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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.
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.
Maybe we could "attack" everyone with outlook express/IE patches, so we finally stop recieving all those self forwarding worms in our e-mail.
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.
From the article the other day on root DNS servers.
Story
For the "internet" to be greatly affected multiple root servers must be brought down.
"The DNS is built so that eight or more of the world's 13 master root servers would have to fail before ordinary Internet users started to see slowdowns, according to John Crain, manager of technical operations for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)."
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
I think I understand their plan now:
1. Plant studip spamware on a gazillion computers worldwide
2. Head for a small island state somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and start blackmailing governments the world over by claiming to "0wn j00r 1nt4rw3b!". A gazillion children addicted to warez, pr0n and AIM complain to their respective parents, who demand action from their governments. Governments pay up.
3. Profit!
Then again, governments do have armies with guns and ships and stuff so things might get messy in the process. *shrug*
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.
With the ability to remotely control a user's computer built into Windows XP in order to provide "tech support", isn't a good portion of the world already vulnerable to a well-written worm? See "Remote Assistance" at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/evaluation / eatures.asp.
libertarianswag.com
You know, EULA or not... what Kazaa did is slimy. VERY slimy. They decieved people into installing something and giving up something they know people will not realize they are giving up. It is deception, whether it fits the legal definition or not.
I'm realistic... most people do not know or care of the difference, but they should.
So my question is...
What can we realistically do in order to force a bit more honesty in software providers?
True, (and belive me this is hard for me to say this next sentence...) I put more trust in Microsofts updater than Brilliants ... ick I cant belive I just said that :)
As such, all three proposed usages: Secure and secret storage, secure and secret computation, and secure content delivery, are all inherently flawed.
This is all to true. Therefore, given Brilliant digital's wicked corporate pedigree, we conclude that they must have a secret, sinister master plan that they're not telling us about.
They've been clever enough to use evil plans as a smokescreen - the plans they've described are just wicked enough that you might believe that they really are brilliant digital's brilliant evil plan. This means that the real evil plan must be extra... brilliant.
Basically, we can divide the possible real evil plans into three categories:
1) Defense related. They're going to hack into NORAD, and hold the world hostage from skull island. The fact that this is physically impossible (because NORAD isn't connected to the public 'net, and so on) never stops Dr. Evil, so it shouldn't be a hindrance for Brilliant Digital.
2) Biblical. Enumerate the billion secret names of god, conjure forth their lord and master, Satan himself. You all saw Warlock, right? Like that.
3) Astrononomical. I know that if I had the computing power of fiteen million consumer level CPU's at my disposal, I'd use it to pull the moon into the earth. 'nuff said.
Either way, we're talking countdown to doomsday, here, and only one man can stop them. I hope Brilliant Digital CEO Kevin Bermeister's mistress is played by Zhang Ziyi; she is so hot.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
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$
Since installing Ximian is "conveniently" performed by running "lynx -source http://go-gnome.org | sh" (as root, of course), what happens when someone registers go-gnom.org or similar typos? (Credit to my brother for thinking of that one.)
Now I did issue the above command, but ensured that the DNS records were compliant and my local DNS server reported the same distant end IP as the authoritative one for the domain, but I doubt many folks do the same.
Also, when installing packages via RedCarpet (again, has to be done as root), what are the cryptographic signatures checked against? (Note: I haven't even researched this. Just typing off the top of my head...) I would hope that the proper response from GPG is hard-coded in the red-carpet binary...
Basically, I think that a lot of new update technologies are vulnerable to this - from windowsupdate.microsoft.com as mentioned in the article to more trusted (by this community, anyway) sites. Semi-automatic updating is great, but it still takes people at the keyboard to think before they do something. Not likely to see a widespread change in that mentality for some time to come.
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.
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.