Dailydave mailing list archives

Re: Usenix w00t (ddz)


From: "John Dohrr" <sf003 () gmx net>
Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 14:54:47 +0200


I was checking out Dino's Usenix paper a couple days ago, and a few questions stuck in my head.
http://www.usenix.org/events/woot07/tech/full_papers/daizovi/daizovi_html/

Um, nothing new here. I recall seeing this kind of thing (ElGamal + DES + ptrace(2) games to prevent tracing) back in 
the days of SunOS 4.1.3. Unfortunately, on a SPARC 2, _any_ kind of encryption introduces a CPU hit, so it was 
relatively easy to tell that something was up. A sploit was used to transfer the encryption 'client' across (primary 
payload), which was then used to conceal whatever (secondary) rootkit was installed[1].

From my experience with openssl, things change regularly enough to ensure that using the OS' crypto libraries is more 
pain that it's worth. You might get away with just using the bigint routines, and rolling the rest yourself....

J.

[1] Interestingly enough, I know of at least one rootkit in the wild that uses a bastardised EKE/SPEKE protocol to 
authenticate connections to the backdoor and prevent MITM attacks.

-- 
Der GMX SmartSurfer hilft bis zu 70% Ihrer Onlinekosten zu sparen! 
Ideal für Modem und ISDN: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/smartsurfer
_______________________________________________
Dailydave mailing list
Dailydave () lists immunitysec com
http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave


Current thread: