The Breaking of Cyber Patrol 4

In the wake of recent announcements by Peacefire that they'd decrypted the secret block lists employed by two brands of censoring software, the "encryption" used by another major brand of software, Cyber Patrol, (produced by a company repugnant enough to advertise the increase in sales after Australia passed national censorship legislation), has also been broken. Matthew Skala and Eddy L O Jansson report in an in-depth essay about the practical difficulties encountered when undertaking this task. Their announcement follows.

Their announcement:

"March 11, 2000 - ANNOUNCEMENT

Cyber Patrol(R) 4, a "censorware" product intended to prevent users from accessing undesirable Internet content, has been reverse engineered by youth rights activists Eddy L O Jansson and Matthew Skala. A detailed report of their findings, titled "The Breaking of Cyber Patrol(R) 4", with commentary on the reverse engineering process and cryptographic attacks against the product's authentication system, has been posted on the World Wide Web at this address:

http://hem.passagen.se/eddy1/reveng/cp4/cp4break.html

The abstract of the report:

Several attacks are presented on the "sophisticated anti-hacker security" features of Cyber Patrol(R) 4, a "censorware" product intended to prevent users from accessing Internet content considered harmful. Motivations, tools, and methods are discussed for reverse engineering in general and reverse engineering of censorware in particular. The encryption of the configuration and data files is reversed, as are the password hash functions. File formats are documented, with commentary. Excerpts from the list of blocked sites are presented and commented upon. A package of source code and binaries implementing the attacks is included.

Eddy L O Jansson
srm_dfr@hotmail.com
http://hem.passagen.se/eddy1/index.html

Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca
http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/"

Comments

Re:This is bad for out children

[Felix The Cat]

Well, speaking as the father of a four-year-old daughter, I just have to say: BZZZZZT! WRONG!

Censorware is not the only solution, as you would have us believe. As a parent, I feel it is my duty to draw and enforce the boundaries within which my little girl can live, play and learn, whether it be in real life or on her computer. As sush, it is also my duty to personally monitor those boundaries to make sure she doesn't wander outside of them. As she gets older, those boundaries get wider and wider until, when she becomes an adult, I cannot set them anymore.

I cannot and will not abdicate this responsibility to a piece of software. This is, in effect, what the proponents of this software want us, as parents, to do. Right now, she has not discovered the Internet (like I said, she's only 4), but when she does, you'd better believe that I will be right there, helping her to discover new things on the 'Net, but always ready to enforce those boundaries that I and my wife have set for her. This, I think, will help her grow into a much more responsible and, yes, moral person than a collection of bits could ever hope to.

Meow.

What the US Govmnt thinks about anti-censorware:

[Blue Lang]

Quote from news.com the other day: (Haselton is the peacefire guy)

---
Gear wouldn't comment on the findings, but Bruce Taylor, chief counsel to the National Law Center for Children and Families in Fairfax, Va.,
disputed Haselton's study.

"I don't trust that Peacefire is telling the truth," Taylor said. "It's all part of the cyberpunk revolution. They don't like the government telling them that they don't have free access to the Internet. It's like 'Lord of the Flies,' and they think they have the conch."
---

That condescending, patronizing bullshit opinion in and of itself is more than enough to put me in the mood to grab a pitchfork and prepare for the politicians-up-against-the-wall kind of revolution.

The issue is not with censoreware, folks, the problem is with the use of hidden and encrypted ban lists. If everyone could see and change those lists at will, then censoreware, while still standing zero chance of actually working, would at least be acceptable.

As for the issue of performance, I think it's a pretty simple math problem to determine the chances of any one product effectively filtering Pr0n on the great big lan - with the number of new sites coming up every day, the ability of Pr0n purveyors to change sites at will, etc, etc, the chance of a high success rate is pretty well near nil, even if you consider only the sites that play by the rules and allow themselves to be censored.

--
blue

Re:There is a solution to this...

[iCEBaLM]

I think most people agree that, in certain ways, "censorware" can be useful. No one really wants kids to easily see hard core porn, do they?

To be perfectly honest with you, if I had children, I wouldn't care one way or the other if they see hard core porn.

Why you ask?

Because all kids do it, I know when I was 10 or 11 I found my brothers porn mags and looked through them, curiously. It didn't scar me for life, it didn't make me go into violent convultions, it didn't kill me.

For gods sake here, all it is is a couple of naked bodies having sex, who cares! Kids can undress and look at themselves too ya know. These puritan mores in our society sicken me.

When it's all said and done, it's not about sheilding your children from nudity and sex, because they are going to see it eventually whether you like it or not. It's about bringing up well adjusted children who are able to handle it.

-- iCEBaLM