Re: Security Hole in Axent ESM

From: Michael Shields (shieldsat_private)
Date: Mon Aug 31 1998 - 11:24:30 PDT

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    In article <199808300501.BAA08612at_private>,
    Andy Church <achurchat_private> wrote:
    >      In other words, if you can't manually set the clock back, get the
    > system to do it for you.  And if the system doesn't allow the clock to
    > "turn over", then all sorts of things will go bonkers when the clock hits
    > its maximum (cron jobs, for one), turning this into a DoS of sorts.  So I
    > don't see this as a particularly effective measure.  One way I could see to
    > make this more effective would be to use 64-bit times and disallow both
    > setting the clock back and changing the top 2 bits to anything other than
    > zero.  This would break the rollover attack without causing any premature
    > Y2k-like problems (2^62 seconds ~= 10^13 years).
    
    This is still a DOS of sorts, as you can set the clock to 2^62-1, and
    then it will be impossible to return the clock to the correct time
    without rebooting.  Many things will probably be unhappy to find
    themselves 10^13 years in the future.
    --
    Shields, CrossLink.
    



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