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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.
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.
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$
An Assyrian tablet from ~2000BC was found with words to that effect (e.g. kids aren't worshipping our pagan gods as much as they used to, the air is getting rotten, etc). The same thing has been said and re-said millions of times since. But it's just not true.
People aren't really getting more ignorant: we're more educated than at anytime in the past. If you think it's bad now, imagine how it was last century. Do you think those textile workers were curious to know how the sewing machines really worked? No, we should try to fight our innate tendency to think everything is getting worse, because in fact by most measures the state of humanity is getting better and better.
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.