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Parasitic Computing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the phlebotomy dept.

b0r0din writes: "CNN has this article about a way to force computers to solve complex computational problem using the checksum algorithm used by the TCP/IP protocol. For more technical details, see their website." You probably thought learning TCP/IP was useless. No! You can use it to make an extremely inefficient computer...

8 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Legality? by silicon_synapse · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Such online piracy does not violate the security of hapless servers, using only areas specifically earmarked for public access, according to the researchers.

    But it could slow the machines down by engaging them in mindless conversation while they unwittingly work for their remote master, Barabasi said.


    Isn't this theft of resources? The researchers are literally stealing bandwidth and clock cycles. Maybe it's just me, but this seems very ethically wrong. I wonder if an IDS or firewall can be configured to protect against such leeching. Any lawyers or firewall experts in the house?

    1. Re:Legality? by 4mn0t1337 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      But that resource is made available for a specific use.

      And that is what the study did.

      I think the wrong phone call analogy is correct. You open up a service and *have* to expect bad/malformed/incorrect data in addition to the good/expected/desired data. You can't get a phone service and say that you only want "desired calls" to come in. Have to take the good with the bad.

      Now, if someone had the *intent* of causing and interruption in service or to harass you by *intentionally* dialing your number (or making a call to a service on your machine) then that is another issue.

      All of this being said, I do think this is a little intrusive, and don't like the idea (other than it is cool that it possible), but I don't think there is much ground for any kind of legal complaint.
      Oh, yeah: IANAL.

      --

      ______
      Once: you're a philosopher. Twice: a pervert.

  2. This looks possible, but why? by phoenix_orb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This will make an EXTREMLY slow computer, and if anyone out there knows anything about routing (which I am sure you do :) The time it would take to recieve and compile all of the data would take longer and require more bandwith than would be viable on the economy of scale.

    Example --- need to send 4,000,000 packets out and recieve the TCP packet back.

    To do this with any speed, and also to not lose a fair majority of packets, you have to have a huge backhaul.. (T-3, OC3 or larger) TCP will not continue sending packet so you will loses them. Cost for large backhaul. $4800 month, (as by what my company chages..)

    4,800 x 12 $57,600

    So for one year of a huge pipe to the net you will be paying 57,600 (through my provider)

    This still will not fix latent packets that never get back to the user, or any other problems.. (such as someone on your network running bearshare and eating all of your bandwidth)

    Now lets look at the amount of money used for that large amount of bandwidth.

    $57,600 for the amount we could have spent on that line in one year we can build a beowulf cluster with 30 nodes (and that is being very liberal on the cost of the nodes)

    Now, looking at the article that I read, it seems as if the computing style using TCP/IP is very very ineffiecint.

    Personally, for the amount needed to make this work, on the scale of actually getting any real work done, I would much rather build a Athlon Beowulf cluster.

    This looks like in reality this could only be implimented in the real world as a new type of DOS attack.

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    Blah Blah Blah.
  3. Re:Interesting concept by orangesquid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Anyway, other than the TCP checksum, are there any other protocols out there that do something more computationally intense to the data before returning it?

    An interesting idea is the hijacking of authorization sections of secure protocols, dispatching authentication requests based on a public/private key pair you are trying to hack, to thousands of servers and the one that returns a successful result must have been given the correct key pair.

    Of course, I'm fairly certain most widespread secure protocols can't be used like this, but one or two of the less common ones might have a loophole... but then again, if they're less common, resources would be scarce, and you're better off trying to crack things on your own.

    --
    --TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
  4. Re:Interesting concept by ddstreet · · Score: 2, Insightful
    A brief read of the paper tells me that it's simply a brute force method of checksumming; they send all possible bit combinations in the checksum field (using the same actual message bits), and the server only responds to the correct checksum. They don't actually compute the checksum locally.

    While it does work, it's basically trading a (relatively) small amount of actual computation for a large amount of bandwidth. Actually sending those packets out in the first place may take more computation that the actual checksum would, so I'm not sure if this is entirely useful...

  5. Ideas, please! by megaduck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Most of the posts here have been of two schools:

    1. It's impractical.
    2. It's unethical.

    Both valid points, but I think that it's foolish to dismiss this out of hand. First of all, it's a pretty slick hack. Very inventive, if nothing else. Secondly, it brings up some very interesting questions. Can this ever be made practical? What would it take? Would it be ethical to make it work? Can this be used to augment a DOS attack, or something similar? If so, how do we defend against it?

    Maybe I'm talking out of my ass here. I don't know TCP/IP very well. However, I know that others of you out there really know your stuff. I'd like to hear from you.

    --
    This .sig for rent.
  6. piracy? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Such online piracy does not violate the security of hapless servers, using only areas specifically earmarked for public access, according to the researchers.

    Eh, there's that word again, pretty handy word isn't it?

    Piracy: anything you do that someone else doesn't want you to do.

  7. Contradiction by D.+Mann · · Score: 3, Insightful
    "We are not worried about copycats taking our program," Barabasi said.

    But variations could be engineered to make online piracy much more efficient, he cautioned.


    If it will make piracy more efficient, I'm pretty sure the pirates would be very interested in finding out more about it.

    Hell, in my experience, most pirates would use a modem that belched huge clouds of carbon monoxide and was powered by grinding up kittens in a big hopper if it got them an extra 10k/s on their downloads.