Worms Could Dodge Net traps

Danse writes "ZDNet reports that future worms could evade a network of early-warning sensors hidden across the Internet unless countermeasures are taken. According to papers presented at the Usenix Security Symposium, just as surveillance cameras are sometimes hidden the locations of the Internet sensors are kept secret. From the article: 'If the set of sensors is known, a malicious attacker could avoid the sensors entirely or could overwhelm the sensors with errant data.' A team of computer scientists from the University of Wisconsin wrote up the background in their award-winning paper titled 'Mapping Internet Sensors with Probe Response Attacks.'"

Quick Summary

[Shadowlore]

Maintaining sensor anonymity is critical because if the set of sensors is known, a malicious attacker could avoid the sensors entirely or could overwhelm the sensors with errant data.'

So basically: "Security through Obscurity is Bad." combined with "We found a way to eliminate the obscurity.".

Again?!

[Arkan]

Is it just me, or are we again speaking about security through obscurity (albeit I have to admin that it's in a slightly different way, this time).

How long will it take for people involved in computers and networks security that "secret" has no virtually no meaning in the field?

A private key is the only exception I can see at the moment: it is kept secret because nobody has any use of it except its owner, a noone will ever need access to it.

But how long a "secret" early-warning network will remain so... when its primary function is to be contacted by the worms that try to evade it?

--
Arkan

Re:Again?!

[jd]

AFAICT, you are correct - the private key of a private/public key pair is about the only true secret, as virtually all other information is shared at some time or other.

I suppose it is arguable that load-balancing and fail-over systems are "secrets" in a sense, as external users aren't supposed to see that information, but I'd call them "null secrets" in the sense that they have no value even if you DID know them.

Presumably these early-warning systems are some kind of a mix of honey-pots and passive sniffers. If the worm is actually any good, it should be able to infiltrate a honey-pot and become stealthy (thus undetectable to anything inside the honey-pot). In that case, the system running the honey-pot would be able to detect an infection occured, but would NOT have reliable data on how or when.

As for passive sniffers, a polymorphic worm that can vary the loading code as well as the payload, OR a worm that is encrypted and can hijack some OS internal decrypt code, would get past such a sniffer. There'd be nothing the sniffer could identify.

The "ultimate" in malware would be some sort of hypervisor - similar in idea to Xen - that could "run" the host OS on top of itself. That way, nothing inside the OS could see it and all calls to the hardware that would reveal the malware could be trapped. Some early DOS boot sector viruses did something similar, copying the original boot sector to an empty sector somewhere else and then marking it bad to safeguard it. Any time a call was made to look at the boot sector, the call was trapped and the copy was returned instead of the real one.

The "ultimate" transport mechanism for malware would use a decoder built into the OS. The LZW code for GIF images, perhaps. Just something that would make it impossible for virus scanners in a mail server, or sniffers on a network, to use simple pattern recognition to identify it. You'd then need a buffer overflow you could exploit to take your newly decrypted malware into the system itself.

Image decoder exploits and buffer overflow exploits are well-known and have certainly been utilized in the past, though I'm not sure if in this way. Polymorphic code, designed to make identification strings next to impossible, has also been around a long time. I think the first polymorphic viruses appeared in the late 1980s and were certainly a significant cause of concern in the early 1990s.

Of course, if Cisco doesn't fix that IOS bug soon, it'll all be moot anyway. If you can just capture one Cisco router at a time, in a chain, you can set up tunnels to carry whatever you damn well feel like. An IPSec tunnel would be utterly opaque to any monitoring system anyone cared to deploy, no matter how sophisticated.

All in all, security through hidden monitors - security through several layers of obscurity - is no security at all, as it is simply too easy to bypass the layers involved and therefore the monitors, without having to know a damn thing about where the monitors are or even how they do the monitoring.