Security quotes of the week

I used to provide detached GnuPG signatures alongside my uploaded source tarballs but nobody cared or even noticed if I inadvertently broke the signature. (This is for packages which regularly got downloaded for inclusion into Fedora, ArchLinux, Gentoo and numerous other distros other than Debian/Debian-based ones which get the source directly from me.)

Honestly, nobody cares.

ICANN has plowed ahead with their extortive get-rich-quick gTLD expansion scheme. The U.S. has turned the DNS into a mechanism for unilaterial actions over entities in other countries, without such [niceties] as due process being required. The list goes on and on.

So no wonder the rest of the world pushes for changes -- and threatens network fragemention -- even as their proposed regulatory regimes could do enormous damage to the Net.

This book marks another chapter in my career’s endless series of generalizations. From mathematical security — cryptography — to computer and network security; from there to security technology in general; then to the economics of security and the psychology of security; and now to — I suppose — the sociology of security. The more I try to understand how security works, the more of the world I need to encompass within my model.

While everyone else was focused on the normal patch specific vuln/update/forget cycle, our focus with these high-profile vulnerabilities has always been to look at tangential issues that are unlikely to be resolved upstream: exploitation techniques that either made certain strategies easier or possible in the first place. In the case of CVE-2012-0056, that issue revealed itself during a discussion on the full-disclosure mailing list on how to reliably exploit systems that changed the permission of the suid root binaries to deny reading. While such a permission change prevented the use of objdump in initial exploits, it was mentioned that a ptrace followed by an exec of the suid root binary allows one to effectively read the contents of the mapped binary. This might be surprising, as a ptrace of an existing suid root process would be denied. When execing a privileged binary while ptracing though, the binary is run without the extra privileges. When the goal is reading out the binary, however, this is irrelevant.