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Student Attempting To Improve School Security Suspended
TA_TA_BOX writes "The University of Portland has handed a one-year suspension to an engineering major after he designed a program to bypass the Cisco Clean Access (CCA). According to the University of Portland's Vice President of Information Systems, the purpose of the CCA is to evaluate whether the computers are compliant with current security policies (i.e., anti-virus software, Windows Updates and Patches, etc.). Essentially the student wrote a program that could fool the CCA to think that the computers operating system and anti-virus were fully patched and up to date. 'In the design of his computer program, Maass looked at the functions CCA provides and identified vulnerabilities where it could be bypassed. He wrote a program that emulated the same functions as CCA and eliminated some security issues. He says that the method he chose is "one of six that I came up with." Maass says his intent was not malicious. Rather, the sophomore says he was examining vulnerabilities so that they could be fixed. "I was planning on going to Cisco with the vulnerability this summer," Maass says. '"
It seems obvious that the suspension is a favor done by the university. A person of this caliber could do better in the workforce or a better university instead of TEACHING the university...
Anyone in the software biz should know: don't do security research (look for vulnerabilities) in commercial software or commercial websites if you want to be in the US. If you find a vulnerability, like a website that lets you launch missiles by putting &loggedIn=true in the URL, the best thing to do is to laugh to yourself about it, and forget it. Failing that, use some secure anonymous service and post the vulnerability somewhere. Doing the responsible thing, like informing the vendor, is absolutely thankless and likely to result in nothing but problems. Be smart, don't be a hero. Don't try to improve the security of others.
TFA isn't really clear on what sort of "break-in" this was. It looks like it was, at most, a proof of concept break-in, and may have been as little as figuring out how to break the system without actually doing it.
In any case, he didn't go around giving out exploit code, and he even worked on the problem of patching the hole (as well as solving other problems with the CCA software), with the intent of full diclosure of the patch and upgrades. This isn't really a punishment for breaking things, it's a DMCA-style punishment for figuring out how someone might break things.
(IANAL)
He should have brought this to the IT department's attention. People writing software to bypass security and installing it without permission on someone's network should have their fingers glued together so they can't type anymore. This guy deserves to have an example made out of him.
This just doesnt bother me at all.
I bet he's reconsidering helping them now.
Steve Jobs openly admits to phone phreaking and calling the Pope. Both he and Bill Gates eventually dropped out of school. It's clear that, to become a person of substance, you have to be willing to challenge authority once in a while. Are we trying to raise a generation of corporate drones who are so obedient they can never pose a competitive threat to existing oligarchy. Are we so insane we let disturbed students stay in school and own guns, but suspend ones who are merely using university's property, paid for by their tuition, more efficiently than average?
He should have talked to the campus IT guys about this "research" before conducting it on live campus systems. I worked in campus IT at Stanford and my experience is that they might be open to seeing what you're working on and allowing it.
/. conveniently left off the next paragraph:
The article summary posted here on
Maass' program was in use for approximately seven months before the University froze his UP account.
So he ran this thing for most of the school year and gave it away to his friends and put up a facebook page about it without telling Cisco? At some point it starts to look like the, "I was about to tell Cisco!" claim is just an excuse to get out of trouble. Once he had a working demonstration he should have approached Cisco, not distributed it while he put off talking to the vendor for half a year.
Still, it seems like the uni is going overboard on the punishment.
Lasers Controlled Games!
If you stop thinking of school (all school, from kindergarten through college) as "where you went when you wanted to learn about things, test things, build new things, and in general broaden your horizons and expand what you are capable of doing" and instead start thinking about it as a way to keep people busy and out of the work force for awhile, then the whole thing starts to make alot more sense.
Imagine what the job market and the economy would look like if everyone in our overpopulated civilization who could work, had one.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
If I did something like that and got caught I would say I was planning to come clean as well.
Clearly you haven't learned from the movie "Catch Me If You Can".
These people can outsmart you every minute of the day if you give them reason to. Why not just employ them and get on their side?
Oh right, this isn't about security, this is another stupid power struggle.
Regardless of the student's ethics (or lack thereof), this illustrates a fallacy of trust in computing that often goes overlooked, especially in software security products: transitive (implicit) trust.
... If the administrator (of the University, some enterprise, or even a home network) cannot state anything about the trustworthiness of an unfamiliar computer, how can that same administrator trust the output of some software program designed to assert the trustworthiness of an otherwise untrusted computer?
Think about it logically for a second
Trusted input (e.g. Cisco Clean Access)
+ Untrusted computation (unknown host)
!= Trusted output (i.e. an assertion from the CCA that the computer is trustworthy)
The nature of this equation is that the untrusted computer is implicitly trusted to compute its own trustworthiness. What ramifications does that have on the real world analogies?
Banker: Can I trust that you'll repay this loan for $1 Billion?
Some joe off the street: [Hides "will work for food" cardboard sign behind his back.] Uh, sure.
And yet, how many NAC/NAP vendors actually try to challenge the unknown host (java applet, activeX control, native code, etc.)? Answer is: nearly all of them, unfortunately. Even if Cisco fixes this hole, what will happen next? This is not unlike Cisco trying to sell a perpetual motion machine-- this simply defies the "natural laws" of security.
--
NAC is not the answer. How about those good ol' 3270 connections?
Would you care to quote the policy you claim he broke?
No, it sounds like he embarassed the University IT administration, so they closed ranks and used a kangaroo court to express their displeasure. Dean Wormer put him on double secret probation first, I'm sure.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
OK this story is sensationalist BS. Maybe the summary should have stated that he USED IT FOR SEVEN MONTHS and GAVE IT OUT TO FRIENDS!? Come on, only when he gets caught does he say he was going to share his results. Yeah, that's like embezzling and then saying you were going to give all the money back when you get caught.
OTOH, if he were smart enough to break this thing and he were malicious, he would have instead sold it to some Russian hacking group to put into new viruses. He didn't. He didn't crack anybody else's machines with it. He didn't run it on university equipment. He didn't do any of the thousands of truly malicious things he could have done. Based on that, I see no reason to believe that the guy didn't intend to tell Cisco about it... but probably not until after he graduated so that he wouldn't have to deal with a bug-fixed version of the software that disabled his workaround....
Instead of using the software maliciously (which would have been relatively easy by comparison), the guy just ran it on his own personal machines and gave it to other people to willingly run on their own personal machines so that they could use the network without the interference of an overbearing piece of security software. All the guy did was write software that made it look like he was running the stupid tool that the uni required him to run in order to use the network without actually having to run it. That's hardly malicious behavior, and if the guy was running reasonable antivirus protection software and was keeping up-to-date with security patches without the "assistance" of the tool in question, it really didn't create any significant security risk, either.
No, this is a typical knee-jerk reaction by bureaucrats. I would expect nothing better from most universities, but it's still a shame every time someone's life is needlessly wrecked because of a bunch of pencil pushers.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I was talking about colleges and universities, lower schools a somewhat different matter. Second of all the problem 95% of the time isn't schools (almost all, even "magnet", middle and high schools are rigid) or the nature of the student but parenting (or rather lack thereof). Now I'm not blaming the parents per say but simply saying that there are tons of options to get out of the hell hole of a system if you are determined enough.
Likewise children should be taught to do the damn work, contrary to what you may believe in real life you all too often need to do bitch work and you can't cry or throw a tantrum or get bored. I remember fondly how in 6th grade after realizing that every math assignment was from the book I simply took a few days and did all the assignments till the end of the year. Doing them all at once on my own was mildly interesting and gave me 2+ months of no math homework. A few friends even got into it and we had a sort of implied competition on who could finish the problems the fastest.