Dailydave mailing list archives
DBs and Patents and Obama and Crypto
From: Dave Aitel <dave () immunityinc com>
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2015 12:18:51 -0400
I wanted to talk about patents in our industry, but I can't because everyone is all like "Software patents are evil" _until they get one_ and it gives me the sads. So instead I'm going to talk about this company I saw yesterday, which is basically this simple diagram: Web App [span port of your mid-tier] -----> [Parser for TDS] ---> [Machine learning to find SQLi] The good things about being on the network stack is that you can get access to clusters. The bad thing is that every minor change of the TDS stack or SQL syntax or anything of that nature means your system starts failing. And you have to auto-detect all possible variation in the network traffic because you're modeling what happens in an immensely complex piece of software on one side that you don't have access to. To avoid all possible ambiguity: This is an impossible problem to get right, even if you limit it to "parse one version of TDS exactly the same as SQL Server 2010 at a known patch level". The other option is to install debugger-like instrumenters on every DB server. In fact, a script to do this came out with an early version of Immunity Debugger, which integrated with SPIKE Proxy so you could scan for SQL Injection and use the feedback loop to guide your scanner around filters and false positives. The downside is of course having to install things on every DB server. In theory MS would release an API that allows a logical "span port" that gave you ever SQL request, and I bet there IS one somewhere in the auditing section. Aside from the horribleness of every possible solution in that area, which probably STILL works better than a few other things, I wanted to point out a KEY sentence you might have missed in the Crypto-War guidelines <https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2426450/read-the-nsc-draft-options-paper-on-strategic.pdf> the administration pointed out. It was this: Without voluntary <https://lists.immunityinc.com/pipermail/dailydave/2015-September/001016.html>and enthusiastic help from Apple and Google, really bad things we won't specify will happen, even if we force it all to be in cleartext. That "parse all variations of TDS" problem that we just looked at is the same as the SIGINT problem faced by the FBI/NSA/etc. Even WITH THE KEYS, the problem is completely intractable if Google and Apple and Microsoft want to make it so. I can hear Google's lawyers now: "Oh, we delivered you our latest protocol spec sheet, every two weeks as promised. Of course, our spec changes every two weeks right after we deliver it, and you are always out of date, and even if you WERE in date, only our software knows which version anyone is at at any given time, and parsing it incorrectly means you are wildly wrong, and if you can't provide a provably correct parser, no court will accept your analysis, etc. Hey, did we mention that every block is not encrypted, but of course it is XORed with this value which we calculate with the most crazy slow algorithm we could find, one million times. That's just this week though. Next week we are reversing every block, but we aren't going to update the version number on the wire." Just food for thought! ;) -dave
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Dailydave mailing list Dailydave () lists immunityinc com https://lists.immunityinc.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave
Current thread:
- DBs and Patents and Obama and Crypto Dave Aitel (Oct 23)
- Re: DBs and Patents and Obama and Crypto Zack Payton (Oct 26)