Re: Count Zero

[Richard Miles <richard.k.miles () googlemail com>]

Hello Dave.

You told that lots of web applications can be owned via a known-plaintext
attack +
hash collision to recover the host key, but it's going to take a lot
more time than a basic SQL injection. What host key are you talking about?

Thank you

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 1:49 PM, Dave Aitel <dave.aitel () gmail com> wrote:

>    "The kind of software someone like you would rent from Two-a-Day,
> that's nothin'. I mean, it'll work, but it's nothing anybody heavy
> would ever bother with. You've seen a lot of cowboy kinos, right?
> Well, the stuff they make up for those things isn't much, compared
> with the kind of shit a real heavy operator can front. Particularly
> when it comes to icebreakers. Heavy icebreakers are funny to deal in,
> even for the big boys. You know why? Because ice, all the really hard
> stuff, the walls around every major store of data in the matrix, is
> always the produce of an AI, an artificial intelligence. Nothing else
> is fast enough to weave good ice and constantly alter and upgrade it.
> So when a really powerful icebreaker shows up on the black market,
> there are already a couple of very dicey factors in play. Like, for
> starts, where did the product come from? Nine times out of ten, it
> came from an AI, and the AIs are constantly screened, mainly by the
> Turing people, to make sure they don't get too smart. So maybe you'll
> get the Turing machine after your ass, because maybe an AI somewhere
> wants to augment its private cash flow. Some AIs have citizenship,
> right? Another thing you have to watch out for, maybe it's a military
> icebreaker, and that's bad heat, too, or maybe it's taken a walk out
> of some zaibatsu's industrial espionage arm, and you don't want that
> either. You takin' this shit in, Bobby?"
>
>    Bobby nodded. He felt like he'd been waiting all his life to hear
> Beauvoir explain the workings of a world whose existence he'd only
> guessed at before.
> — Count Zero by William Gibson.
>
>
> Here's something you may have learned about exploits recently: They
> usually take a long time to run.
>
> Lots of web applications can be owned via a known-plaintext attack +
> hash collision to recover the host key, but it's going to take a lot
> more time than a basic SQL injection and so most teams aren't even
> going to bother looking. I went downstairs for a demo from Sean the
> other day, and he's like "This is going to take a while to run - like
> six minutes or something" and the only answer is of course, "If it
> gets me in reliably , I don't care if it takes all day. Enhancing time
> on target is the operator team's problem. They can go re-read
> MidnightSun.pdf[1] while it runs in the background. " As Halvar would
> put it "server side attacks are a myth now, publicly".
>
> And here's where the hilarity starts. Because a 24 hour runtime attack
> does not "scale" well. It's not something you can "automate" against a
> class B network.
>
> William Gibson is on Twitter BTW. How cool is that? Pattern
> Recognition and Spook Country are great books.
>
> -dave
> [1] http://www.stepheniemeyer.com/midnightsun.html
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