[ISN] Month of PHP bugs gets rolling

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Mon Mar 05 2007 - 22:33:24 PST


http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=8174

By Matthew Broersma
Techworld
05 March 2007

Security researcher Joanna Rutkowska has demonstrated several methods 
that sophisticated rootkits can use to hide from even the most reliable 
detection method currently available - hardware-based products that read 
a system's RAM.

Rutkowska is a researcher with security firm Coseinc Advanced Malware 
Labs. She recently outlined several ways of getting around the User 
Account Control (UAC) feature introduced in Windows Vista. Several 
researchers have identified problems with UAC.

The demonstration, given at the Black Hat security conference in 
Arlington, Virginia, indicates that if a rootkit is advanced enough, 
there currently is no way it can be reliably detected, Rutkowska said. 
Rootkits are designed to hide some activity from observers, and have 
recently been used to conceal the presence of Trojans and hacker 
backdoors - not to mention Sony BMG's copy-protection software.

Several hardware-based systems exist for acquiring an image of a 
computer's RAM, the most reliable way to detect the presence of certain 
kinds of rootkits, Rutkowska said. Those include Tribble, Komoku's 
CoPilot and RAM Capture Tool from BBN Technologies, but she said none 
are particularly easy to find.

Rutkowska's findings mean system designers may need to come up with a 
system architecture better suited to forensic analysis, such as an 
interface dedicated to memory acquisition.

"We live in the 21st century, but apparently can't reliably read the 
memory of our computers," she said at the presentation. "Maybe we should 
rethink the design of our computer systems, so that they were somehow 
verifiable."

Rutkowska's presentation outlined three types of attacks, one that 
crashes the machine when RAM acquisition is attempted, a "covering 
attack" that allows the acquisition tool to see only garbage when it 
inspects certain parts of physical memory, and a "full replacing attack" 
that allows the tool to see false information when it scans parts of 
physical memory.

The denial-of-service attack could leave investigators legally liable 
for crashing the system, Rutkowska said.

The "covering attack" might allow investigators to see the malware's 
"hooks" in some cases, but would make it impossible for investigators to 
analyse the malware. And the "full replacing attack" could simply mean 
that the malware is never detected at all, she said.


_________________________________________
Visit the InfoSec News Security Bookstore
http://www.shopinfosecnews.org



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Mon Mar 05 2007 - 22:45:53 PST