Subject: RE: [Asrg] Viruses

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 12:49:20 -0700

> >Plus or minus the odd serious bug or misconfiguration operating
> >systems such as unix, linux, VMS, MVS, TOPS-20 (going back 
> 20+ years),
> >etc are more or less immune to such problems. 
> 
> I guess you can claim that if you dismiss any vulnerability 
> as an "odd serious 
> bug".

The only O/S security feature I am aware of that is relevant in this
regard is the VMS fine grained privileges that allowed processes to
be created that did not have network access or did not have file 
access.

There is a similar feature set in Windows NT but the applications
appear to be unaware of the reason it should be used.

I am unaware of any equivalent system in the UNIX world, chroot is
not equivalent. The .NET framework has reinstated the concept of fine
grained privs but it will take many years for them to be used by
applications.

Finger pointing is rarely a good guide to good security practice.
I remember the time when people doubted unix would get anywhere
because of its notorious security problems and weak security
architecture, it does not seem to have had the predicted effect.

		Phill

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From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 16:40:09 -0400

Note: this thread is only very marginally relevant to the subject of
this group...
Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> The only O/S security feature I am aware of that is relevant 
> in this regard is the VMS fine grained privileges that 
> allowed processes to be created that did not have network 
> access or did not have file access.

	VMS also had pretty good file system access control (as did most
of the Digital operating systems). Given basic access controls (Read,
Write, Delete, Execute) plus access control lists on files and
directories, it was very difficult to insert viruses into system files.
	Given a few more decades, the ex-VMS folk at Microsoft (Cutler,
Bell, Bernstein, etc.) might actually be able to get Windows to the
level that we had VMS back in the early 80's... After all WNT is just
VMS+1...

		bob wyman
		(11.5 years with DEC starting in '79...)

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From: [email-masked] (Justin Mason)
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 14:07:10 -0700

Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes:
>not equivalent.

grsecurity, NSA's secure linux work, and similar third-party patches.
But they aren't in the mainstream kernels yet, which is what I'd
like to see...

--j.

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From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 15:11:19 -0600 (MDT)

> From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>

> ...

Many UNIX flavors have extremely fine grained privileges.  I've been
told by people who dealt with the U.S. Dept. of Defense's tests that
full-up mandatory access controls are unavoidable.  That might be why
many and probably most commercial UNIX flavors have (or at least had)
MAC available.  They also tend to have elaborate privilege inheritance
mechanisms.  Eg. for inetd to be able to open the sockets it needs,
it must not only be running as root, but started by a process that
has the rights to open those sockets and that explicitly passes those
rights during the fork().  Such stuff makes for a lot of bug prone
noise in control files, and elsewhere, and so it's generally disabled
and suppressed for commercial customers.   It's been more than 5 years
since I was employed by a UNIX vendor that offered this gunk.

I think a fundamental security principle is that the operating system
cannot entirely trust applications to do the right things.  Ignoring
this principle was the foundation of the first 10 or 15 years of
Microsoft security holes, where Microsoft thought or claimed that a
primitive program loader and some utility routines was an "operating
system."  But yes, the ancient Burroughs system could be seen as an
existence proof to the contrary.

Perhaps in theory and certainly in press releases .NET is secure.
The history of other absolutely, provably secure mechanisms from
Redmond including ActiveX urge skepticism.

What does any of this have to do with spam in general or the ASRG?
That viruses and worms can used to pump spam from Microsoft systems
doesn't seem much different from the fact that a lot of spam is pumped
through open-by-default proxy programs.  The spam looks the same.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

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From: Barry Shein <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 18:57:28 -0400

> What does any of this have to do with spam in general or the ASRG?

That's the right question because I think we've now lost the point of
my bringing it up in the first place.

I maintain that the primary problem with spam right now is caused by
the hijacking of systems (demonstrably) by the hundreds (probably much
more) to spew spam.

I further maintain that without these hijacked systems spammers would
be ineffective, a relatively minor nuisance.

There are good, structural reasons why this is the case:

a) Spamming does not provide the sort of margin needed to purchase and
maintain the equipment they seem to rely on. Therefore, they must
steal it.

b) Even if they could acquire such equipment, and concomitant
bandwidth, it would of necessity be located in a relatively static
location (e.g., ip addresses), and, so, relatively easy to just block.

Now, how these systems are hijacked is a subsequent topic.

And, what might be done about it is yet another subsequent topic.

But, this is a research group, and that is a result of my research.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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From: Bruce Stephens <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 00:21:11 +0100

Barry Shein <[email-masked]> writes:

[...]

> the hijacking of systems (demonstrably) by the hundreds (probably much

Is there evidence to support this?  (My apologies if it's already been
quoted.)

> location (e.g., ip addresses), and, so, relatively easy to just block.

I must admit, my gut feeling suggests that these two points ought to
be true.  And yet I suspect they aren't: I suspect spamming is cheap
enough, and that there's just enough demand, that some spammers can
indeed make a profit relatively legitimately.

[...]