Too Many Hacks

Too Many Hacks
Hal Flynn, 2003-10-15

The open-source community should abandon its piecemeal approach to securing Linux-- and soon.

A series of misconceptions 2003-10-16
Anonymous (1 replies)

First of all, there's a certain level of ignorance about the inetd problem demonstrated in this article. inetd does, indeed have a configurable setting that disables a service if it spawns too many times in a short period of time. The reason is simple -- it's better to disable a service than have ...

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You've added more misconceptions 2003-10-16
Anonymous (2 replies)

One of the key features of a "Trusted" OS is _not_ digitally signed binaries. Do some research. Trusted is a designation that generally relates to the TCSEC (Orange Book) levels of B1 or higher, which require mandatory access control (MAC). Apart from MAC, other trusted-type OS's have role-based a...

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You've added more misconceptions 2003-10-17
Anonymous

OK. I think I was confusing this with Palladium/Trustworthy Computing and similar schemes. The fact that he mentioned hardware solutions is what threw me off.

...

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You've added more misconceptions 2003-10-17
Anonymous

You're both right. One of the purposes "Trusted Computing Group" is to implement digital rights management. "Trusted Computing" in this sense is misleading because it is not referring (at least not strictly) to a trusted OS such as those defined by DoD standards which have nothing to do with digita...

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Looking like donkey's 2003-10-16
Anonymous (3 replies)

There could be a better way to patch things, MS's example is not an improvement.

The "Trustworth" model is a PR gimic. Nor has using the "Trustworthy" model enabled MS to avoid looking like donkeys. Nor has it stoped hacks.

Try compairing the publicity statments to the actions of the company ...

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Looking like donkey's 2003-10-16
Anonymous (1 replies)

Donkey's evolved so do operating systems...
Natural selection will eventually lead us back to Vax/VMS & just as Donkeys in time will return to being horses..
...

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Looking like donkey's 2003-10-20
Anonymous (2 replies)

Uhm.. no. A donkey can't return to being a horse when the offspring between a horse and a donkey creates a sterile mule. Not to mention, I only know of 1-2 places still using VMS/VAX machines, and they're desperately trying to phase them out....

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Looking like donkey's 2003-10-22
Darwin

MMmm yes...

Donkeys evolved from horses, in response to poorer enviromental conditions. Natural selection pure and simple.. Thus as conditions improve (as they are now) natural selection will move back to the better design and solution .... The horse or as in the computing world the stallion tha...

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Looking like donkey's 2003-10-25
Another Hobbit

Maybe that is why we should retain it. Most of the crackers will hit it and won't even know where to begin! But then again, Kevin Mitnick should be able to touch a keyboard again one of these days. Maybe it will have evolved so much in the interim he won't be able to do much with it any more... Tee-...

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Looking like donkey's or a horse's 2003-10-16
Axe-2-Grind

To go even further, using the "trustworthy" evironment in a unix/linux world opens yourself to generic use faults. Example: How many of us actually stick to default load without injecting our own brand of changes. Therefore, "trustworthy" would only apply to crashes you can trust to happen. Been...

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Looking like donkey's 2003-10-27
Anonymous

Nothing is a 100% secure. Even hardware solutions. Microsoft should know. For example the xbox is being hacked in public.

Microsoft, Intel, Compaq and the other companies involved in Palladium wil look like donkeys if they want to or not. Simpely cause their engineers are human (All tho some mit...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-16
Anonymous (3 replies)

What the heck did any of this have to do with Open Source?!?

I see the same piecemeal methods used by closed source products as well. Simply because you can rattle off a couple of known holes in the architecture does not mean that the same does not exist in proprietary code. In fact, we know th...

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Thanks Anonymous 2003-10-16
Axe-2-Grind

why complain that this article had nothing to do with open source, when that was your only issue with the post.

Please don't use others columns as a rant against security focus, it just makes you look small.

Good thing you didn't sign that post. You are very dissapointing. Why bother complai...

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misinformation 2003-10-16
Kelly Martin

Anonymous, in the past few days there have been two new Infocus Feature articles, two Guest Feature articles, two Columns, and a news story by Kevin published... in additional to regular news by The Register which has a content sharing deal with our site. Last week's content was quite similar, inclu...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-21
Anonymous

Bravo!...

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New Editorial Direction for SF? 2003-10-16
Al Franken (1 replies)

Remember, "Fair and Balanced" is a Fox News copyright....

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New Editorial Direction for SF? 2003-10-16
Anonymous (3 replies)

You took the words right out of my mouth, Al.

Several years ago there were so many good security sites of one sort or another, but now most of them are gone or, worse yet, done like hackernews->@stake. It's getting to be like turning on the radio and finding nothing but 20 Clearchannel stations....

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Shatter 2003-10-17
Anonymous (1 replies)

No, they haven't rewritten Windows. They've said, "Don't let privilaged applications interact with the desktop." Which is reasonably sensible. They've also started patching the buggy controls piecemeal, but that's going to be a long process...
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Shatter 2003-10-17
Anonymous (1 replies)

> No, they haven't rewritten Windows. They've said, "Don't let privilaged applications interact with the desktop."

Whew, what a relief! I guess that's why no antivirus products run interactively anymore. MS is clearly on top of the problem. ...

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Shatter 2003-10-20
Anonymous

A privilaged app like an antivirus program could still interact with the desktop safely if it does so through a non-privilaged process. It's just a matter of adding another layer of indirection, I think.
...

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New Editorial Direction for SF? 2003-10-18
Anonymous (1 replies)

P.S. -- Has Microsoft rewritten Windows to fix the "shatter" vulnerability yet, after 18 years? I thought not...

Yes, they have

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/sf/ms/2002-q4/0054.ht
ml...

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New Editorial Direction for SF? 2003-10-20
Anonymous

The fix was incomplete.
http://www.securesynergy.com/securitynews/newsitems/2003/jul
-03/150703-08.htm...

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New Editorial Direction for SF? 2003-10-20
Anonymous (1 replies)

"P.S. -- Has Microsoft rewritten Windows to fix the "shatter" vulnerability yet, after 18 years? I thought not..."

Who cares? Has it been exploited yet? I never hear anything about it. Can it be exploited remotely? Probably not.

Stop making a big deal out of something this trivial....

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New Editorial Direction for SF? 2003-10-20
Anonymous

Trivial is worrying about a temporary DOS attack based on opening hundreds of connections to a server in a few seconds. Other operating systems don't deal with this situation very gracefully either....

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Evolution, a necessary evil 2003-10-16
Axe-2-Grind (1 replies)

First, before I go on, as usual, I must make a totally useless statement. That is, doesn't Hal's picture here look remarkably like a "24" ID photo of Keifer Sutherland? IF that is his REAL name......

but anyway....

What Hal is pointing out, basically, is that evolution rules our ever changin...

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Evolution, a necessary evil 2003-10-17
Faust (1 replies)

Heh, Heh... he said limp window....

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Evolution, a necessary evil 2003-10-21
Anonymous (1 replies)

haha....haha...

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Evolution, a necessary evil 2003-10-24
tycho

.... he said limp...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-17
Deven Phillips, CISSP

There are some interesting concepts to the "Trusted Computing" concept from a security manager standpoint, but there is also the aspect that is you have to get software signed by a central authority for it to run, then that will likely slow down the already "too slow" patch and repair process. Altho...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-17
Alberto Guglielmo

Interesting, but I think we don't need another wave of playstations to play with.
Solutions as SecureLinux, or better RSBAC can do the job, in an excellent way.
Regards...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-17
fli-flop

Trusted computing???

THAT SUX !!!!!!...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-17
A nonny mouse (1 replies)

I think you are all missing the point of this article....

So Hal, what happened after you fixed the tire................

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-17
Faust

Exactly the point! I'll bet the tire (buffer) overflowed, the bike blue screened, his buddy crashed to the blinking prompt.

As icons of limp windows encircled his scuffed and bleading head he realised that "Father knows best".

He therefore spent the rest of his life working on alternate OS'...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-17
David

H.A.L,

Your Dad don't let you change the tire by yourself as bill does.

Bill won't ask you : "why don't you try to solve the problem with all of your friends ?
you will learn together and share the solution"

And for sure, your dad finally gave you the appropriate patch for the tire as you ...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-18
Anonymous Coward

"[...] a hacker named Silvio Cesare, who proved with an alarming degree of success that one can patch a statically compiled kernel in memory. As time progresses, this will probably evolve into the standard means of putting a backdoor in a Linux system."

Since the publication of suckit and a detai...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-18
Charles Forbin

You mean a good system architecture, developer discipline, a premium placed on security, good documentation, and a holistic rather than Band-Aid approach would make an OS more secure and less frustrating?

One word: OpenBSD...

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R u sure u r not a donkey yourself? 2003-10-20
Anonymous (2 replies)

U r supposed to be security focus Unix expert? And u claim what????!!!!!!! that modular kernels r bad for Linux's health? The feature that made Linux what it is today? The feature that makes Linux better than MS Win?(apart from the stability blah blah).
U dont seem much of an expert to me and to...

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R u sure u r not a donkey yourself? 2003-10-20
Anonymous (1 replies)

Wow you seem really knowledgable on the subject and your use of "u" indicates to me that you're not a 25 year old living in your mother's basement. ...

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R u sure u r not a donkey yourself? 2003-10-20
Anonymous (2 replies)

More like a 10 year old...

There should be a SecFocus requirement that, to post, you must at least be able to put a somewhat coherent sentence together.

Two words for this guy... 'Script' & 'Kiddy'....

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R u sure u r not a donkey yourself? 2003-10-20
Anonymous

I totally agree. I stopped reading after the second line of this terrible rubbish. I think whoever wrote that broke every rule in the book; 'u', 'r', 'ur', '????' etc. are all factors which make me think 'idiot, I'm not going to take this guy seriously at all'.

Learn to spell kid, then people may...

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R u sure u r not a donkey yourself? 2003-10-20
Anonymous (1 replies)

And it's those same "ScriptKiddies" that put most of you to work.

Yes, the English is poor and the rant is obvious, but poo-pooing the younger folk is what got us in this mess to begin with.

Let's be careful and respectful here. After all, you are _supposed_ to be professionals.
...

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R u sure u r not a donkey yourself? 2003-10-20
Anonymous Coward (1 replies)

Nothing annoys me more than seeing people dismiss other people's opinions simply because of their use of English. Perhaps this person's native language is not English -- ever think of that?

Pick apart his comments, this is not a grammar rodeo.

As for the bitching related to 'u', 'ur', etc. Get...

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R u sure u r not a donkey yourself? 2003-10-21
Anonymous

And you know, nothing annoys me more than people who defend those who post nothing more than holy war garbage on SecurityFocus that add absolutely nothing useful to the discussion at hand.

His writing is not the issue, his comments and lack of respect for everyone else is. I don't care if he's fr...

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R u sure u r not a donkey yourself? 2003-10-27
penfold@dlofnep.com

"But even if what u r sayin its sound, at least I wont get hacked by a 15 yr old kiddie but by a very skilled hacker. And thats not the case with windoze which 100 hacks p/day happen by 15yr olds."

And where are you getting your figures from? Most linux distros have way more services running by d...

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man inetd.conf 2003-10-21
Anonymous

man inetd.conf, section on wait/nowait.
I this doesn't help: man man, man brain, man life....

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-21
Anonymous

Sure, the Open Source community should change their patching model. After all, it WORKS, and there's no room for five levels of bureaucrats, lawyers and naysayers preventing it from working.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and it's not hard to see how successful the Unix approach is com...

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Wil-E-Coyote bridge design 2003-10-21
DWilliams (1 replies)

The message I received from the article is that it is better to do it right the first time than to do it wrong several times.

Everytime I see a patch that fixes a patch that resolves and issue with a feature that was released to correct...All I can think about is Wil-E-Coyote nailing one board on...

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Wil-E-Coyote bridge design 2003-10-22
D McQuay (1 replies)

A patch to fix another patch is not the way to go.... Lets try this again

...

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Wil-E-Coyote bridge design 2003-10-24
tycho

Hi all,

I think axe has it down. The system is made with many modules on different levels and flexibility is the key issue with all of the software/hardware/os developers out there trying to do it right the first time just gets you another oops somewhere else. Even IBM with the AS 400 names their...

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Too Many Hacks 2003-10-24
Anonymous

Hmmm. This seems like an elongated version of: "People build tools so that other poeple can build better tools"...and on and on...Personally, I like the idea.....

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