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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I don’t trust them either. But I can’t not trust them unless I trust you, which I don’t.

    This feels like a variation of that two guard riddle except the warning is “both guards lie all of the time” and the two guards still don’t agree.

    Which is resolved by the riddle itself being the lie. Applying that here means we should do the opposite and not (never trust anyone).

    Now which way does that not apply?

    • sometimes trust anyone
    • never distrust anyone
    • never trust noone
    • sometimes distrust anyone
    • never distrust noone
    • sometimes trust noone
    • sometimes distrust noone

  • Yeah, I think there is a lot of potential for code analysis. There’s a limited cross section of ways malware can do interesting things, but many permutations of ways to do that.

    So look for the interesting things, like:

    • accessing other programs’ address spaces
    • reading/writing files
    • deleting/moving files
    • sending/receiving network traffic
    • os system calls and console commands
    • interacting with hardware
    • spawning new processes
    • displaying things on the screen
    • accessing timing information

    Obviously there’s legitimate uses for each of these, so that’s just the first step.

    Next, analyze the data that is being used for that:

    • what’s the source?
    • what’s the destination?
    • what kind of transformations are being applied to the data?

    Then you can watch out for things like:

    • is it systematically going through directories and doing some operation to all files? (Maybe ransomware, data scrubbing, or just maliciously deleting stuff?)
    • is it grabbing data from somewhere and sending it somewhere else on the internet? (Stealing data?)
    • is it using timing information to build data? (Timing attacks to figure out kernel data that should be hidden?)
    • is it changing OS settings/setup?

    Then generate a report of everything it is doing and see if it aligns with what the code is supposed to do. Or you could even build some kind of permissions system around that with more sophistication than the basic “can this app access files? How about the internet?”

    Computer programs can be complex, but are ultimately made up of a series of simple operations and it’s possible to build an interpreter that can do those operations and then follow everything through to see exactly what is included in the massive amount of data it sends over the network so that you can tell your file sharing program is also for some reason sending /etc/passwords to a random address or listening for something to access a sequence of closed ports and then will do x, y, z, if that ever happens. Back doors could be obvious with the right analysis tools, especially if it’s being built from source code (though I believe it’s still possible with binaries, just maybe a bit harder).




  • I want to see some videos of salesmen trying to sell touchscreens like they are cars of the future and so great. Followed by the same salesman selling the return to tactile buttons as a big step forward because of how bad of an idea the touchscreens are.

    Most likely the first one will be older, but I bet there’s many that could be lead to do both in the same day by two different people showing interest in the same model but different year of a vehicle.










  • Oh but some do create very helpful content like “repost!” comments to help people seeing old content from getting embarrassed by not realizing all discussion about that content has been done already.

    Some try to improve stories by adding claims of applause or a famous person offering a sum of money, probably because it’s silly to imagine such embellishments and they like joining in on the fun.



  • Thanks for the detail!

    And I agree that maybe they should be using something else. Though one risk with using something that few others are using is that it can also be used for targeting and tracking. Like if someone knows the bodyguards use shortwave communicators and that there’s an event at some location, they could have drones set up to just target those frequencies when they see them.

    It’ll always be an arms race, at least if the players realize they are in an arms race and don’t just willingly carry tracking devices.