On 18-May-08, at 7:11 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
2. It can be prevented by what's widely regarded as BCP on router security, and has been covered at *nog, in cisco training material, etc etc for quite some time now.
I am much less concerned about security conferences discussing this than about the (highly uninformed) publicity that accompanies these conferences.
I'm not going to touch the disclosure or not debate... it's been done. But I will agree to disagree with you about the above two points. First of all about prevention, I'm not at all sure about this being covered by existing router security planning / BCP. I don't believe most operators reflash their routers periodically, nor check existing images (particularly because the tools for this integrity verification don't even exist). If I'm wrong about this I would love to be corrected with pointers to the tools. Regarding the second point, I also lament the often liberal doses of alarmism/FUD that get plastered over the popular media whenever complicated technical issues are discussed - but unless we have some have the discussions, and information dispersal, then the misconceptions have no chance of being dispelled. The threat of misinformed press does not seem to be sufficient to justify censuring open discussion of the issues imho. One of the thing I truly enjoy about the conferences we organize, is seeing the synergism that occurs when multiple minds focus on these security issues at the conferences. When the analysis is parallelized over multiple brains, inevitably the creative solutions that occur from the congregation of different viewpoints and ideas is pleasantly surprising, and powerful. I've seen numerous examples of this: even just last April I had a chance to be a fly on the wall at a discussion between Jacob Appelbaum and Theo DeRaadt talking about the cold memory attacks research Jacob started - the result of which was that during the discussion it was realized that with the addition of about 30 lines of code in the power fail interrupt handler a large segment of those attacks could be nullified, as they are now on OpenBSD. If the discussion hadn't happened, the creative solution to it would have never arisen. These kinds of "out of the box" solutions frequently arise out of multi-person debate and free association that follows discussions of serious issues - no-one has the whole picture and adding other's viewpoints often brings superior solutions to problems up. So in my opinion the benefits of discussing serious issues at conferences far outweigh the potential drawbacks of misguided media coverage of them. What I infer from your post is that you are of the opinion that issues such as this rootkit prototype should be reported to CSIRT and then shuffled under a carpet. To which I respond that that kind of attitude has led to what I currently consider to be an inappropriate level of concern and awareness amongst service providers of the seriousness of this threat. Cisco has some great guys, but surely discussion of this threat amongst the wider security community will lead to more and better solutions than Cisco operating in a vacuum. And more importantly this issue is not a Cisco issue - the basic threat vector should be a concern to other infrastructure equipment manufacturers too. Until we talk about it, we cannot find the right responses to the problem, and experts talking about it usually leads to better and more comprehensive solutions than single persons or smaller groups working in isolation. cheers, --dr -- World Security Pros. Cutting Edge Training, Tools, and Techniques London, U.K. May 21/22 - 2008 http://eusecwest.com pgpkey http://dragos.com/ kyxpgp