Immunizing the Internet

jonny4001 writes "The Harvard Law Review has published a student-written article that argues that hackers, worms, and viruses are good for network security and that the law and public policy should encourage 'beneficial' hacking. From the article: 'Exploitation of security holes prompts users and vendors to close those holes, vendors to emphasize security in system development, and users to adopt improved security practices. This constant strengthening of security reduces the likelihood of a catastrophic attack -- one that would threaten national or even global security [...] Current federal law, however, does not properly value such strategic goals.'"

Comments

Finally!

[Anonymous Coward]

Totally telling the FBI slashdot said it was 'ok'.

Wow! Who knew?

[Heavyporker]

Darwin operates perfectly online! Now all we need is to set up the digital version of the Darwin Awards. Now, granted, idiot users aren't permanently removed from the gene pools, but if they ram enough computers into the dirt, they'll be dirt-poor and thus unsuitable as mates, hence they won't reproduce. Right?

Re:Wow! Who knew?

[Tatarize]

It turns out while your a child, you will turn out better if you touch everything and pick your nose and eat your buggers.

In general being exposed to a lot of germs (typically harmless) trains up your immune system. buggers catch a lot of local bacteria and allows for exposure in a safe and weakened form.

-- Just because it's correct. Doesn't make you want to do it.

The well is poisoned.

[argent]

More than a quarter of a century ago I inadvertently found a hole in a UNIX based bulletin board system, went in and fixed the code, called the operator to tell him what I'd done and how to fix the rest of the problems, and ended up with a series of contracts.

A few years later I wouldn't have considered it. People who'd not done much more had spent time in court and been threatened with jail. Not much later, you had people actually doing jail time for simply "knocking on doors".

What happened?

The whole "ethical intruder" meme had spread, and people had started cracking into systems and then claiming they were just "rattling doorknobs" to "help security". Of course you couldn't tell an "ethical hacker" from a crook, and the crooks could claim they were just trying to help.

It's the "ethical hackers" themselves that have made it impossible for this kind of activity to be condoned.

Re:The well is poisoned.

[Xugumad]

I think also, as systems stop being maintained by one person, and are covered by a group, it has become a lot less easy to simply go "Ah, they meant well, I'll just ignore it". Instead, the entire group has to come to a decision, and no-one wants to be seen as lazy at maintaining security.

I've seen a student here report a security hole (the muppet that originally developed the web app they were using tracked currently logged in user by putting their username in the CGI parameters. Change the name, and you can be whoever you want), and some members of staff still wanted to seem the kicked out (we did manage to talk some sense into them, though). Point is, if it had just gone to the person maintaining the system at the time (me), I'd have patched up the code, thanked them, and forgotten about it.

Re:The well is poisoned.

[vistic]

I'll have you know that Dr. Bunsen Honeydew is a very good coder!

Re:The well is poisoned.

[jaclu]

One problem is accountabilitty,

While I do agree with you, that a kid reporting an error and perhaps even a sugested solution, would be regarded as helpful and something of a "white-hat" on a private perspective

However one thing that has changed since the early eighties is that now there is usually quite a bit more money involved.

Now accountability is a big concern.

If that kid was into a system I admin, I must realize that even if he propably just is helpful, I still cant be sure, after all he was in there, where he shouldnt have been, who knows what he did and discover but not tell me about.

And thats what its all about, ne one side I have a complete stranger who claims that he has been in one of my systems, found a few bugs, and have a few suggestions, one the other side is that the only way to be sure of system integrity is to asume that the system is completely penetraded, and do a very expensive security checkup, to see how much damage that _could_ have occured.

If I trust the kid, and he happens to be a black-hat - poof - there goes my job

If he turns out to be a white-hat, well in that case he was nice and not much won for either me or my clients (since we have to do an expensive audit anyhow)

So I would asume he was a black-hat, cause if he wasnt, I havent lost much... Maybe synical, but thats how it works. /Jacob Lundqvist

PDF WARNING!

[Maelwryth]

The link is directly to a .pdf file. This should link to the Google html cache.

For those who won't RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure plenty won't click the link, so you are missing out on the great title that was left out of the summary:
IMMUNIZING THE INTERNET, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE WORM

Re:For those who won't RTFA

[arivanov]

Well...

Realistically this is the history repeating itself. Many times.

Prior to Edward Jenner discovering the vaccination the people tried to instill immunity to Smallpox in their children by a process known as variolation. The difference from vaccination was that people were deliberately infecting children with the real virus hoping that they have it in a milder form. Well... and if not, that was just a child, one more, one less who cares. In some more awkward and less developed parts of the world this is still done with Varicella, and less frequent Rubella, Measles and Mumps.

Society attitudes have changed since. The majority no longer consideres normal to infect children with the real viruses. Still, even now, there are idiots who insist that "having child diseases is good for the children as it improves their character" (or other such bollocks).

Similarly, infecting networks with real worms is not dissimilar to variolation. There are plenty of security tools out there nowdays which can detect the vulnerabilities that can be used by the worm and force the user to fix them. There is no real need to weed out the "weak" (yeah, I know, I am tempted myself to weed out the idiotz sometimes).

And as far as jo average user it will take some time for them to grow up, but it will end up the same as with vaccination. People were reluctant to do it initially. That is not the case now.

Does this work for offline crime?

[amelith]

So bank robbery is good for their security and should be encouraged? Everyone who moves to a new city should be immediately mugged so they can learn valuable lessons about personal security? Perhaps there should be an official quota of licensed murders so people don't get too lax about their own safety?

What is the special magic about technology that makes people give opposite answers to "Is X sensible?" and "Is X sensible using a computer?" for just about all values of X?

Ame

Re:Does this work for offline crime?

[evilviper]

So bank robbery is good for their security and should be encouraged?

This isn't the equivalent of bank robbery (nobody gets potentially harmed, and no real damage done). Rather, a far better example would be the instances of journalists repeatedly and successfully smuggling weapons through TSA security, onto commercial flights. Absolutely no real harm is done by it, and success leads to very important good things (increasing security where it is lacking).

The more they will find security holes, and make the system safer against the real threat, the truely malicious professionals. Of course, the analogy isn't perfect, but it's far closer than bank robbery and murder.

What is the special magic about technology that makes people give opposite answers to "Is X sensible?" and "Is X sensible using a computer?" for just about all values of X?

Probably because of people like you... People who can't relate the computer world to the proper real-world equivalents, and therefore have a really warped and twisted misunderstanding of the computer world.

Re:Does this work for offline crime?

[Archtech]

Every time computer security is discussed, someone immediately trots out the "burglar" analogy. I have nothing against analogies - they are very useful for getting insight into unfamiliar situations - but every analogy has its limits. In this case, a burglar is someone whose only purpose is to steal property for his own gain. Some people who hack into computers have this motivation, but many do not.

This is where the analogy breaks down catastrophically. There is no simple, familiar motivation for anyone to try getting into a house as an intellectual exercise, or even as a challenge. Either the house is wide open - in which case it would be legal to enter in some jurisdictions, while in others the householder could legitimately shoot an intruder anyway - or it is secured, in which case any attempt to gain entry is almost certainly of a criminal nature.

Computers are different, in that trying to understand and improve on software mechanisms is a universal impulse among (good) programmers. Bill Gates, and many other people who came to be famous, hacked in his youth. The sainted Richard Feynman confessed openly to having made a hobby of getting into as many locked areas and safes as he could, while working on the Manhattan Project. He had absolutely no ill intentions, although he was well aware that the military bosses would be hard to convince of that. Incidentally, he told of a valuable spin-off, when a senior official left the project and his immense safe was found to be secured. No one had the combination, and they were thinking of explosives and thermic lances until Feynman came along and casually opened it.

Please don't accuse me of trying to excuse genuine criminals - I am the last person to do that. But do realize that many people who experiment with software do so from motives of genuine curiosity and intellectual challenge, which can be very useful if properly harnessed. And let's get over the crude physical analogy of "breaking into" a computer. A computer is a machine that executes instructions. When some sets of instructions are executed, the computer can display words, numbers, and pictures meaningful to humans, and accept human input through keyboards and other devices. A computer does not have a mind of any sort, and thus cannot be deceived, pleased, annoyed, or educated. Moreover, the idea of the computer as a structure or territory that could be broken into is simply an analogy that helps us to think about it; it does not correspond to anything real.

Re:Does this work for offline crime?

[egarland]

We already have laws that make stealing illegal, there's no reason for making doing it "with a computer" special. If you break into a computer and steal money, you stole money, go to jail.

If I break into a computer and play a prank that hurts no one, why should I be facing hard jail time where if I had just broken into a building and played a prank the police would probably not even bother tracking down who did it?

Somehow people in the technology world have gotten it in their heads that people being curious and testing boundries deserves ass pounding federal prison time. This is incredibly destructive to some of the most important qualities in people: curiosity, cleverness, inventiveness all get squashed by this concept of "if we didn't intend for you to be able to do something and you do, you're a criminal".

This is highly destructive to real network security, the kind of security where even if people want to do something you didn't intend them to do, they can't. We need to go back to making tinkering with interfaces provided to you legal. The rule should be, if you don't want me to be able to tinker with the interface, don't provide it to me.

If hacking is a crime only criminals will hack.

Taquila Sunrise

[Joebert]

How I learned to stop worrying & love the worm.

Looks like I found a new Taquila drinking buddy.

Re:Taquila Sunrise

[Joebert]

I'm drinking a bottle of rotted juice, with a worm in it, & you expect me to know how to spell it ?!

Too often companies ignore problems until it's....

[Anonymous Coward]

.... too late. It doesn't even have to be a real security issue. It can be something as simple as good security practices. Here are ideas I would recommend e-mail providers, for example, to implement.

Dual passwords. A master password which can change anything in the account, and a secondary password which can change anything but the master password. The idea is that if your secondary password is stolen, you clean your machine (just incase you were infected), log in with your master password, change your secondary password, and everything is fine.

Freezing expired accounts for 10 year periods to prevent someone from grabbing it up and gaining mail-forgotten-password privledges from other sites. Got a bank account? Got online banking? Got an account which you can easily send your password to your e-mail address? Oh wait! Your e-mail address expired! Someone else registered it, went to a bunch of bank websites and such, just to see if your former e-mail address has an account there.

Re:Student from where ?

[OverlordQ]

Taking 2 seconds to view their hompages tells you this:

The Harvard Law Review is a student-run organization whose primary purpose is to publish a journal of legal scholarship. ... The organization is formally independent of the Harvard Law School.

What's with people being lazy? Or is it just an attempt at some karma whorage?

Article summary - rewritten...

[jkrise]

Hackers, worms, and viruses are good for network security ("Security Software firms such as Symantec) and that the law and public policy should encourage 'beneficial' hacking (Legislation must ensure we keep such firms running). From the article: 'Exploitation of security holes prompts users and vendors to close those holes (Makes people believe that such defects are inevitable, and can only be solved by continuous updates) , vendors to emphasize security in system development, and users to adopt improved security practices. This constant strengthening of security (reliance on vendors for updates) reduces the likelihood of a catastrophic attack -- one that would threaten national or even global security (any negative impact on suspect business practices OR bottom-lines)

Makes sense now, don't you think?

Good idea, but doesn't work out

[Opportunist]

The idea that finding a hole and reporting it leads to more security works in a "perfect" setup. Perfect in a sense that the one finding it reports it instead of abuses it, and the one informed about it fixes it instead of ignoring it.

The reality looks different.

In reality, people don't want to be bothered with this pesky thing called security. They want their machines to do the magic by themselves and not worry about it. So they created laws where it becomes illegal to even look for a security hole. Because, what you can't see isn't there.

Take you average user. Just enough smarts to turn on the PC, updating with an automatically generated and even transfered script is beyond their capabilities. When (not if, when) their computer is turned into a spamslugger, who will they blame? Themselves for not being able to keep their machines secure?

Keep on dreaming.

The laws are a reflection of the general unconsciousness. People don't want to be hacked, so it must not be done. Yes, the machines are insecure, yes, there are billions of trojans and viruses out there trying to break in (and succeeding, most of the time), but as long as we don't see them, they're not there.

La la la, I can't hear you...

Lawmakers out of touch

[pubjames]

I think this raises a fundamental issue - most of our lawmakers and enforcers are people who have not grown up with these new technologies and have little understanding of them, both from a technology point of view, but also their social context.

Most judges, seeing a bank had implented very poor physical security - so poor that a lone teenager could fairly easily get into the bank without help - would be lenient on the teenager for breaking into that bank and bank would be in lots of legal trouble for having lax security. But when the internet is involved the teenager becomes an evil hacker in the eyes of both our lawmakers and much of society, and it's off to jail for the teen and no punishment for the bank.

I really worry about the next generation. All kids do stupid stuff and talk about stupid things as they are growing up. Only now, much of that stupid talk is done via electronic communications, and much of the stupid stuff is easier to trace.

I can see in the near future (maybe it's happening already?) that when a misdemeanour with a youth occurs one of the first steps a law enforcer will take will be to get access to the youths electronic communications. Then they'll uncover all kinds of stuff that will look terrible in the eyes of a law enforcer and the parents - and be extremely embarrassing or worrying for the youth. But in reality will just be the stupid things people do and say when they are growing up. We'll have youngers going to jail and being ostracized by their parents and society just for doing and saying the stupid things that we all did when we were young.

What is the special magic about technology

[Animaether]

Imagine if this was the so-manieth discussion about music or video copyright infringement. Now ask again: "What is the special magic about technology". I think you'll find your answer.

I don't agree with it, for what it's worth, in either case.

Re:Why Shouldn't it :-P

[Anonymous Coward]

"the banks pass on the loss to their insurers"

Yeah, because we all know that insurers are not part of the system at all; unlike the rest of us, they have access to magic money-making machines powered by pixie dust.

Re:Why Shouldn't it :-P

[badfish99]

No, it's trickle-down economics in action. The banks recover the cost from their customers, who are mostly rich businessmen. So some of the wealth of those rich people ends up having trickled down to the poor robbers. Isn't that how things are supposed to work?

The rich people were probably just going to donate their spare wealth to charity to help the poor: robbery saves them the trouble of having to do that, too. It's a win-win situation!

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing...

[trims]

The paper (or article, or whatever) is actually quite well-nuanced and fairly even-handed. However, it suffers from a fatal flaw of many legal articles: a fundamental ignorance of the subject matter itself.

It's a paper written by (wannabe) lawyers, who, while they site large rafts of supposedly corroberating papers and "experts", don't understand what they (the exports and sited papers) are talking about.

This kind of approach is eminently practical (and effective) when attempting to try a case, or negotiate a settlement. However, it is absolutely the wrong way to do things when attempting to write a Public Policy piece. If one is attempting to educate the populance (or some subsection of it) about an issue, you have to actually understand the subject, not just quote others' ideas.

They are correct in the supposition that cybercrime has a different nature than that of "real world" crime. But they completely misunderstand how this difference affects people.

A classic example of not really understanding the subject matter occurs when they claim that a compromised system actually causes very little economic damage, as the system itself is not physically damaged, and the effort to repair it is theoretically comparable to a periodic security audit/update of the machine. What they perceive is a JoyRide in a "stolen" car - someone took my car out for a whirl, and if they've returned it in good shape, all I (the owner) have to do is sweep out a few of the crumbs (and maybe fix the door lock) before it is ready to go again. This isn't the true case. Rather, it is closer to the case that I, the owner, would have to completely dissassemble the entire car, and put it back together again from its component parts, just to make sure that the kids didn't screw something up (or wire a bomb to the ignition). There is a HUGE economic cost to cleaning up after even a minor intrusion. Because, frankly, there is no way to determine if something was a minor or a major intrusion, until a complete postmortem is done. And the risk associated with keeping a compromised system working is far too great to NOT do the full rebuild. In many ways, the risk analysis looks a lot like empidemiology: when a herd of cows is found to contain one case of Mad Cow, we kill the entire herd and check them all, rather than just kill the sick cow, and say "oh, we found the problem, and it is fixed now".

The real solution is not to allow "ethical hackers", but rather to provide economic incentives for companies to protect their data. If this were the case, then companies would take security seriously, and there would be a whole thriving sector of legal security probing companies (which exists in a very tiny manner today). If companies were held to multimillion dollar fines every time private data was compromised, you could be damned well sure that security would rank somewhere above "oh, and empty the trash before you leave tonight", which is where it currently resides. And security checks would be done by true professionals, complete with after-incident reports and improvement suggestions.

-Erik

Honest, officer, I was just checking the doors

[davmoo]

So to use this same idea, y'all have no problem if I discover your back door to your house is unlocked and I come in just to look around and make sure there are no other 'security issues', right? I promise I won't steal or damage anything, I just want to look around...

Sorry, it don't work that way, and just because computers are computers doesn't make it any different. If you want to come in to my computer and inspect, I expect you to ask, just like I would for my house.

When Microsoft is caught sniffing around anyone's computer without permission, even if they don't damage or alter anything, everyone here wants Bill Gates' head on a pike for public display and criminal charges against Microsoft. But if its a white-hat hacker, that's okay, and we should have the law allow them in. Funny how that works.

Parallels in Biological Systems

[D.A. Zollinger]

From another perspective, the author's ideas have some merit. In biological systems, it is only after one has been infected and their immune system fights off a disease that they are impervious to repeat infections. In this way entire societies build up resistances to deadly diseases. For example, Jared Diamond believes 95% of Native Americans were killed off by diseases carried by European settlers who were largely immune to said diseases. (link)

In a way, as different portions of the computer systems and software are attacked, the flaws that allow for such attacks are, in general, corrected. Problems identified in one attack can be applied to other areas, and as such, can affect system-wide changes toward a better system (think buffer overruns), as well as more security-minded design (think security developments in IE7 and Vista).

I'm not advocating that the world governments should let virus writers and crackers have free reign of the Internet. A balanced response would allow for leniency for those who have no malice in their intentions. Of course, this is difficult to prove, and from personal experience, I have yet to meet a virus writer with purely altruistic intentions. Also there are corporate interests to deal with as well. How embarrassing must it have been for Symantic to have their flagship product meant to help secure a computer be the source of insecurity? While Symantic handled the situation extremely well, many other companies do not have a large security minded staff on hand to deal with security problems. For them it is easier to accuse the attacker than acknowledge a problem they cannot deal with.

Re:Full disclosure is a necessary evil

[Anonymous Coward]

... but going in jail is may be a worse option.

It is true that bad hackers will pretend to be ethical hackers but by putting everone in jail you end up creating a less secure world. Only the bad hackers will find the security hole and they won't tell anyone.

Full discolure is the only solution and it is not popular: companies get bad press for having security holes, they might loose some business and thus try to shoot the messenger ... with success so far.

However, full discolure is a necessary evil it we want to have a safer online life.

Certified Ethical Hacker

[Flying pig]

There is a possible way...

Introduce a properly run certification scheme for "Certified ethical hacker". Base it on a course taking in relevant law, security techniques etc., and make damn sure it is vendor-agnostic. Only make the course available to persons who have no criminal convictions, are on the voter's list, member of a professional body, and pass FBI checks or your national alternative. It will be free to qualified applicants.

Now issue those people with a set of official paper forms, with proper security marking and tied to the individual. When they encounter a security issue, they issue a paper based advisory (because it is still traceable, and because you do not then leave a trail on the net that might enable the black hats to find and target you.) copy to some official body who every year will report the statistics, and list the companies that failed to respond to security advisories.

So now you have it on your resume when you write in for the bank job: Certified Ethical Hacker, 42 confirmed alerts (or whatever).

Before anybody tells me this is simply fantasy, consider that there are already volunteer public security forces. In the UK we have Special Constables and the Territorial Army, and there are equivalents in many other countries. We have a Health and Safety Executive who can walk into any company at any time it is operating and demand immediately to observe what is going on. So why not a properly trained volunteer Internet security force?