On Fri, 17 Aug 2001, Robert Graham wrote: > People often ask me "what motivates people to write worms". The above > discussions highlights one of the prime motivations. In the scientific > community, we don't believe theories and propositions, only > experimental evidence. Therefore, to prove that somebody can take down > the Internet in 30 seconds, you actually have to do it. Otherwise, > nobody really believes you. robert's almost right. (1) the scientific community doesn't ncessarily discard something without experimental evidence, but instead accepts well reasoned and founded arguments. example: einstein's theory of relativity, which took decades to gain experimental evidence (and we're still finding some), but was accepted much earlier due to the clean, solid reasoning behind it. i'm really sorry to see these two discussions gaining such blind acceptance. it strikes me as obvious that for both the warhol worm and the flash worm that people don't understand basic elements of dynamics, such as kinetic theory, which includes things like encounter theory and propogation. if such analysis were included, done, or even simply understood, i think that this whole discussion would have been seen as obviously lacking in technical merit, and ripe in hyperbole. in a nutshell, think sigmoidal growth patterns, not exponential. that's not to say that there can be an architecture for fast spread, but neither the warhol worm nor the flash worm seem to be adopting it. as such, i don't see the need for experimental demostration of this, only a more sound backing of the theory with some mathematical workings. sure, we can all assume infinitely fast transfer rates, sub-second exploitation/control gain, and inifinitely fast pipes, but even then 15 minutes is not going to plausibly happen. i've started working on framing kinetic theory for the information scientist to discuss worms specifically. in the meantime, those who wish to seriously analyze these offerings in the flash worms and the warhol worm scenarios, please read this excellent paper by the IBM antivirus research team: http://www.research.ibm.com/antivirus/SciPapers/Kephart/ALIFE3/alife3.html notes: 1. i'm a scientisit, specifically a biochemist. i live in the scientific community, so .. thats my perspective. i don't speak for all, only ofering a perspective here that seems to be lost. ____________________________ jose nazario joseat_private PGP: 89 B0 81 DA 5B FD 7E 00 99 C3 B2 CD 48 A0 07 80 PGP key ID 0xFD37F4E5 (pgp.mit.edu) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This list is provided by the SecurityFocus ARIS analyzer service. For more information on this free incident handling, management and tracking system please see: http://aris.securityfocus.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Aug 19 2001 - 20:29:02 PDT