A Cheap, Distributed Zero-Day Defense?

coondoggie writes "Shutting down zero-day computer attacks could be carried out inexpensively by peer-to-peer software that shares information about anomalous behavior, say researchers at the University of California at Davis.The software would interact with existing personal firewalls and intrusion detection systems to gather data about anomalous behavior, says Senthil Cheetancheri, the lead researcher on the project he undertook as a grad student at UC Davis from 2004 to 2007. He now works for SonicWall."

Comments

Wow...

[roc97007]

If you could break into that process, you could rule the world.

Cheap Defense?

[drewzhrodague]

Six Inches of Air?

Not so fast...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

On the face of it, it sounds like he's proposing a "trusted" infection vector. A way to distributed code intended to patch holes to systems that want it. The obvious problem with such a system is the consequences of it being compromised. Then it becomes a way to distribute malicious code much more effectively than the way bot-nets infect new hosts now.

Re:Not so fast...

[girlintraining]

On the face of it, it sounds like he's proposing a "trusted" infection vector. A way to distributed code intended to patch holes to systems that want it. The obvious problem with such a system is the consequences of it being compromised. Then it becomes a way to distribute malicious code much more effectively than the way bot-nets infect new hosts now.

You forget that the system is also leaking information about the traffic it is sending/receiving at the same time, and possibly internal state information (such as what applications are loaded, plugins, etc). That data in and of itself is valuable to an attacker, nevermind whether the vector can be protected or not... It opens up the possibility of discovering new vectors in ways maybe not possible remotely.

Sooo...

[gblackwo]

What is the zero-day defense protocol for the zero-day defense software?

What to tell your boss

[MrEricSir]

"I'm not pirating movies... I'm protecting the network!"

Flimsy

[sean_nestor]

I can't think of any way this could fail gracefully. If this system was compromised, it'd be a powerful way to disrupt network traffic and take down important systems that happen to run it.

"It depends on the number of events and the number of computers polled, but if there is a sufficient number of such samples, you can say with some degree of certainty that it is a worm,â Cheetancheri says. For that decision, the software uses a well-established statistical technique called sequential hypothesis testing, he says"

I'm also skeptical that you could rely on a vast network of machines that have presumably fallen prey to an attack to share information between each other fast enough to correctly diagnose an attack with the kind of results the researcher seems hopeful of.

Given that no method for correctly identifying "malicious" code 100% of the time currently exists, I don't think it's wise to allow a software program to run with the decision of shutting a machine down on notice of a perceived threat.

The concept seems like an interesting idea, but I doubt It could be terribly effective in practice.

Will never happen.

[girlintraining]

Detecting anomalies requires a baseline of what "normal" is. That means surrendering information about the type and nature of traffic being received by your computer (and possibly sent as well). It's a privacy problem that not many people will commit to. And businesses will be even more reluctant to surrender such information. That said, an aggregate of several hundred thousand firewall logs would be an asset to many organizations and individuals. For this reason, it will never be free... The moment someone realizes there is a monentary value in what they're doing, they will attempt to capitalize on it. So, effectually, what this project is asking you to do is give them your private, personal data, so they can turn a buck under the pretense of fighting those big bad evil hackers. Isn't the market already pretty crowded with the fear-mongers, anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-anti-anti businesses?

Also, this is not a defensive product. A defense requires the ability to resist or avoid an attack. Nothing about this scheme suggests it would provide that to the end-user. It is more of a "zero day surveillance" system than anything. It's a digital cow bell. Moo, ding ding, moo. The only problem is the cow moves at the speed of light and can replicate a few thousand times a second (conservatively). Don't ask about the milk. x_x

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Could work on large corporate-type networks

[sweatyboatman]

The summary is misleading in that this isn't proposed as a defense. This is an early-warning system for detecting compromised machines on a network.

This isn't going to run on every computer in the world. Think of a corporate network with thousands of machines with fairly homogeneous usage. This could alert the sysadmin to a worm infection when the number of machines is numbered in the tens.

And since all it's doing is monitoring it shouldn't present a security risk (if well designed) greater than any P2P client.

This already exists

[charlesnw]

It's called dshield: http://isc.sans.org/howto.html

A Cheap, Distributed Zero-Day Defense?

[Thaelon]

A Cheap, Distributed Zero-Day Defense?

User education.

My first thought too

[A nonymous Coward]

Who watches the watchers?

Any system like this would be a premium cracker target. All it would take is one false positive or false negative before no one would trust it again.

Six months later, some other researcher would make a new proposal for a p2p system to guard the broken p2p system.