space (except for lunch)
  • Location
  • Quality of speeches
  • Affordable wireless connection

Minuses:

  • Lunch
  • Some promising speeches were cancelled
  • Networking site (Crowdvine)

Other great coverage of the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin

RIA and Ajax Security Workshop – Web 2.0 Expo Berlin

A very interesting and informative talk dealing with the new types of attacks that affect web 2.0 applications and RIA in particular.

The session was divided in 2 parts, the first about AJAX and the last about Rich Internet Applications.

The slides of this talk are available on slideshare and are impressive for their completeness. Not only they provide detailed examples for every case illustrated, but they link to a series of articles and web resources.

The main problem of this talk is that it’s quite impossible to be able to be specific enough and, at the same time, don’t get too much into details. This resulted in some hard-to-understand parts.

AJAX

In general attacking an AJAX application is more difficult compared to a web 1.0 site. But on the other hand is more difficult to protect an AJAX application because there are more ways to exploit it and new ways are discovered every day.

  • Not all “web 2.0” sites use new technologies (such as Youtube and MySpace)
  • A single page in Myspace has a lots of includes.
  • Also Google Maps has a lot of includes, but ofJavascript code. Google code can be potentially insecure

Why care about web 2.0 security

  • People changed how they interact with web sites (they erase privacy barriers and they don’t feel the distance. The are the new generations)
  • Technologies spread from innovators to traditionalists (today AJAX in financial institutions, health care, government) – mainstream
  • Bugs are affecting people now

Discovery and method manipulation

  • Playing with parameters is still an excellent web attack (asking application to do the work for you). As business logic gets more complex, so do parameters vulnerabilities
  • Figuring out web apps is tough part of pen-test

Two types of Ajax apps

  • client-server proxy (equivalent to SOAP, client hides javascript)
  • client-side rendering (we can see the javascript and know what it does)

Cross Site Scripting

  • Downstream communication methods are much more complicated
  • User controlled data might be contained in arguments in dynamically created javascript, contained in Javascript arrays, etc. As a result, attack and defence is more difficult

Four bugs

  • downstream JS Arrays. Dangerous characters
  • XSS payload can be tucked into many places
  • XSS might already be in the dom (document.url, document.location, document.referer).
  • AJAX uses “backend” requests never expected to be seen directly in browser

RIA

Is ill-defined. Many contain many terms, AJAX, Flash, offline mode, decoupling from the browser. There is a huge disparity in features and security design.

Why use RIA

  • to increase responsiveness
  • desktop integration
  • to write full desktop apps

RIA Frameworks

No one framework is without limits and security problems. The worst seems Adobe Air because it shows all the limits of the very old ActiveX model.

The frameworks:

  • Adobe AIR
  • Microsoft Silverlight
  • Google Gears
  • Mozilla Prism

Adobe Air

  • Full-featured
  • Cross-browser, cross-platform
  • Created with Flex, Flash
  • Can be invoked by browser with arguments, like ActiveX or Flash
  • Air is best thought as ActiveX than Flash ++ (code runs with full privileges and can install malware)
  • SWF files can import functionalities that allows them to interact with AIR applications
  • SWF files can check install status and version
  • By default, code included in AIR application has full rights
  • There is not a “code access security” model such as in Java or .Net
  • AIR has many ways of loading executable content to run, such as HTML/JS and SWF
  • AIR applications can be bundled as binaries
  • Problems: allowing users to install signed applets is dangerous. Allowing self-signed is terrifying
  • Some suggestions to adobe: change default action, disable unsigned install prompts

Silverlight

Lot of sensibility toward security

  • Is the Microsoft Flash equivalent
  • Cross browser and cross platform
  • Subnet of the .NET frameworks
  • The security model is based on .NET
  • Calling system primitives the system will fail. You need to isolate it
  • What could go wrong (threading, DoS attacks against local system)

Google Gears

  • Has SQLite embedded
  • Uses an homegrown API for synchronizing data
  • Has a LocalServer
  • Works offline via SQL database, local assets and a local app server
  • Uses some origin to restrict access to site databases and LocalServer resource capture
  • Provides for parametrized SQL
  • Unfortunately they allows personalization of opt-in screen

Yahoo! Browserplus

  • A very bad idea
  • Runs as a browser plugin, with a separate helper process
  • It’s very similar to ActiveX concepts
  • Use old version or Ruby. Perfectly safe as long as you don’t use strings and arrays

Mozilla Prism

  • Wraps webapps to appears as desktop apps
  • Standalone browser instance
  • Problem: the Javascript included with webapps has full XPCOM privileges (but no content scripting privileges)
  • Problem: the sandbox isn’t real

HTML 5

HTML introduces some new concepts related to storage of informations.

  • Introduces DOM storage (sessionStorage, localStorage, database storage)
  • The major goals are more storage space and real persistence, because cookies are considered too small and users delete cookies or won’t accept them
  • This method bypasses pesky users, that however can use a specific about:config directive

Browser based SQL Databases

  • Injection becomes far more damaging (because of lot of privileges)

Checklist

  • prevent predictability named data stores
  • parametrize sql statements

Summary

  • RIA frameworks widely vary in their security models
  • It is highly likely that web developers will introduce interesting flaws into their desktop applications
Alex Stamos is a Founding Partner of iSEC Partners, Inc, a strategic digital security organization. Alex is an experienced security engineer and consultant specializing in application security and securing large infrastructures, and has taught multiple classes in network and application security. He is a leading researcher in the field of web application and web services security and has been a featured speaker at top industry conferences such as Black Hat, CanSecWest, DefCon, SyScan, Microsoft BlueHat and OWASP App Sec. He is a contributing author of “Hacking Exposed: Web 2.0” and holds a BSEE from the University of California, Berkeley.
RIA And AJAX Security Workshop, Part 1

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: 2.0 web)