in reply to (tye)Re: Immoral?
in thread Morality of posting Perl "virus" code?

        I do find releasing malware seeds to the world to be exactly that.

    I don't know. To me, that seems akin to the old mantra "security through obscurity." That is, the "don't-talk-about-it-so-people-won't-think-about-it" kind of mentality always seems to backfire. I, for one, am intrigued by this post; but certainly not in a malicious sense. I am interested because in order to solve problems (if we would want to classify this as such), you must identify the problem and provide proof of concept, which is what tachyon did.
    To me, the real discussion should now become "how providing solutions to this problem". We should discuss making sure non-privileged users (or lowest neccesary priveleged users) are running Perl scripts. We should talk about verifying code found "in the wild" before running it, etc. Then, after coming up with a way to prevent this sorta thing from happening, we can return to the original problem and see if we can get around the solution we came up with.
    Do you disagree with BugTraq? They often talk about and provide proofs of concept for code and techniques that could easily be maliciously employed.
    In the end, to me, this could be turned into a very valuable discussion. Granted, the code could be modified in such a way to only provide proof of concept rather than executing that concept at all. But, I find nothing wrong with it.

Jeremy

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(tye)Re3: Immoral?
by tye (Sage) on Jun 27, 2001 at 20:18 UTC

    When I've seen malwarish code distributed by security resources, it has always been at least one of these:

    • Already in the wild
    • Solutions to thwart it are already available
    • The code has been very carefully modified to introduce several subtle bugs
    • It is intentionally very vague, intentionally leaving out some key ideas required to make it work
    • It is a reaction to some other organization not dealing with a security issue in a manner that was considered acceptable by the distributor of the malware
    And this last item I find close to the concept that "cracking is good because it gets people to increase their security". Although I think that you can do some very careful cracking to bring home a point about a lack of security, I find it immoral to do damage while doing that. And handing out tools that can be used by others who probably don't agree with me on that is not a good idea in my book.

    I never said "don't talk about it". I don't find the working code very interesting. The concept is simple enough that I don't think the working code adds much to it. To stop such a virus you need to prevent/detect modifications to files. The details about how the modifications are done are mostly irrelevant and concentrating too much on them gets you a solution that isn't robust anyway.

    It is like untainting variables by trying to think up which characters you want to exclude. You are bound to miss some. Instead, specify which characters that you know aren't going to be a problem. For a virus, you need to figure out ways that scripts can be modified safely and how to prevent/detect all other modification, not just the modification methods highlighted by a proof of concept.

            - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")
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