Microsoft: RDP Vulnerability Should Be Patched Immediately

wiredmikey writes "Microsoft is urging organizations to apply the sole critical update in this month's Patch Tuesday release as soon as possible. The critical bulletin – one of six security bulletins issued as part of Tuesday's release – addresses two vulnerabilities in the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Those IT admins who use RDP to manage their machines over the internet, which is essentially the default in cloud-based installations such as Amazon's AWS, need to patch as quickly as possible, said Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek. Besides the RDP bugs, this month's Patch Tuesday addressed five other vulnerabilities: two denial-of-service bugs and an escalation of privileges issue in Microsoft Windows; a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Expression Design; and an escalation of privileges issue in Microsoft Visual Studio."

Re:VNC over SSH tunnels, public keys, no root logi

[Slashcrap]

Gee, I manage my cloud over SSH tunnels. Authentication is done with public/private key pairs. No SSH root user login. In the rare cases that I need a GUI, it's VNC over an SSH tunnel.

Any other ports?

It's tunnels. All the way down.

Yeah, it sure is unfortunate that you can't do exactly the same thing with RDP. And MS should definitely think of adding IPSEC support one of these days (yes, I know). Of course people are probably less likely to bother, since unless you're French, RDP is fully encrypted (standard VNC only encrypts the password) and talking of passwords it allows them to be more than 8 characters long. You can even have a username too, if you use the right version and configure PAM (joke - there is no right version for that because it's a terrible idea security wise). It has also never had a bug where the client could tell the server it didn't support any of its authentication schemes and so the server simply let it connect without authentication.

In fact this is the first time I've heard of a potential serious vulnerability in Remote Desktop, so frankly this is not the area to be smug about.

Anyway this is a bit too MS positive for my liking, so I'll just add that TurboVNC + VirtualGL + VirtualBox = one fucking awesome free VDI implementation. Add SSH, OpenVPN or IPSEC to taste if you want (although VirtualGL handles SSH itself transparently if you want). Actually for remote admin purposes you only need the 1st part (unless it's a bunch of 3D workstations you're supporting). And possibly a new hobby to use to soak up all the time you used to waste waiting for the screen to refresh. I would also mention FreeNX, but a) I think it gets outperformed by the above and b) I am fucked if I'm setting that damned thing up again just to verify.

Oh yeah, one more neat trick - Virtualbox can run in headless mode on a box with no GUI (or with one, doesn't matter). In this mode it serves up the VM display using an extended version of RDP. The great thing is this doesn't just apply to Windows VMs - it can serve any OS it can run over RDP. Watch the look on your colleague's faces as you get them to fire up MSTSC and connect straight into Ubuntu. Or OS2, OSX, Win 3.1 etc.. etc.. You can even dump them into an EFI shell or the virtual BIOS. Literally minutes of laughs to be had. Oh yeah, you may need the non-open source extension pack for that. Also they're adding VNC in the next release. I have no fucking idea why.

And no, I have no idea why you're not allowed to use RDP encryption in France. I have no idea why they're not allowed to use deoderant either, come to think of it.