Worditudinality

["Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rMslade () shaw ca>]

Go look up the term rootkit on Wikipedia.  (Go ahead, I'll wait.)  Lovely entry, 
isn't it?  Lots of information.  Trouble is, there's lots of misinformation, too.

A rootkit is *not* "a program ... designed to take fundamental [or] ... `root' 
access" for a system.  It's designed to *keep* that access, once you broken into 
the system and grabbed it.  (And rootkits were around before 1990, etc, but we'll 
let that go for the moment.)

Or, at least, it used to be defined that way.  Recently, all kinds of people have been 
redefining what rootkit means, to the point that it may no longer mean anything.

Wikipedia is a wonderful tool, and the English encyclopedia made with it is a 
wonderful resource.  For the most part.  But when you get to the real specialty 
areas you start running into problems.  As John Lawton has pointed out, the irony 
of the information age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed 
opinion.  And Wikipedia is susceptible to that problem.

Now the Wikipedia people are aware of the problem, and have provided ways to 
address it.  There is the fact that anyone can correct errors, when errors have been 
made.  There are technical controls in terms of limits on changes.  There are 
administrative controls in the granting of elevated privileges to editors.  But 
occasionally you get a breakdown, such as the fact that an editor can be, him or 
herself, in error.  And then you get entries like the one for rootkit.

But Wikipedia is not what I really want to talk about.  I want to talk about words.  
Specifically, the jargon that we use, and create, in technical fields, and in the field 
of information security in particular.  Because language is kind of like a giant 
Wikipedia, where anyone at all can make an entry.  And anyone at all can try and 
modify that entry.

Lots of people like to talk about computer security.  It's quite likely that more 
people like to talk about security than actually *do* anything about security.  So 
it's not hard to see that a lot of the people who are talking, and writing, about 
security often talk about things that, well, they are not quite certain about.

If I say that Alan Turing was a homosexual, I might be right, or I might be wrong.  
But it would be fairly easy to check whether I was right or wrong.  However, if I 
say that a Turing Machine is a universal computer because it can be implemented 
on any computer, I am making a different kind of assertion, and one that it harder 
to check.  Someone who hears me say that, and knows that I'm wrong, might not 
challenge it immediately, because it's partly right, and the error I've made may not 
be important to the point that I'm making.  But the people who hear me make 
that statement, and who do not know why the statement is in error, are probably 
going to assume and generate various kinds of mistaken ideas about Turing 
machines.  And if I make the statement frequently enough, and in enough 
different places, it starts being taken as true.  And eventually we'll have people 
saying that a universal computer is any entity that can be implemented on any 
platform.  Which had nothing at all to do with what Turing was doing and proving.

So it is with a number of the specialized terms that we have been using in infosec.  
A lot of people are getting hold of them, and using them in sloppy ways.  Now, a 
great many people say that language is living, and you have to make allowances 
for that growth.  Fair enough: much of the vocabulary that we use every day in 
computer security didn't even exist fifty years ago, so it would be hard to argue the 
point.  However, if the terms can be changed by anyone, at any time, then they 
lose meaning.  If I use the word virus to mean one thing, and you use it to mean 
something quite different, then we aren't going to come to any agreement.  We 
can't communicate.  And, in all of these rapidly changing technical fields, 
communication is vitally important.

So, in the blort, I just want to regrify you to smetnicate all forms of antrifact.

Yelth you for your fesculiant. 

======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade () vcn bc ca     slade () victoria tc ca     rslade () computercrime org
No experiment is ever a total waste:
    it can always be used as a bad example          - science maxim
victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.