Re: Staying on the treadmill.

[Joanna Rutkowska <joanna () invisiblethingslab com>]

dave wrote:
> People (this means you) like to think hard about game changing events in
> the world of hacking. But just staying on the treadmill of exploit after
> exploit can be a game changing event.
>
> For example, today you may have noticed that Intevydis
> (http://www.intevydis.com/vulndisco.shtml) released as part of their
> latest exploit pack, some exploits for all the major access
> point/mini-router firmwares. Not CSRF "exploits" or XSS "exploits". I
> mean "Here's a shell, now you get to install new programs and muck with
> the router's configuration" exploits.
>
> For a lot of people (not you) it's hard to care about such things. The
> inevitable ennui sets in: "oh, not another one", "that one is similar to
> one I found in 1992AD", "well, if you had good patch management that's
> the best you can do!", etc. etc.
>
> The magic is in finding each one of these things unique and special and
> worth of attention.

... or, instead of being an exploit fetishist, one might try to design their
network in such a way that a compromise of your network devices is not fatal.
Same for PDF viewers, browsers, etc. and how you design your computer system.

Sure, it's cool to write exploits -- that always impresses people. We also do
that at ITL. E.g. we will be showing a couple of VM escape exploits during our
upcoming virtualization training (and we really are excited about those
exploits!), but the whole point is to illustrate how a good design (in that
particular case of your hypervisor) and new technologies (e.g. VT-d or TXT) can
mitigate a problem of exploits, even if we cannot find and patch them all.

I think one should not forget that an exploit, no matter how cool, is only an
illustration of a problem. The actual solutions often have nothing to do with
how exploits are written. Do you really think VT-d designers were heap-overflow
ninjas? I doubt.

joanna.

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