[Dailydave] time for my lil opinion poll

[Chris Anley]

Arun Koshy wrote:
> A friend from the vuln research arena ( sorry .. no names etc ) told
> me in a convo a few hours ago  that this does not work :
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Leak_Prevention
> 
> Would like to know the community's opinion about the whole arena ..
> both public and private responses ( if you can't be public ) are
> welcome.

Your friend is possibly thinking along these lines:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_channel

As an example, if the ILP system works solely at the TCP stream level,
then a network client or server could pause while transmitting packets,
and the host at the other end could measure the pauses. Or you could
leak one bit at a time, by establishing connections in odd or
even-numbered seconds.

Or, since TCP packets can be delivered out of order, if you're sending
'n' packets, you can transmit a number from 1 to n! by re-ordering the
packets. In all these examples the TCP stream is identical, but there's
additional information the monitoring system is unaware of.

Another, more obvious method would be to include the information in any
outbound random number, such as a cryptographic session key, TCP ISN,
etc. If the information is supposed to be random, how can the monitoring
process tell that it isn't?





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