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Reflections on Brilliant Digital: Single Points of 0wnership
nweaver writes "Some reflection on Brilliant Digital's plans shows that they have inadvertently created a Single Point of 0wnership: a single machine or small group of machines which, if succesfully attacked, can be used to gain effective control of the Internet. The implications are rather scary: Even if you never touched KaZaA, your systems may be affected if someone manages to attack Brilliant Digital's update service. Who needs a Warhol Worm?".Updated by HeUnique: use these instructions to remove the Brilliant part.
Here at work I pointed a couple of coworkers toward the previous articles on Kazaa. There response you might ask?
As long as I can get good download speed and have a large mp3 base what do I care?
Does this type of thinking occure elsewhere? I thought I worked with some bright people but they seem to think of their machines as black boxes and if they work great.
sigh.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
If you use KaZaA, with all of its spyware, worm-like auto-updating, and history of escalating privacy invasion, you don't have a clue. You deserve to be 0wn3d d00d.
MS has been doing this for years, many tools check for updates and install them.
I noticed Need for Speed Porsche did this too.
These friendly autopatchers could all be hacked.
This is a serious risk with new subscription based services too.
The difference is: we TRUST the owners of the root servers to keep their systems secure. The owner's of KaZaA don't have the same track record.
Ok, from what I understand, Kazaa is going to be attempting to get their users to give up their spare CPU cycles to help drive advertisements and other income-based projects for Kazaa?
Ok, not only would this concept be likely considered unwelcome even by casual Kazaa users, but think of all the other possibilities for an already heavily established (as those things go) P2P app like Kazaa...
In other words, they could try to get their users to share a distributed computing project working towards, say, the cure of a deadly disease or other medical project, then give ( or sell, which would be more likely) the results to whatever foundation would actually be able to use the data?
That way they could make money, a name for themselves, and generally the rest of humanity a bit happier.
Palaces, barricades, threats, meet promises
That's a good point - but still, you can trust someone to keep a system secure but things still happens - right? Sure the chances are cut, but it doesn't rule anything out. The safest way to design a system is to make it safe *by design* in addition to maintaining the safety. Wouldn't a valid argument be made for the Internet root DNS servers or am I totally off-base?
_
WINDOWS USERS CLICK HERE!
Interesting article. I think it effectively shows that Brilliant Digital -- along with just about 95% of our industry -- needs to learn that they can't just shove software down people's throats. Most interesting to these companies should be the legal liability questions raised.
I'd expect these companies to start adding stuff into their installation legalese with something to the effect of, "You agree not to reverse-engineer anything we might be doing with your computer. You agree to sit back and relax while we adjust the horizontal and vertical"..
perhaps the whole situation isn't as bad as it seems. having read the article, one would realize that the author only hypothesizes on whether or not the network is secure. brilliant could have implemented all the things that he questioned as insecure. this is not a review of their technology, but rather a blatant guess at how their technology will work.
Need for Speed isn't installed on 10 million PCs. And, unlike Kazaa (I refuse to type that #$%@ capitalization), it's probably not running more or less 24/7 on a good percentage of those boxes.
True, windowsupdate.microsoft.com is a big fat target too, but at least that was designed primarily with security in mind, and AFAIK it hasn't been hacked yet in the 4 years since it was introduced. Also, Windows Update will NOT install anything without your explicit consent. (Now, as for Windows Media... it says right in the EULA that MS reserves the right to update your codecs without your permission, at the very least...)
Early 90's, the (usenet) world was shocked by the fact that somebody abused the network to send spam.
Early 00's, the (slashdot) world is shocked by the fact that people don't care about installing spyware / trojaned software.
Be afraid, be very afraid.
bash$
I have seen TrendMicro's PC-Cillin d/l executables before.
So, while Brilliant Digital is out of line and while Weaver makes good points, the reality is that this threat has been around for a very long time.
For that matter, have you considered what might happen if someone 0wns the Akamai system?
Linux is UNIX.
You are blatantly ignoring the context of "How does it affect me". The intended context is: Does it directly compromise my system and my data? The context you address is: Does it affect remote resources that I'm accustom to having access to?
The article summary implies the former: direct compromise of a system. ("Even if you never touched KaZaA, your systems may be affected if someone manages to attack Brilliant Digital's update service.") If it's actually implying the latter remote resource issue, then it's irresposible reporting.
And, I agree with the first poster. There's no evidence to suggest that assuming control of Kazaa machines gives access to non-Kazaa machines.
Well, the guy is most certainly smarter than me. I do respect him. However, rant is rant, despite the velvet on the emperor's robe. The whole text is nothing more than a rant, and conjecture. I hope his thesis papers are not written this way. It is sad when people, with good intentions, discredit themselves in this way. People don't know what they don't know. and nobody knows anything about Brilliant's sneak-ware. For him to create a thought-experiment of what he believes to be true(or false), and rant about it, doesn't afford him any credibility. So until he actually disassembles the Kazza sneakware, there is nothing to write about. The only good part of the text is his questions to ask about Kazza. The rest is hot air.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
....too bad I can't mark this one as insightful... 'cause you're right. I hadn't really looked at it that way.
We do tend to idealize the past beyond its reality. Still... apathy harms.
Today everyone, no matter how smart, is submerged in a tide of information. The only way to survive and get anything out of it is to filter it. But how should one construct the filters???
Don't pat yourself on the back too hard, just because you understand computers. There's a lot more to this civilization than computers. And the rest is just as important.
All I've been able to do is demarcate a small area that I try to understand, and try to find other people that I trust to understand other areas for me. I don't know of a better method, even though that one is clearly flawed. Note that this is the same technique that almost all people adopt.
One of the critical flaws in the process is:
How does one choose trustworthy authorities? I sure don't have an answer. The best I can do is pick people that I don't know to be wrong for reasons that are unknown or unacceptable to me. This isn't great, but it's something. One of the good points about this system is that it distributes authority (I see centralized authority as inherently evil: consider that the central authority will have the same limitations [mentioned above] as anyone else, and the people that the central authority chooses to trust will have every motivation to give self-serving advice [as long as they aren't caught at it.])
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Instead of following HeUnique's instructions to get rid of Kazaa's spyware, try this:
;P
DON'T INSTALL IT TO BEGIN WITH.
tempest303, continuing his crusade to troll people that think fair use means never paying for media.
The Free desktop that Just Works
There's no need to take over the Brilliant servers. An attacker should be able to do it all from any suitably modified Brilliant client.
If someone writes an effective Brillant-based attack, it might contaminate most of the clients in a very short period of time. And most of them woudn't even notice, until it was too late.
Brilliant isn't exactly a tech-savvy company, either. Their previous business was producing hip-hop videos. They have 18 employees. Plus one software consultant. (Read their SEC filing.) They have no track record of producing secure systems. They make no claim that their product is secure against external takeover. And they don't have enough assets that if they screw up, they'll be able to pay for the damage.
If you have responsibility for any computers that do anything important, scan them all for this program immediately, remove it, and block it at your firewall.
It's possible that the Brilliant "projector" is so secure that it can't be used as a pathway for an attack. But without independent verification of its security, it has to be viewed as highly dangerous. All it takes is a buffer overflow and some carefully crafted "ad content" to use this as a virus distribution system.
Some of the same potential vulnerabilities apply to other peer-to-peer systems. Netnews/NNTP, for example. But Netnews is typically run on UNIX machines under its own userid, so even if an exploit in it exists, it can be contained within the Netnews world. And it's a mature system; the obvious holes were plugged long ago. Most of the other peer-to-peer systems, like Gnutella and Freenet, are pull-type systems; they only bring in content when the client asks for it in response to a user request. That slows down propagation and associates it with specific content, like an ordinary virus. But Brilliant, from their description of what they do, pushes automatically and peer to peer. That's much more dangerous.