RE: Why I should have the right to kill a malicious process on your machine

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: Jason Coombs <jasonc () science org>
Cc: Thor () HammerofGod com

Aloha, Tim.

Rights in and liability for abandoned property is a complex subject of
law. Nobody would argue that you don't have the right to perform
remote system administration on abandoned property that happens to
still be connected to a power source and the Internet, but a server
that has been owned by a worm or an anonymous third-party attacker is
not clearly abandoned. As physical property it still belongs to its
legal owner. If we allow anonymous remote system administration that
is allegedly benign or even beneficial to information security why
shouldn't we also encourage the coding of self-replicating concept
worms and viruses that exploit security vulnerabilities for the sole
purpose of demonstrating that such vulnerabilities exist?

Code Red was a concept worm. It did no real harm. Its spread could
have educated IIS administrators as to the threat of their unpatched
boxes, but it didn't. Code Red II DID result in widespread awareness
of the security risk of unpatched IIS boxes because it did cause
widespread harm. It's not difficult to see the slippery slope that
begins with your good intentions and ends with the logical conclusion
that in order to cause real security for the good of your nation and
the world, you have to write malicious code that self-replicates and
causes global electronic paralysis. Otherwise nobody will listen,
nobody will acknowledge the threat even though you see it clearly, and
nobody will act to prevent more severe penetrations before they occur.

When electronic trespassing is permitted in violation of other
people's reasonable legal rights under the condition that the
trespasser must be attempting to do something beneficial to the
security of the property in which she trespasses the entire notion of
illegal electronic trespassing disappears, to be replaced with
forensic arguments made by expert witnesses in front of juries. You do
not want a jury of your peers to decide whether or not the
prosecution's interpretation of the computer evidence is accurate or
whether your defense expert witness is correct in her forensic
counter-analysis that proves your innocence. This is a losing
situation for you, the accused, because law enforcement will always
appear to be the more credible witness.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, who are you going to believe?
THOR () HAMMEROFGOD COM or the FBI?"

Advocating white hack hacker penetrations of other people's property
for the purpose of remote system administration also fails the common
sense test. Common sense tells us that we can defend ourselves
adequately from all of our badly-configured and compromised peers
simply by unplugging our computers from the network that connects us
to them. If the only viable solution to the world's information
security problems includes automated legalized trespassing, then the
world needs brand new computer products designed from the ground up
with infosec in mind. The fact that we will soon see the first
generation of these systems enter the marketplace may be proof of the
fundamental insecurity of existing programmable computers; though the
jury is still out deliberating this point.

Sincerely,

Jason Coombs
jasonc () science org


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-isn () attrition org [mailto:owner-isn () attrition org]On Behalf
Of InfoSec News
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 2:17 AM
To: isn () attrition org
Subject: [ISN] Why I should have the right to kill a malicious process
on your machine


http://212.100.234.54/content/55/28851.html

By Tim Mullen
Security Focus Online
Posted: 14/01/2003

Opinion - A lot has happened since my Right to Defend column in
SecurityFocus Online last July, and the subsequent presentation I made
at the Blackhat Security Briefings in Las Vegas. The idea has
withstood a lot of criticism.

To refresh, I believe you should have the right to neutralize a worm
process running on someone else's infected system, if it's
relentlessly attacking your network. I've even written code to
demonstrate the process. Though the initial news coverage of the
concept was grossly inaccurate in conveying my ideas, it has stirred
up a constructive dialog.

I knew my idea was controversial, but I was wrong about something-- I
figured everyone in the security biz would "get it" and that the hard
part would be convincing everyone else that if they can't or won't
secure their machines, we as the defenders would have the right to
terminate the process attacking us.

It has turned out to be the opposite.

TechTV's Cybercrime news magazine show did a segment about strikeback,
where I talked about my goals and demo'd a couple of my neutralizing
agents. Though the audience of Cybercrime is a much more generalized
group of computer users and enthusiasts, the very people I thought
would cry foul the loudest, I did not receive a single negative e-mail
in response. Every last message was wonderfully supportive, and most
of them eagerly offered assistance and asked how they could
participate.

It has been the "security experts" who have grouped as the opposition,
some even with a level of condescension. For instance, Eugene Schultz
of U.C. Berkeley's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wrote in an
issue of SANS Newsbites that he "hoped no one would take Mr. Mullen
seriously" about this technology, as if it were some joke I was
playing on the community.

[...]



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