RE: signing applets a solution? Never!

[Hal <hal () mrj com>]

I took some time to read the paper you referenced.  Yes, there are  infinite sources of cleverness and clever people. 
NCSC strove to  perfect a clean environment carefully closing each avenue by which a trojan horse might be introduced. 
A perfect example of deconstructionism and it failed. Too expensive, formal proofs-of-security not up to the job, 
administration, a nightmare. So then what's left?  Industry is simply moving ahead gates ajar!

I heard recently about a large military think tank which had forbid any applets at all except onces that they had 
checkout and cached internally. Nothing directly from outside.  This worked for about a month and was dropped.  Their 
users wouldn't put up with it. So they decided to take the risk, roll the dice, (whatever metaphor you like) and hope 
(or trust) that they weren't going to get wacked. Still they search for a solution as do we all.  

BTW (I don' remember the study title Thompson asked about but I do remember that the trojan horse was carefully 
disguised as a microcode fix.  It was packaged exactly as other routine patches, even to the extent of reproducing 
exact matches of  internal company control forms and wrapping.. The package was "placed" into the on-sight Customer 
Engineer's in-basked who then installled it in the target Multics.
Very neat.) 


----------
From:   Pauline van Winsen - Uniq Professional Services[SMTP:Pauline.van.Winsen () uniq com au]
Reply To:       Pauline van Winsen - Uniq Professional Services
Sent:   Thursday, December 11, 1997 7:41 PM
To:     darrenr () cyber com au; jk () stallion ee
Cc:     firewall-wizards () nfr net
Subject:        Re: signing applets a solution?   Never!


> When talking about security of binary products, I believe it is hard to
> believe that programmers do not sometimes program backdoors into their
> programs. It probably depends on the software company, but in many places
> it should be fairly easy to put something into the code without company or
> fellow programmers finding out about it.

& for a classic example check out:

http://www.cs.umsl.edu/~sanjiv/sys_sec/security/thompson/hack.html

one of my all time favourite security papers.

cheers,
pauline

Pauline van Winsen                                   pauline () uniq com au
Uniq Professional Services Pty Ltd                       www.uniq.com.au
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