Slashdot Mirror
Rutkowska Faces 'Blue Pill' Rootkit Challenge
Controll3r writes "Three high-profile security researchers — Thomas Ptacek of Matasano Security, Nate Lawson of Root Labs and Symantec's Peter Ferrie — have issued a challenge to Joanna Rutkowska to prove that her 'Blue Pill' technology can create "100 percent undetectable" malware. The Black Hat 2007 challenge will feature two untouched laptops of the make/model of Rutkowska's choosing for her to plant Blue Pill on one. From the article: 'She picks one in secret, installs her kit, sets them up however she wants,' Lawson explained in an interview. 'We get to install our software on both and run it, [and] we point out which machine [Blue Pill] is on. If we're wrong, she keeps the laptop.' No word on whether Rutkowska will accept the challenge."
She should say she installed it when in actual fact she didn't...
Then snigger while these guys spend hours scratching their huge domed craniums wondering how she did it.
Another obvious thing I would request is that different services software be installed (and running) on the laptops. Like maybe put MySql on one running as a service and PostGres on the other. That way they can't do something as ridiculously simple like a memory or CPU profiler to find out which one is using up (all beit small) more CPU resources & memory. That seems to be the strategy of the challenging team: Matasano's Ptacek, who has spent a lot of time studying Rutkowska's work, said the challenge team will compare the behavior of the system to known norms to find the presence of Blue Pill. But how many times do you approach a computer that's infected & have all the behaviors of that machine mapped out? I think the real world answer to that is never. So perhaps the name of the "100% undetectable rootkit" will have to be "100% undetectable in the wild rootkit" since most of us have software on our machines (hell, even World of Warcraft did this) and not even us (the people who installed it) can adequately predict what its going to do. I guess one could always make a rootkit that (given the priviledges) targets a host process deep within a host tree and inserts itself into it. You CPU scheduler would simply be running a thread of a trusted set of processes but unless you had a behavior/benchmark for each process of that tree, you'd be hard pressed to figure out it is host to a virus. That said, I think it's entirely possible to create a nearly 100% undetectable rootkit as long as there are unknown & unprofiled processes running on that machine at the time. Just one more reason to only use open source, I guess!
My work here is dung.
"You guessed wrong."
"You only think we guessed wrong. That's what's so funny! We switched laptops when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against three high-profile security researchers when a laptop is on the line! Ahahahahaha! Ahahahaha! Ahaha-"
"And to think, all that time it was your laptop that had malware."
"They both had malware. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to blue pills."
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Helu. I'm Thomas Ptacek, one of the four challenge team members --- Slashdot left out Dino Dai Zovi, who kicked this off by writing a virtualized rootkit at Matasano last year.
Joanna has responded to our challenge. We invited her to stipulate any terms she deemed reasonable. She proferred:
You can probably predict our response.
Here's where it stands: all parties agree that by Black Hat '07, Blue Pill will not be in a state where it is hard to detect. Our detection techniques are likely to detect Blue Pill at Black Hat. Blue Pill requires six months of engineering time to get to a state where Joanna is confident that we can't detect it.
Here's why you care: a few weeks ago, Microsoft decided that Vista Home would not allow virtualization, in part because of the threat of virtualized malware. To the best of our knowledge, there have been two (2) real hypervisor rootkits ever produced: Joanna's Blue Pill, and Matasano's Vitriol. Neither has ever been seen in the wild, because neither has been released to the public. Meanwhile, our team is preparing to demonstrate at Black Hat this year that hypervisor malware is actually even easier to detect than the kernel malware operating systems like Vista are already exposed to.
Joanna's Blue Pill work, along with all the rest of her work (check out this project, where she turns AMD security hardware against forensics devices), is top-notch. In a weird, secretive space like security, this is how science gets done. Joanna chooses a side: it's possible to make undetectable malware. We square off on the opposite side. Then we debate it using code, presentations, papers, and I guess Slashdot stories. Hopefully, in the end, we all learn something.
Hope this stays interesting for everyone. Thanks for paying attention!
Just weigh the machines. The heavier one would have to have the extra files and stuff.
Rutkowska should also think about the reward: "If we're wrong, she keeps the laptop." Who the hell wants a laptop infected with undetectable malware?
Make sure it is girls though. If you give it to a pair of teenage boys by the end it'll be full of porn and chat logs filled with "FAG!" comments.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning