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Johnny Cache Breaks Silence On Wi-Fi Exploit
Joe Barr writes, "Johnny Cache — aka Jon Ellch — is chafing under the cone of silence placed over him and co-presenter Dave Maynor about the Wi-Fi exploit they presented at Black Hat and DEFCON last month. So he has finally broken his silence on NewsForge in hopes of ending the personal attacks coming from what he implies is a smear campaign started by Apple." (Newsforge and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.)
Johhny Cache writes, "If you're going to post a news story that is a rehash of my post to a mailing list, I would much prefer it if people actaully just read the post in its entirety."
Johhny Cache writes, "If you're going to post a news story that is a rehash of my post to a mailing list, I would much prefer it if people actaully just read the post in its entirety."
The classic defense of the madman or the liar: "What I say is true, but terrible, unspeakable things would happen were I to prove my assertion. You'll just have to take my inability to prove my assertion as evidence of its validity."
What a schmuck.
Tags != Comments, and -1 (Troll) != -1 (I Would Respond Angrily To This Poster So They Must Be Trolling)
Maybe he doesn't want one, seeing as how they're so easy to exploit. . .
At BlackHat Johnny Cache claimed this alleged exploit is not platform-specific, he only picked a Macbook for the demo to piss off Apple fanboys. If that's so, and the exploit really works, why not demonstrate rooting Linux or Windows or if you really want to stir up security trolls on slashdot, NetBSD?
Is the exploit real? Who knows, I've seen video of someone cracking a Mac through a wireless driver. Then again I've also seen video of a virus written on a Mac taking down a fleet of invading alien spaceships...
0 1 - just my two bits
So, if I put on my blog that I challenge George Bush to provide some proof of [pick anything that's ever come out of his mouth], at a mall of his choosing, and I'll give him a free laptop if he does it, and he never shows up, that proves ... what exactly?
I'm sure John Gruber's blog is extremely important to John Gruber, but if some guys who are clearly dealing with a mountain of legal issues right now choose not to meet him at the mall, you can't take that as evidence of anything -- except that Gruber's pretty clever at diverting attention to himself.
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
"- how can a driver have the same bug on windows and macos x?"
Quite simply; the Intel card is, in both cases, doing things like UDP and TCP offload from the main system. This means the card and driver together have an internal state in software to manage it, and (due to the asynchronus nature of networking) you can get the hardware and driver software's core into a situation where they don't agree on the state.
The small glue layer that deals with the OS hooks is a static translation layer that wouldn't be involved. The SB Live! and Audigy drivers in Linux are the same driver as the Windows Creative driver (well, they were about 6 years ago when they contributed the code). nVidia uses the same driver code on all platforms as well. For anyone who's written a driver, this is easy to understand.
"- why use this stupid external card? what are the chances it did have the same chipset as the internal one?"
He uses it because it's a timing race, and because it's easier to demonstrate with 2 cards in the system. With a 4000 microsecond delay, this means it's likely taking a bit longer for the OS to service the interrupts between the two cards; enough that the driver bug can show itself. There are likely other ways to tickle this bug that don't require multiple cards, but then you'd have to have something running on the OS. Still, If you setup a machine to throw packets around, you could make an intermittent crash bug appear on an OS -- that's not cool.
"- and odds are the bug is a buffer overrun... does it take a SO LONG for apple to fix a stupid memory overrun?"
A stupid memory overrun? Man, you haven't programmed ever, have you? A timing related bug in device driver code is probably the second hardest bug you'll ever encounter to debug (the first would be the core of the OS itself). Concurrent programming is difficult.
It's responses like these that show why this person had been light on detail. Most people lack the technical background in OS design to understand this issue.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
If I had mod points, I would mod you down. Not only do you demonstrate a complete disdain for whoever you think is "inferior," you show a complete lack of understanding for the issues in the middle east.
There is no "inferiority complex" in the middle east. They aren't emo kids running around threatening to slit their wrists. It just so happens that their standards of living are ridiculously low compared to the standards of living of "the west," not directly due to us, but partially. If you grew up there, you'd be looking for someone to blame, and their government provides "the great satan" as a convenient scapegoat. Further proving their point, "the great satan's puppet in the region," (aka israel) has just rampaged through lebanon, destroying civilian targets like bridges, hospitals, and airports, further degrading their quality of life. it's lack of understanding of the kind that you have just demonstrated that has brought us into the current situation in iraq and afghanistan, as well as the US unspoken nod to israel to rampage across the middle east.
this in no way relevant to the situations of mac users, who just happen to have a different OS preference. your above statement would be like saying that whenever an african american person acts stereotypically black (whatever you might define that as) they are acting out of a feeling of self-inferiority.
think about it.