Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: Resistance is futile, or what I learned trying to secure the scanner
From: adam () HOMEPORT ORG (Adam Shostack)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 17:28:18 -0400
On Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 11:17:29AM -0700, David LeBlanc wrote: | I was in the middle of the effort to try and protect ISS' Scanner against | the licensing being cracked, so I've got some unique insight. It took the | crackers about 3 months to crack the 4.0 release of the NT scanner (I was | honored that they'd rather crack the NT version I built instead of the UNIX | version, but...). Hey, we went through this too, ya know! :) David and his group went to a lot more effort than we did. I advocated against doing this work, even though it would have been a lot of fun, and even though I was really interested in it as a fascinating problem, it relates very closely to the copy-protection problem, which is unsolved. I don't think you can build a system in software only which a sufficiently dedicated attacker can't crack. This is the position that I advocated when we were building Hackersheild, and thats the position that prevailed: That its not worth spending a lot of time and energy on, because you will lose if your attacker has control of the system on which you run. Adam -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume
Current thread:
- Resistance is futile, or what I learned trying to secure the scanner David LeBlanc (Oct 12)
- Re: Resistance is futile, or what I learned trying to secure the scanner Adam Shostack (Oct 12)