Some people call it “a hacker in a box”, “DOS attack in a box”, or “vulnerability torture chamber”, the official name is Mu-4000. An appliance produced by one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups. Mu Security, today announced an important enhancement for their Security analyzer.

What the automobile industry has been doing for a long time – crashing a car into a wall and see what happens, is gaining increasing support amongst companies and organizations that want to proactively test their products against every imaginable type of attack. It’s called negative testing and Mu Security’s tagline could also be – “We break stuff”. Once unleashed, it’ll create a fury of attack scenarios that will only stop once it knocked the target object off the network.

Adaptive Analysis - How about 10 Million different kind of attacks?
Mu Security today announced the release of a significant enhancement to their product called – Adaptive Analysis. It allows customer to choose between a combination of attack mutations for their desired protocol (e.g. SIP), a specific authentication method (e.g. SSL) and certain transports such as IPv4 or IPv6. In other words, Adaptive Analysis allows customers to pick and choose between different methodologies to whatever fits best to their particular environment. They can select from over 100 protocol suites with nearly 10 Million server side, client side, transport and authentication attack mutations.

Product Vendors, Critical Infrastructure and Government
Their customers include names like Motorola, AT&T, Juniper, NetApp/Decru, including certain government institutions as well as critical infrastructure providers. Motorola for example, is using it worldwide to test and analyze software before it gets rolled out. Companies like Juniper test their own appliances against published vulnerabilities as part of their test cycle.

Choose from three different kind of attack modes

Mutation Analysis
Generates millions of mutations (attacks) based on Mu Security’s understanding of security, hacker methodology and secure programming techniques.

Published Vulnerability Analysis
Allows customers to test in a timely manner the security readiness of networking software and hardware products against critical vulnerabilities published on the Internet by a wide variety of sources.

External Attacks
Customer developed attack scripts to allow continued leverage of their installed base of attack vectors with Mu Security’s set of Monitors and Managers.

Fault Ranking: How bad is a fault?

What makes it different?
Other than generic protocol fuzzers or traditional vulnerability scanners the Mu-4000 offers remediation reporting every time the system finds a known or 0-Day vulnerability. It records and documents the actual problem which then can be analyzed by whoever is responsible to fix the problem. As part of the remediation cycle it’ll create a Linux executable with the vulnerability embedded, allowing to reproduce whatever caused the fault. A fault report that includes a detailed listing of the protocol state and structure on where the issue occurred will be generated as well.

Why is this helpful?
Product vendors can take this information directly to their engineers – saving valuable cycles – and identifying issues before the product gets shipped to the customer. Rather than spending weeks of running tests and manually analyze and scan a system, Mu Security allows for a completely automated and rapid approach to finding potential issues.

“Most of the products are doing positive testing against things that are out there already. But they are not doing any negative testing, which is really the point of view that hackers have, when they are looking at any kind of product that they want to break into or cause issues with. We are allowing you to proactively test and document any findings that you might get based on negative analysis”, said Adam Stein, VP of Marketing at Mu Security.

Proactive Security
The closest thing to Mu Security would be an internally developed framework consisting of years of tools and process development. The problem with that is that it takes a long time to build and today’s rapidly changing threat landscape it’s often no match for that. An automated approach like Mu Security allows an organization to stay ahead and proactively catch vulnerabilities rather than constantly play catch up.

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