26.1 Can You Trust Your Computer?

For a few minutes, try thinking like a computer criminal. A few months ago, you were fired from Big Whammix, the large smokestack employer on the other side of town, and now you're working for a competing company, Bigger Bammers. Your job at Bammers is corporate espionage; you've spent the last month trying to break into Big Whammix's central mail server. Yesterday, you discovered a bug in a version of the web server software that Whammix is running, and you gained privileged access to the system.

What do you do now?

Your primary goal is to gain as much valuable corporate information as possible, and do so without leaving any evidence that would allow you to be caught. But you have a secondary goal of masking your steps so that your former employers at Whammix will never figure out that they have lost information.

Realizing that the hole in the Whammix web server might someday be plugged, you decide to create a new back door that you can use to gain access to the company's computers in the future. One logical approach is to modify the computer's SSH server to accept hidden passwords. Because the source code for sshd is widely available, this task is easy.

You want to hide evidence of your data collection, so you also patch the /bin/ls program. When the program is asked to list the contents of the directory in which you are storing your cracker tools and intercepted mail, it displays none of your files. You "fix" the computer's MD5 utility so that it detects when it is computing the MD5 of one of the modified utilities, and returns the MD5 of the unmodified utility instead. Then you manipulate the system clock or edit the raw disk to set all the times in the inodes back to their original values to further cloak your modifications.

You'll be connecting to the computer on a regular basis, so you also modify /usr/sbin/netstat so that it doesn't display connections between the Big Whammix IP subnet and the subnet at Bigger Bammers. You may also modify the /usr/bin/ps and /usr/bin/who programs so that they don't list users who are logged in via this special back door.

Content, you now spend the next five months periodically logging into the mail server at Big Whammix and making copies of all of the email directed to the marketing staff. You do so right up to the day that you leave your job at Bigger Bammers and move on to a new position at another firm. On your last day, you run a shell script that you have personally prepared that restores all of the programs on the hard disk to their original configuration. Then, as a parting gesture, your program introduces subtle modifications into the Big Whammix main accounting database.

Technological fiction? Hardly. By the middle of the 1990s, attacks against computers in which the system binaries were modified to prevent detection of the intruder had become commonplace. Once sophisticated attackers have gained superuser access, the usual way you discover their presence is if they make a mistake. Despite better intrusion detection and firewall technologies introduced in the late 1990s, the problem of "invisible" misuse continues to be common.

26.1.1 Harry's Compiler

In the early days of the MIT Media Lab, there was a graduate student who was very unpopular with the other students in his lab. To protect his privacy, we'll call the unpopular student "Harry."

Harry was obnoxious and abrasive, and he wasn't a very good programmer either. So the other students in the lab decided to play a trick on him. They modified the PL/I compiler on the computer that they all shared so that the program would determine the name of the person who was running it. If the person running the compiler was Harry, the program would run as usual, reporting syntax errors and the like, but it would occasionally, randomly, not produce a final output file.

This mischievous prank caused a myriad of troubles for Harry. He would make a minor change to his program, run it, and—occasionally—the program would run the same way as it did before he made his modification. He would fix bugs, but the bugs would still remain. But then, whenever he went for help, one of the other students in the lab would sit down at the terminal, log in, and everything would work properly.

Poor Harry. It was a cruel trick. Somehow, though, everybody forgot to tell him about it. He soon grew frustrated with the whole enterprise, and eventually left school.^[1]

^[1] We don't recommend such pranks. People like Harry may not realize they are difficult, and adding to their personal misery is unlikely to help their disposition or social skills. At the least, making someone's life a little more difficult is cruel. Perhaps Harry could have gone on to invent some great security tool or computing aid for the disabled had be not been so discouraged. At the worst, we have read too many news stories about the office loner who snaps and lays waste to the office with an assault rifle.

And you thought those random "bugs" in your system were there by accident?

26.1.2 Trusting Trust

Perhaps the definitive account of the problems inherent in computer security and trust is Ken Thompson's article, "Reflections on Trusting Trust."^[2] Thompson describes a back door planted in an early research version of Unix.

^[2] Communications of the ACM, Volume 27, Number 8, August 1984.

The back door was a modification to the /bin/login program that would allow him to gain superuser access to the system at any time, even if his account had been deleted, by providing a predetermined username and password. While such a modification is easy to make, it's also an easy one to detect by looking at the computer's source code. So Thompson modified the computer's C compiler to detect whether it was translating the login.c program. If so, then the additional code for the back door would automatically be inserted into the object-code stream, even though the code was not present in the original C source file.

Thompson could now have the login.c source inspected by his coworkers, compile the program, install the /bin/login executable, and yet be assured that the back door is firmly in place.

But what if somebody inspected the source code for the C compiler itself? Thompson thought of that case as well. He further modified the C compiler so that it would detect whether it was compiling the source code for itself. If so, the compiler would automatically insert the special login program recognition code. After one more round of compilation, Thompson was able to put all the original source code back in place.

Thompson's experiment was like a magic trick. There was no back door in the login.c source file and no back door in the source code for the C compiler, and yet there was a back door in both the final compiler and in the login program. Abracadabra!

What hidden actions do your compiler and login programs perform?^[3]

^[3] Your typical compiler likely has many other accidental bugs and faults that aren't so well hidden, too!

26.1.3 What the Superuser Can and Cannot Do

As these examples illustrate, technical expertise combined with superuser privileges on a computer is a powerful combination. Together, they let an attacker change the very nature of the computer's operating system. An attacker can modify the system to create "hidden" directories that don't show up under normal circumstances (if at all) and can change the system clock, making it look as if the files that he modified today were actually modified months ago. An attacker can also forge electronic mail. (Actually, anybody can forge electronic mail, but an attacker can do a better job of it.)

Of course, there are some things that an attacker cannot do, even if that attacker is a technical genius and has full access to your computer and its source code. An attacker cannot, for example, decrypt a message that has been encrypted with a perfect encryption algorithm. But he can alter the code to record the key the next time you type it. An attacker probably can't alter your computer's hardware to perform basic mathematical calculations a dozen times faster than it currently does, although there are few security implications to doing so. Most attackers can't read the contents of a file after it's been written over with another file unless they take apart your computer and take the hard disk to a laboratory. However, an attacker with privileges can alter your system so that deleted files are still accessible (to him).

In each case, how—and when—do you tell if the attack has occurred?

The "what-if" scenario can be taken to considerable lengths. Consider an attacker who is attempting to hide a modification in a computer's /bin/login program. (See Table 26-1.)

If you think that this description sounds like an intricate game of chess, you're right. Practical computer security is a series of actions and counteractions, attacks and defenses. As with chess, success depends on anticipating your opponent's moves and planning countermeasures ahead of time. Simply reacting to your opponent's moves is a recipe for failure.

The key thing to note, however, is that somewhere, at some level, you need to trust what you are working with. Maybe you trust the hardware. Maybe you trust the CD-ROM. But at some level, you need to trust what you have on hand. Perfect security isn't possible, so we need to settle for the next best thing: reasonable trust on which to build.

The question is, where do you place that trust?