Re: Political Analysis of Security Products

[<ed () the7thbeer com>]

Being systemically a paranoid people, a simple portscan would be highly
unlikely to reveal a backdoor written into FW-1 by the Israelis.  

More insidious, and well discussed in certain circles, is the idea of
"multiple triggers", wherein a seemingly benign application received
multiple triggers, each one inconsequential but retained and examined.
When each trigger is in place and sent to the applicaiton in question, a
master-key routine executes, thereby opening the backdoor.  This is
similar to symmetric split keys in one sense of having multiple pieces for
the single key(or single trigger).  So you could nmap FW1 all you wanted,
and still never find anything.  

A complete code review would be the only way to determine if such a
vulnerability existed.  Even then, a crafty coder could hide each trigger
piece in seemingly benign ways.  If the paranoia of the client is that
great, go with something homegrown, whose code CAN be audited and
reviewed, IMHO.

===============================
Ed Mitchell (ed<-at->the7thbeer.com)
Finger for PGP public key
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In time of War, the law falls silent

On Tue, 5 Feb 2002, R. DuFresne wrote:

> Marcus Ranum, if I recall correctly, has an outstanding reward for anyone
> with proof that fw-1 was ever backdoored by the Israeli's, it has never
> bee collected nor has any evidence of such a backdoor ever really been
> offered up.  It remains an unsubstantiated rumor, perhaps initiated by
> those competing with fw-1, years back.  An open backkdoor should be able
> to be gleened from port mapping techniques, the port has to be openly
> accesible for it to be used, yes?  A review/audit of the code for the
> product might further provide evidence, but, would require much more time
> as well as skill level <i.e. one would need to know C or C++ quite well,
> or whatever code base the application./device was written in>  An
> examination of theunderlying OS, before and after install, if this is not
> a drop and place and configure blackboox device might prove useful also.
> Most of the blackbox designs might prove hard to thouroughly audit from an
> OS/source perspective as they owner/writers might not be too willing to
> provide particulars of their design.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ron DuFresne
>
> On Tue, 5 Feb 2002 pentestlist () hushmail com wrote:


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