Slashdot Mirror
Enhanced Carnivore To Crack Encryption Via Virus
suqur writes: "MSNBC has a story about a new Carnivore feature, dubbed 'Magic Lantern,' which arrives on a victim's computer in the form of a virus through email or well-known vulnerabilities. Magic Lantern uses keylogging to extract keys typed in, and sends them off to the FBI. This is similar to a story reported on previously, but taken one step further, allowing computers to be compromised remotely."
Does this mean it will now be illegal to use a secure system? Having any type of security/virus protection will be circumvention of law-enforcing software.
And what happens if this "happens" to get installed on a foreign government's computer? Can we say "espionage"?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
What are the odds that antivirus software could be updated to find this virus? It obviously couldn't be cross-platform either. And if the gov't somehow manages to pressure a/v companies into not including it in virus defs, what would happen if some malicious kiddie got hold of the code, and unleashed a much more destructive version, knowing full well that most machines were not protected? Who would be liable in that case?
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
In other news today, the FBI was arrested en masse for violating numerous newly legislated anti-terrorist laws prohibiting compromising remote computers...
a) The FBI kicks in your door and installs Outlook
b) You always open email with the subject "Snow White and the 7 FBI Agents"
c) You run the attachment called "FBILOVESYOU.VBS" (and you run Windows, Outlook, etc)
Blah, dumb communist FBI
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
It watches for a suspect to start a popular encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy. It then logs the passphrase used to start the program, essentially given agents access to keys needed to decrypt files.
If this is true, then it would seem all you need to do to foil this latest slightly-hare-brained-scheme would be to rename pgp to something else, such as goawayfbi.
Thanks to the FBI, a whole new market is now being pushed into exploring the world of alternative operating systems.
Talk about a boon to the Open Source movement! Show the people (not just the bad guys) that Microsoft's numerous vulnerabilities can be used by Big Brother to monitor them. I can't think of a better way to boost Linux distro sales.
The first thing that comes to mind is a flagrant violation of the DCMA.
:P. That was easy to get around.
How does the government expect to work around this one? There are so many things that can go wrong...
1. Probably OS-dependent. Remember: virii for one platform (i.e., Win) will probably not work for others. That was not hard to get around
2. Human link involved. This virus will presumably be propagated via email, or some other form of trojan. Those who tend to use encryption tend to block this type of thing from happening to their machine anyway. Yet another reason not to open email/attachments from an addresser named "CIA"
3. Network link involved. Those who use encryption are usually savvy enough to detect extra packets flying from their machine to some unknown address, which would easily be identified in a reverse-lookup.
My goodness, they are getting desperate, aren't they.
From: Bill@Slashdot.org
To: Fred@Slashdot.org
Subject: Magic Lantern.doc.pif
Hi! How are you?
I send you this file in order to have your advice.
See you later. Thanks
-- Dan
Are there any cases involving damage done to personal property in eavesdropping operations? That is, legal taps? Any lawyers here? I gotta imagine that this would be a very very dangerous thing for the government to get into. Not only could it cause damage to personal property, but if the suspect is smart enough to encrypt their stuff, they're going to be smart enough to know when they've been h4x0red by an email virus.
This story makes a lot more sense if you remove every reference to "our sources" and replace it with "my little brother." I believe *that*.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Remember Ken Thompson's hack! You only get the bonus points if you compiled the OS (and CD-ROM burning software) from source on a compiler you wrote yourself ;-)
Of course, anyone who would be vulnerabe to this is either a moron or doesn't feel that they have anything to hide, so it seems kind of pointless.
Of course, the truely paranoid communicate with their computer using morse code with their space bar and scroll lock LED. I can see it now:
Head of Investigation: "What have we got from the J Random Hacker log file?"
Computer Specialist: "84,365,928 spaces, sir"
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
After it's renamed and loaded with the ATI drivers, PGP will encrypt things twice as fast, but side-by-side inspection will reveal it's algorithm to have switched to XOR.
I received an email with the subject "Good Times", and I opened it. My browser popped open, and sent me to a site that had the headline, "See what really happens 'behind closed doors' when John Ashcroft and George Bush get together." My firewall picked up something weird, but I don't know anything about that, because I was already getting ready to format my disk.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Even easier: use an encryption program that their virus doesn't know how to sniff yet. Their virus doesn't sniff all keystrokes (yet), just for specific encyrption programs. You don't even necessary need to change encryption schemes, just use a different front-end for typing in your password.
At first I thought that this was just stupid, because no one running a reasonably secure system, keeping up to date with the latest patches, etc, would be caught by it. But then I thought: why rely on already known (and fixed) and other yet undiscovered holes, when you can roll your own?
recently seen in #anti-trust:
*** BillG is now known as GMoney ***
<GMoney> How can we get out of this DOJ crap?
<FBI> I have this "security patch" I'd like you to distributed through Windows Update. Say it fixes some hole using malformed URLs in IE5 and IE6. No one will blink twice. I'm not even sure most XP users can read.
<GMoney> Will you put in a good word for me with the DOJ?
<FBI> Sure.
<FBI> DOJ: Let Microsoft go scott-free, or I post incriminating pictures of John Ahscroft and Hilary Rosen to usenet.
<DOJ> Rokie dokie, baws.
GMoney laughs maniacally.
FBI laughs maniacally.
DOJ tries to laugh maniacally, but chokes on the pencil eraser he was chewing.
*poof*. Insta-hole. Security patches are worthless if you can't trust the source. And yes, this wouldn't work with non-MS OSes, especially decentralized open source ones. I hope.
-Puk
The FBI is evil, but not stupid. If they did it the best way possible, then their software probably replaces a key part of your operating system's networking code, so that even if you knew each and every process running and exactly what it does, you could still have their software installed and never have any way of knowing.
r ity.html is standard reading in newsgroups and on websites dedicated to privacy. It is also standard reading in newsgroups and message boards where child pornography is posted. It is probably also known to organized crime and other elements which engage in illicit activities and use computers. It explains in language most people can understand, the use of PGP, firewalls, various encryption and security software, and the threat of keyloggers and trojans and how to use software like ZoneAlarm to secure network access to only those programs you choose to authorize.
After all, it's doubtful that Microsoft would object to the FBI looking at their source code for such a project, it's doubtful that Apple would object--but even if they did, the lower levels of OS X are open-source Darwin--and of course Linux is open-source anyway. It doesn't seem too difficult for them to do.
It seems that if they were to do it the simpler way, it would be too easy to detect. If they installed it like a simple trojan, it would be trivial to detect, particularly by software such as ZoneAlarm and equivalents which monitor all attempts by programs to access the net. In fact, if it is what they used in the Scarfo case and they are using it now, if it were a simple trojan it would probably have been reported by now. People with something to hide know what software to use to protect them from such things.
For example, "Dr. Who's Encryption and Security FAQ" http://www.slack.net/~hermit/ebook/documents/secu
Call me crazy, but I think the FBI would take note of this readily available information and come up with a way to counteract it. Writing their trojan into your operating system itself seems like a damn good way to do this. Windows and Mac users and even Linux users expect certain processes to access the network, so why not exploit that to camouflage an "ultimate trojan"?
There would be only one way to counteract it, and this is mentioned in Dr. Who's FAQ: make detached PGP signatures for each important file in your OS that you'd expect not to change, and use a script to check them against the files each time you boot, or each time you choose to run it. If a file has changed, you know something is wrong.
Of course, this is very cumbersome--how many files exactly should you sign? Very tedious. I got to thinking on this some time back, and came to the conclusion that if you want the best possible security against unauthorized changes to your system, the best way might be to install your whole OS and all your apps, configure everything how you like, and immediately transfer the whole system to one file. Then, strip down your OS to the very minimal parts needed to boot and to check the signature on the "big file" and your stripped-down OS files, then decompress/mount then boot the whole OS in your "container" file. If you have lots of cheap RAM, you can decompress the file containing your OS into a RAMdisk to save some time and make the files less persistent. A lengthy process, depending on how big your OS/apps are, but if you want security there will be a price. This way, every file on your system is uncorruptable, untouchable by trojans and FBI spyware.
I experimented with just that using Windows 98SE, and though I don't know exactly how you'd do it with Linux or WinNT/2k/XP it is definitely doable with Win9x. First I installed Windows and all my apps, then made a Zip file (using no compression at all, for speed of unzipping at boot) of the whole system. Then I deleted the system except for minimal DOS command files and a RAM disk creation tool called xmsdsk.exe and a command-line unzip tool, altered Autoexec.bat to call xmsdsk with the parameters to make a 1GB RAM disk (there were 1.5gigs on the machine), called the unzip tool to unzip the file to the RAM disk, and had the config files boot Win98 from that drive. It took fiddling a bit, but finally I got it right and it worked. When my Win98 booted, in the startup folder was a shortcut to check the PGP signatures of all the startup files and the Big File that the system was stored in.
Not ideal. Quite slow to boot up. You can see why I don't actually still do this; it was more or less an experiment. But it did work. When the system was shut down, the RAM disk went away, and so any changes at all to the system would be undone. If the Big File the system came from, or any of the boot files, were modified it would show up the next time I booted when the signatures were checked. It was unweildy, but it did provide full protection of a sort I can't think how to have otherwise.
So, does anyone else have crazy ideas on how to provide security against such intrusions? Preferably ones that don't require a boot time long enough that you can go make breakfast in the intervening minutes.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
How many straws will it take before the people of the United States, the people who take pride in living in the "best nation on Earth", the "land of the free," stand up and say ENOUGH?
Is a sense of security worth allowing Stalinist Russia to be reborn in America?
How many straws, America? How many?
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.