[Ilugc] query about virus attack on UNIX / LINUX environment
- From: girishvenkatachalam@xxxxxxxxx (Girish Venkatachalam)
- Date: Thu Sep 17 17:04:06 2009
On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Venkatraman S <venkat83@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
There are far more Windows users on earth than Linux/UNIX users.
This fact will never change.
I hear that Windows has a backdoor hole which is a cause of all the
problems.
Can you expatiate it technically and why Win doesnt plug it? What is the
fundamental premise which makes Linux/Unix not-virus-friendly?
This is the last question I will answer today.
Why Windows doesn't plug it? I am not the right person to answer that.
Microsoft couldn't care less.
I can however tackle your other question.
What makes UNIX unfriendly towards virus writers?
I have already covered a lot of the easy stuff in my mails sent today.
Since you are asking a pointed question I will get a bit more technical.
I know of the cryptographic and other practices employed in the most
secure OS on earth, OpenBSD. Some of these ideas are used in other
UNICes and Linux as well.
Cryptography requires randomness in everything. Crypto alone cannot
solve security problems. You need other protection mechanisms and
checks and balances.
Stuff like stack protection, chroot jails, privilege separation, privilege
dropping and many many other things found only in OpenBSD.
You can read some of Theo's papers at
http://www.openbsd.org/papers
I had read them for the ILUGC seminar.
Now Linux and other UNICes have implemented some of the C buffer overflow
problems by randomizing mallocs. You need to randomize every form of ID
generation, be it TCP sequence numbers or DNS query IDs,
OpenBSD has been doing this for ages.
And you need a sound real random generator. We only find pseudo random
numbers in the computer world. Peudo random sequences have the entropy
of random numbers they are predictable and given a seed you have a fixed
stream.
Random sources include hard disk accesses, network loads, keypresses,
mouse movements and so on.
And most importancely UNIX with its sound design and KISS principle makes
it all the more harder for virus writers.
But Windows is full of vulnerabilities of various kinds. Blob programs with
different trapdoors and weaknesses abound.
That is it guys. I am tired. Sigh.
-Girish
--
Gayatri Hitech
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http://gayatri-hitech.com
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