Re: Anonymous return addresses

["Mark M." <markm@voicenet.com>]

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On Sat, 8 Jun 1996, Hal wrote:

> The other one was "Holding Intruders Accountable on the Internet" and it
> had one strange comment.  Basically it was about a way of trying to track
> down cracker types who break into systems.  One strategy these people use
> is to log into a whole series of insecure hosts, one after the other,
> before attacking their target.  Then tracing back where they came from is
> very difficult.  Cliff Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" is the classic account
> of how hard it is to trace these people.  Probably the new books about
> Mitnick talk about the same thing.
> 
> The idea in this article is that you monitor the whole net and track
> all the rlogin and telnet traffic between pairs of hosts.  Then they
> describe a statistical technique for determining that two different
> telnet sessions are chained together by recognizing the same patterns
> of traffic on them.  Basically they count the frequency of spaces and
> punctuation marks on minute-long time slices and try to correlate
> them.  This way you can tell that the intruder attacking here is also
> using these other hosts over there, and try to track him down that
> way.
> 
> I don't think this is very practical, and I have mixed feelings about the
> technology - I don't favor breakins, but the kinds of surveillance that
> would be necessary to implement their technique seem very threatening.
> Also they do mention the obvious countermeasure of using encryption at
> each stage, which would be easy with such things as the secure remote
> shell programs around now.

I don't really understand how such a system would work.  It would either
require some kind of centralized system to receive information from each host
being monitored, or each host would have to contact another and relay the
connection information.  The former would require too much bandwidth and the
latter would open up hosts to easy eavesdropping attacks.  The only alternative
is for sysadmins to monitor syslog activity which is (hopefully) done already.

[...]
> 
> So apparently in the view of these authors anonymous remailers are
> maintained by "the intruder community."  It is unfortunate that we have
> this image among some member of the larger community.  BTW, there are
> periodic suggestions here to run general-purpose connection redirectors,
> but people should be aware of the problem that cracker types would seize
> on these as another shield for their crimes.  These would have to be
> limited to specific uses, such as port 80 which is the http port and
> which hopefully can't easily be used for attacks.

Unfortunately, httpd is very insecure.  First of all, cgi scripts are very
difficult to make secure and can be exploited quite easily.  There may also
be buffer-overflow problems.  It's about as difficult to make connection
redirectors safe from cracker use as it is to make anonymous remailers safe
from child pornographers, terrorists, and other horsemen.

- -- Mark

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markm@voicenet.com              | finger -l for PGP key 0xe3bf2169
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"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with
reality at any point."
                -- Friedrich Nietzsche


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