Vulnerability Development mailing list archives
Core Dump as an Intrusion Event
From: Crispin Cowan <crispin () WIREX COM>
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 07:00:15 -0700
Background: StackGuard 2.0 (as released this summer) does not provide secure resistance to format bugs. However, because StackGuard changes some data layouts, it does tend to change the offsets that are required to make the exploit work. As a result, exploits tuned for the "standard" instance of a vulnerable program tend to just cause the victim program to dump core without giving up the shell prompt. This leads me to conjecture that "core dump" makes a good intrusion detection event. Server apps. ("services", e.g. Apache, ftpd, fingerd ;-) should not be dumping core, so you could treat a core dump as an indication that an attacker is rattling your door. StackGuard enhances this effect, by making it unlikely that the first attack attempt will work. Other factors may also be used to enhance this effect. In theory, theory is just like practice, but in practice it's different. Anyone have practical comments on this hypothesis? In practice, how often do services dump core for non-security reasons? If services dump core for non-security reasons even just a little, then the false-positive rate of intrusion detection from this clue gets out of control. Caveat: I know that this is a bad heuristic for Windows machines :-) Thanks, Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. Chief Research Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com Free Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org
Current thread:
- Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Crispin Cowan (Oct 05)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Alexander Kiwerski (Oct 05)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event antirez (Oct 05)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Slawek (Oct 05)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Pascal Bouchareine (Oct 05)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Crist Clark (Oct 05)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event W. Reilly Cooley (Oct 05)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Eclipse, Solar (Oct 05)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Erik Tayler (Oct 06)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Jarno Huuskonen (Oct 06)
- Re: Core Dump as an Intrusion Event Crist Clark (Oct 07)
(Thread continues...)