Vulnerability Development mailing list archives

Re: Infecting the KaZaA network? (moving here thread from 'traq)


From: "Raistlin" <raistlin () gioco net>
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 23:13:11 +0100

On advice of bugtraq moderator I'm moving my reply here. The thread is
basically dealing with the possibility of infecting with a virus the
distribution of kazaa client since it's shared. I will quote the whole
original message since some of you may not receive 'traq:

From: "GertJan de Leeuw" <dataholic () punkass com>

I had the same thought about this subject a long time
ago, but I discovered there are 2 major problems why
a attacker cannot successfully infect the distribution
of a new kazaa client:

1.The installation MUST have the same size as the
orginal distribution package, since kazaa will look on
its network for the filename with the exact filesize (for
multiple downloads at one time from different clients)
Because you need to 'inject' your evil code the
filesize will be bigger. Ofcourse you could pack it with
a pe packer like upx and add bytes till the exact
filesize is there , but then we have problem 2:

2.As we all know, KazaA downloads from multiple
users, so IF you have success with step 1, you will
fail at this point, because you will have an invalid exe
(a evil version merged with the orginal distro).

There's a third major problem:

3) Kazaa uses MD5 to check that files are identical when starting a multiple
download and/or looking for "alternate sources" for a given file (this is
explained on their site). In fact if you just change a letter in the ID3 of
an MP3 file, it will not be listed as a "copy", even if otherwise identical.
You can, instead, alter the filename without risk.


Stefano "Raistlin" Zanero
System Administrator Gioco.Net
public PGP key block at http://gioco.net/pgpkeys


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