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Packet Juggling - Floating Data Storage
Filthmaster writes "I just saw an interesting paper that has been posted to bugtraq, full-disclosure and vulnwatch. It deals with the principles of stealthily using network infrastructure as either short-term or long-term storage. Not sure if I'm ready to implement it, but it makes interesting food for thought." There's also a mirror up.
If it were quick enough and timed well enough, could network bounced packets be enough for some really quick swapped out swap space? gig ethernet gets around 1ms to my next machine, and thats 10 times quicker than my hard drive (10ms access time) so if I could store swap in that space, would that work?
I was thinking of tunneling ssh over sms before this, but that sounds just silly now.
... in which complete computer memories worked like this: those were called mercury delay line memories, in which pressure waves in mercury lines basically held information.
The UNIVAC I had such an 18-channel memory. More information can be found here, here, and here.
These channels could hold a whopping kilobit!
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Think we could get them to sue themselves for illegally storing and distributing copyrighted material? Or would my mp3s now be legit (afterall the RIAA sent them to me)?
There's never anything new...in electronics lab in college in the 60's I built a delay line memory, which was nothing more than a very large coil of wire and some rather simple circuity that would shove bit's into one end and 'catch' them out the other side and recirculate them. You used timing to specify the addresss and could read or update as the bit came by. Another variation that was commercially used on this used a column of mercury and cycling sound waves...see http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/mak-UNIVAC-I-delay- line.doc
When I was in college back in the Good Old Days (tm) of the Internet, I had a friend who sometimes stored files "in transit", so to speak, by emailing them to himself with explicit routing in the To address. He would send the message on a long circuit of several machines around the country and he had a script to automatically reforward them once they got back if he didn't save them within a certain period of time. Back in the day you could do this by setting the To address to something like "@hostone.com,@hosttwo.com,me@myhost.com" (see RFC 821 sec 3.6) and since the network and the machines on it were much slower in those days, if you added enough hosts then you could introduce a significant delay and have lots of files stored in transit (actually, on the various mail servers) even though your own disk quota was nearly used.
Explicit routing is long gone, but it is an interesting early manifestation of the same principle: the network is my hard drive.
I remember that when I was at the University, I explained to someone that with satellites at 37000 km from us, information took a quarter of a second to go there and back to earth. So if you use a 500 Mbps link, you can store 15 MBytes of data in the distance between, on an absolutely zero cost medium, during 0.25 second. And if you were confident enough in the reliability, you could even put a bouncer on earth, which goal would only be to resend the stream to the satellite and keep it looping. You would have 15 Mbytes of free storage with an average access time of 125ms (250ms max). Although absolutely useless, that would be as fun as TCP/IP over pigeon routing :-)
Willy
I will never put a sig.
...but I just love bringing up the fact that I'd thought up something similar, like, 4 years ago now, and every time my memory's jogged about it here on Slashdot, I like to post about it. Instead of hijacking existing services, however, I did create a new one, where a basically packets were flung from one machine to another (or many) around and around again -- each machine held on to a number of packets, but didn't keep them for too long. All traffic was encrypted, and no machine knew 1) where a packet started and 2) where a packet ended up, it just kept flinging packets around.
The main goal of the service was to create a nice, neat, encrypted, secure messaging system where neither the origin or destination of a particular message could be detected, such that even if a message was intercepted and decoded, you still didn't know where it came from or where it was going. (This was envisioned about 2 days after the early reports of Carnivore.)
One of the nice side effects, however, is that you could use the service to basically store a message "on-the-wire" damn near indefinately, broken apart into tiny packets, distributed more or less randomly to every other participating host, with those hosts having absolutely no clue what it was, who put it there, or who's going to retrieve it.
The bandwidth usage was, in two words, potentially catastrophic. It could really hork a network. I mean, really, REALLY hork a network.
It was kinda cool. God only knows where that paper is today, though -- I removed it from the web about 2 years back when the Justice Department was considering considering such papers, ideas, services, devices as potential aids to terrorism, and fining/imprisoning the bright young minds who come up with such stuff. So, until either our government stops playing the "T" card, our citizens calm down, and/or we eradicate the likes of Hammas, Islamic Jihad, the IRA, the ELF, and many other like groups, I doubt I'll ever make it available again. *shrug*
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.