Prerequisites
ThreadFix is self-contained and as such runs on Windows,
Mac, and Linux systems
JEE based, Java 7 needed
Introduction
As an incident responder,
penetration tester, and web application security assessor I have long
participated in vulnerability findings and reporting. What wasn’t always a big
part of my job duties was seeing the issues remediated, particularly on the
process side. Sure, some time later, we’d retest the reported issue to ensure
that it had been fixed properly but none of the process in between was in scope
for me. Now, as part of a threat intelligence and engineering team I’ve been
enabled to take a much more active role in remediation, often even providing
direct solutions to discovered problems. I’m reminded of a London underground
(Tube) analogy for information security gap analysis (that space between find
and fix) taken whilst stepping on the train. Mind the gap!
But with new responsibilities
comes new challenges. How best to organize all those discovered issues to see
them through to repaired nirvana? As is often the case, I keep an eye on some
of my favorite tool sources, and NJ Ouchn’s Toolswatch came through
as it often does. There I discovered
ThreadFix,
developed by Denim Group, a team I was already familiar thanks to my work with ISSA.
When, in 2011 I presented Incident
Response in Increasingly Complex Environments to the ISSA Alamo Chapter in San
Antonio, TX, I met Lee Carsten and Dan Cornell of Denim Group. They’ve had
continued growth and success in the three years since and ThreadFix is part of
that success. After pinging Lee regarding ThreadFix for toolsmith he turned me
over to Dan who has been project lead for ThreadFix from its inception and
provided me ample insight. Dan indicated that while working with their clients,
they saw two common scenarios – teams just getting started with their software
security programs and teams trying to find a way to scale their programs – and
that ThreadFix is geared toward helping these groups. They’d seen lots of teams
that had just purchased a desktop scanning tool who’d run some scans and the
results would end up stored on a shared drive or in a Sharepoint Document
Repository. Dan pointed out that these results though were just blobs of data such
as PDFs being emailed around to development teams with no action being taken.
ThreadFix gives organizations in this situation an opportunity to start
treating the results of their scanning as managed
data so they can lay out their application portfolio, track the results of
scanning over time and start looking at their software security programs in a
much more quantitative manner. Per
Dan, this lets them have much more "grown up" conversations with
management about application and software risk. A natural byproduct of managed data leads to conversations that evolve
from "Cross-site scripting is scary" to "We've only remediated
50% of the XSS vulnerabilities we've found and on average it takes us 120 days
which is twice as slow as what others in our industry are doing." WHAT!? An
informed conversation is more effective than a FUD conversation? Sweet! Dan
described more sophisticated organizations who are tracking this "mean
time to fix" metric as better managing their window of exposure, and that public
data sets, such as those released by Veracode and WhiteHat Security, can
provide a basis for benchmarking. Amen, brother. Mean time to remediate is one
of my favorite metrics.
Dan and the Denim team, while
working with bigger organizations, saw huge struggles with teams getting bogged
down trying to deal with different technologies across huge portfolios of
applications. He cites the example of the Information Security group buying
scanner X while the IT Audit group purchased scanning service Y and the QA team
was starting to roll out static analysis engine Z. He summed this challenge up best with “The only thing worse than
approaching a development team with a 300 page PDF report with a color graph on
the front page is approaching them with two or three PDFs and expecting them to
take action.” Everyone familiar with
Excel hell? That’s where these teams and many like them languish, trying to
track mountains of vulnerabilities and making no headway. Dan and Denim intended for ThreadFix to enable these teams to
automatically normalize and consolidate the results of different scanning tools
even across dynamic (DAST) and static (SAST) application security testing technologies.
This is achieved with Hybrid Analysis Mapping as developed under a contract
with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). According to Dan, with
better data management, security teams can focus on high value tasks such as
working with development teams to actually implement training and remediation
programs. Security teams can take the data from ThreadFix and export it to
developer defect tracking tools and IDEs that developers are already using.
This reduces the friction in the remediation process and helps them fix more
vulnerabilities, faster.
Great stuff from, Dan. The
drive to remediate has to be the primary goal. The industry has proven its
ability to find vulnerabilities, the harder challenge and the one I’m spending
the vast majority of my focus on, is the remediation work. Threat modeling,
security development lifecycles, and secure coding best practices are a great
start but one way to take your program to the next level is the tuning your
vulnerability data management efforts with ThreadFix. There is a Community
Edition, free under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), which we’ll focus on
here, which includes a central dashboard, SAST and DAST scanner support, defect
tracker integration, virtual patching via WAF/IDS/IPS options, trend analysis
& reporting, and IDE integration.
If you seek an enterprise implementation
you can upgrade for LDAP & Active Directory integration, role based user
management, scan orchestration, enhanced compliance reporting, and technical
support.
Preparing ThreadFix
First, I tested both the
2.0.1 stable version and the 2.1M1 development version and found the bleeding
edge to be perfectly viable. ThreadFix includes a number of plugins, and most
importantly for our scenario, for OWASP ZAP and
Burp Suite Pro.
There is also a plugin for Eclipse too
though for defect tracking and IDE I’m a Microsoft TFS/Visual Studio guy
(shocker!). Under Defect Tracking
there is support for TFS but I can’t wait until Dan and team implement a plugin
for VS. J To
get started ThreadFix installation is a download-and-run-it scenario. ThreadFix
Community Edition includes a self-contained .ZIP download containing a Tomcat
web & servlet engine along with an HSQL database. That said, most
production environment installations of ThreadFix use a MySQL database for
scalability; if you wish to do so instructions are provided. As
ThreadFix uses Hibernate for data access, other database engines are also be
supported.
Once you’ve downloaded ThreadFix,
navigate to your installation directory and double-click threadfix.bat on a Windows host or run
sh threadfix.sh on *nix systems.
Once the server has started, navigate to https://localhost:8443/threadfix/ in a
web browser and log in with the username user
and the password password. Then
immediately proceed to change the password, please.
Click Applications on the ThreadFix menu and add a team, then an
application you’ll be assessing and managing. My team is HolisticInfoSec and my
application is Mutillidae as it has obvious flaws we can experiment with for
remediation tracking.
After you download the
appropriate plugins, unpack each (I did so as subdirectories in my ThreadFix
path) and fire up the related tool. Big note here: Burp and XAP default proxy
ports conflict with ThreadFix’s API interface, you’ll have contention for port
8080 if you don’t configure Burp and ZAP to run on different ports. For Burp,
click the Extender tab, choose Add, navigate to the Burp plugin path
and select threadfix-release-2.jar. You’ll then see a new ThreadFix tab in your Burp UI which will include Import Endpoints and Export Scan. You’ll need to generate API
keys as follows: click the settings gear in the upper right hand of the menu
bar and select API keys as seen in Figure 1.
 |
| FIGURE 1: Create ThreadFix API keys for plugin use |
Click Export Scan and paste
in the API key you created as mentioned above. Similarly in ZAP, choose File then Load Add-On File and choose threadfix-release-1.zap. After
restarting ZAP you’ll see ThreadFix:
Import Endpoints and ThreadFix:
Export Scan under Tools.
You may find it just as easy
to save scan results from Burp and ZAP in an .xml format and upload them via
the ThreadFix UI. Go to Applications,
then Expand All, select your Application, and click Upload Scan. You’ll benefit from
immediate results as seen from an incomplete Burp and ZAP scans of Mutillidae
in Figure 2.
 |
| FIGURE 2: Scan results uploaded into ThreadFix |
The ThreadFix dashboard then
updated to give me a status overview per Figure 3.
 |
| FIGURE 3: ThreadFix dashboard provides application vulnerability status |
Drilling into your target via
the Application menu will provide
even more nuance and detail with the ability to dig into each vulnerability as
seem in Figure 4.
 |
| FIGURE 4: ThreadFix vulnerability details |
- Have Team/Application setup in Threadfix
- Have source code for an Application linked in Threadfix
- Have a scan for the Application in Threadfix
- Have the Applications scan linked to a Defect Tracker
Once you have it configured,
you can select specific vulnerabilities and submit them directly to your
preferred Defect Tracker under the Application view, then click Action. This is vital if you’re pushing
repairs to the development team via the likes of Jira or TFS.
Additionally, if you’re
interested in virtual patching, first create a WAF under Settings and WAFs where
you choose from Big-IP ASM (F5), DenyAll rWeb, Imperva SecureSphere, Snort, and
mod_security, which I selected and named it HolisticInfoSec. Click Applications again, drill into the
application you’ve added scans for, then click Action and Edit/Delete.
The Edit menu will allow you to Set WAF.
I then selected HolisticInfoSec and
click Add WAF. You can also simply
add a new WAF here as well. Regardless, go back to Settings, then WAFs, then
choose Rules. I selected HolisticInfoSec/Mutillidae
and deny then Generate WAF rules. The
results as seen in Figure 5 can then be imported directly into mod_security.
Tidy!
 |
| FIGURE 5: ThreadFix generates mod_security rules |
In Conclusion
Make use of the ThreadFix wiki to
fill you in on the plethora of detail I didn’t cover here and really, really
consider standing up an instance if you’re at all involved application security
discovery and repair. This tool is one I am absolutely making use of in more
than one venue; you should do the same. You’re probably used to me saying it
every few months but I’m really excited about ThreadFix as it is immediately
useful in my every day role. You will likely find it equally useful in your
organization as you push harder for find and fix versus find and…
Ping me via email if you have questions (russ at
holisticinfosec dot org).
Cheers…until next month.
Acknowledgements
Dan Cornell, CTO, Denim
Group, ThreadFix project lead
Lee Carsten, Senior Manager,
Business Development, Denim Group
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