RE: Cisco LEAP

["Rob Shein" <shoten () starpower net>]

He predicted 40 GB in size.  Not just a few megabytes.  And I don't think
he's going to want to do the kind of customizing that Inktomi did just to
attack LEAP :)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: johnadams [mailto:johnadams () apple com] 
> Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 3:56 PM
> To: Rob Shein
> Cc: 'No Man'; pen-test () securityfocus com
> Subject: Re: Cisco LEAP
>
>
>
> On Monday, November 3, 2003, at 11:59 AM, Rob Shein wrote:
>
> > It's not a question of peak performance as much as 
> consistency.  Flat
> > files
> > aren't meant to work this way; that's largely why database 
> > applications work
> > the way they do in the first place.  If something like 
> paging competes 
> > for
> > drive access just long enough, the whole thing can go to 
> hell.  When 
> > you're
> > opening a graphic or text file completely into memory to 
> view or edit 
> > it?
> > For that, sure, a flat file is faster.  But when you're streaming 
> > through a
> > flat file that's dozens of gigs in size, over an extended period of 
> > time
> > while running the data into a memory and 
> processor-intensive program 
> > at the
> > same time?  Try it, and just see how quickly that works over the 
> > length of
> > the entire file compared to a database :)
>
> The real issue here is the right tool for the job -- we're talking 
> about a file with many passwords in it, which ostensibly 
> would be under 
> a few megabytes in size. You could mmap() the entire thing 
> into memory 
> and get consistent access without the use of a database. Memory is 
> cheap these days.
>
> One thing that I see much of in software design is an overwhelming 
> desire to put everything into a database with complete disregard for 
> performance,
>
> I used to work at Inktomi, and we used very little in the way of 
> databases to hold massive datasets (all web pages on the 
> Internet.) We 
> avoided databases for performance reasons, and saw serious gains 
> because of customized code that read flat files filled with 
> structures.
>
> I guess the thing to remember here is that eventually the 
> database has 
> to write your data out to disk, and when that happens, it'll 
> be placed 
> on the disk in a file, using an fwrite() and a modicum of 
> indexes into 
> the data. Even programs like mysql eventually write their data out as 
> BerkeleyDB files.
>
> -john
> (posting far outside the scope of pen-test now)


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