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Parasitic Computing
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...
I wonder if an IDS or firewall can be configured to protect against such leeching
IANAFE (I am not a firewall expert), but the only way I could think of would be to always ignore the checksum so they always get a connection and thus it would screw up their results. Otherwise it's indistinguishable from normal traffic, it's just bad traffic. Maybe the firewall could start dropping packets after X number of bad checksum packets?
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
ICMP echo packets (ping packets) also includes a checksum. By using the ICMP checksum instead of the TCP checksum, almost every computer connected to the Internet could be used for computation, not only web servers.
I Have DONE THIS! I Did it years ago (steal cpu cycles remotely for local computational tasks in a distributed network manner without having account priveledges on any target systems)
,117 K-12 schools or school districts , 22 Local, state, and federal government agencies ,16 Healthcare organizations , 111 Libraries , 21 Other non-profit organizations ,28 Businesses . Most were Amdahl mainframes (IBM clones).
Many unitversities in the 1980s used the MERIT network and many still do.
A feture of MERIT allows logging onto any other system from another system and during a login process a free command line feature allows use of the CALC calculator line command.
This exotic command would only work for a while before they severed the line after about two minutes, unless you finally logged in validly so they could charge you the 9600 baud access fees.
The calculator command was great. It allowed a truly dumb terminal to do simple math functions. Other 1980's terminals such as Liberty Freedom Ones and other terminals have built in desk calculators modes.
You can use the calculator function to do multiplication and other operations without owning a system account. It even worked during modem connections and tou could tie up several connections by "hopping" during a login.
I created tools to use the math functions of the MERIT network to perform computations FOR FREE.
Merit is a private, non-profit corporation, governed by thirteen of Michigan's four-year publicly supported universities. In addition to the thirteen members there are 230 affiliates with a combined total of 425 dedicated network attachments from 398 separate locations. Merit affiliates include: 85 Colleges and universities,25 Community colleges
Stealing free cpu cycles of innocent target machines as a parasite to perform complex computational tasks of a larger state machine, using network protocols is fun, especially if distributed across multiple systems and limitless.
I proudly did it first in the early 1980s.
(I have a life though and achieved many other more useful things by the way)
F.E.
User agreement: I'll let you access the information on my site at no direct cost to you IF you'll allow me access to your computer (not to exceed specified limitations) in return.
Click here to agree.
Don't you think it's time to start communicating?
To really be useful, you need a longer time to do a more complicated calculation. So:
/. types, they'd probably have JavaScript turned off.
1) Create a compeling website that will get people to stick around for a while (free pr0n would probably work).
2) Put all your pages into frames with a hidden, 0 pixel frame.
3) Create dynamic pages (JSP/ASP/whatever) that will pipe down JavaScript to the hidden frame with the algorythm that needs to be run.
4) Let the calculation run while the user browses your site, then POST the results back to the server when it's done.
This would all be relatively transparent to the user... Of course, if they're all paranoid
Why not make this a feature? Write an extremely simple virtual machine that would perform calculations as asked. Way smaller than java. Simple enough that you could write a proof that it couldn't try to play outside its sandbox.
You could give it a small chunk of memory to use, run it at a VERY low priority, and use SSH like transmission where the packets are automaticaly compressed and only a list of certain IPs would be accepted. All you would have to do is download the IPs of the distributed projects you wanted to work on and the virtual machine would accept packets from them. No specific clients to download for each project, and you would get distributed computing easily on all your machines.
Any projects like this? It would be great to have an always on and client secure distributed computing platform.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME