Decrypting PerfView’s OSExtensions.cs file

While analyzing the PerfView source code, I stumbled upon an interesting README file in the src/OSExtensions folder:

// The OSExtensions.DLL is a DLL that contains a small number of extensions
// to the operating system that allow it to do certain ETW operations.  
//
// However this DLL is implemented using private OS APIs, and as such should
// really be considered part of the operating system (until such time as
// the OS provide the functionality in public APIs).
//
// To discourage taking dependencies on these internal details we do not 
// provide the source code for this DLL in the open source repo. 
//
// IF YOU SIMPLY WANT TO BUILD PERFIVEW YOU DO NOT NEED TO BUILD OSExtensions!
// A binary copy of this DLL is included in the TraceEvent\OSExtensions.  
//*************************************************************************** 
// However we don't want this source code to be lost.  So we check it in
// with the rest of the code but in an encrypted form for only those few
// OS developers who may need to update this interface.   These people 
// should have access to the password needed to unencrpt the file.    
//
// As part of the build process for OSExtension.dll, we run the command 'syncEncrypted.exe'.
// This command keeps a encrypted and unencrypted version of a a file  in sync.
// Currently it is run on this pair
//
//  OSExtensions.cs   <-->  OSExtesions.cs.crypt
//
// Using a password file 'password.txt'  
//
// Thus if the password.txt exists and OSExtesions.cs.crypt exist, it will
// unencrypt it to OSExtesions.cs.   If OSExtesions.cs is newer, it will
// be reencrypted to OSExtesions.cs.crypt. 

Hmm, private OS APIs seem pretty exciting, right? A simple way to check these APIs would be to disassemble the OSExtensions.dll (for example, with dnSpy). But this method would not show us comments. And for internal APIs, they might contain valuable information. So let’s see if we can do better.

Decrypting Bamboo 5.7 secret variables

The article describes how to decipher encrypted strings in an old (5.7.2) version of Bamboo. I don’t have access to other versions, so I am not able to tell if it works there too (it won’t work for the latest version). Please leave a comment if you were able to test it on other versions of Bamboo.

When we create a build plan or a deployment project in Bamboo we need to define tasks which compose it. Bamboo internally stores these task definitions in a database column as an XML blob. Some of the tasks, such as SSH or SCP, require a password to connect to the remote server. In this short post, I will show you how to decrypt such passwords. Although we will decipher the remote server password, it looks that Bamboo uses the same algorithm to encrypt other data too (for example, credentials to access the external code repositories).

Randomness in .NET

There are various situations when you need random data in your application. Maybe you want to mix the order of the returned items, or maybe you create nonces for your encrypted messages. Those two sample scenarios require different approaches, and while choosing a non-cryptographic PRNG works just fine in the first situation, using it in the latter is entirely wrong. You may be wondering what a non-cryptographic PRNG is. A PRNG, or pseudorandom number generator, is an algorithm for generating a sequence of numbers whose properties almost equal to the properties of sequences of random numbers. The way how the algorithm creates these sequences could be either cryptographically secure (cryptographic PRNG) or not (non-cryptographic PRNG). A non-cryptographic PRNG cares only about the uniform distribution of random bits and not about their predictability. As we will see in a moment, using the same seed twice in the Non-crypto PRNG, results in two sequences of bytes equal to each other. Cryptographic PRNGs, on the other hand, provide random bits but are also unpredictable. In the coming paragraphs, we will examine in detail the ways we use PRNGs in .NET.

Performing Padding Oracle Attack from PowerShell

In the previous post we created a sample ASP.NET application, which performs encryption in an old, unsecured way (without signature). Its source code is available in my blog samples repository. To run the application execute the runiis.bat file – you must have IIS Express installed on your machine. If everything starts correctly you should see in your browser this beautiful page:

Extracting Service Principal Credentials in VSTS

When we need to deploy an application to Azure from VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services), we use the Azure tasks prepared by Microsoft. These tasks require a contributor account in Azure AD to make changes to your subscription. As this account is not a regular user account but an application account we call it a Service Principal. A very basic build pipeline might look as follows:

The “Azure App Service Deploy” task is an example of a task that will use a Service Principal account to update your App Service in Azure. VSTS makes it easy to create the Service Principal account; it also automatically assigns a contributor role in your subscription to this newly created account. When you want to have full control over your Azure AD you may manually create an App Registration (another name for the Service Principal) in the portal and give it the required rights. You will also need a key to authenticate the service in Azure:

In the next step, you create a new Azure Resource Manager Service Endpoint, providing all the collected information: