Hacker Hide and Seek
Core Security Ariel Waissbein has been building security games for a while now. He was They were kind enough to send a copy of his their “Exploit” game after I released Elevation of Privilege. [Update: I had confused Ariel Futoransky and Ariel Waissbein, because Waissbein wrote the blog post. Sorry!] At Defcon, he and his colleagues will be running a more capture-the-flag sort of game, titled “Hide and seek the backdoor:”
For starters, a backdoor is said to be a piece of code intentionally added to a program to grant remote control of the program — or the host that runs it – to its author, that at the same time remains difficult to detect by anybody else.
But this last aspect of the definition actually limits its usefulness, as it implies that the validity of the backdoor’s existence is contingent upon the victim’s failure to detect it. It does not provide any clue at all into how to create or detect a backdoor successfully.
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A few years ago, the CoreTex team did an internal experiment at Core and designed the Backdoor Hiding Game, which mimics the old game Dictionary. In this new game, the game master provides a description of the functionalities of a program, together with the setting where it runs, and the players must then develop programs that fulfill these functionalities and have a backdoor. The game master then mixes all these programs with one that he developed and has no backdoors, and gives these to the players. Then, the players must audit all the programs and pick the benign one.
First, I think this is great, and I look forward to seeing it. I do have some questions. What elements of the game can we evaluate and how? A general question we can ask is “Is the game for fun or to advance the state of the art?” (Both are ok and sometimes it’s unclear until knowledge emerges from the chaos of experimentation.) His blog states “We discovered many new hiding techniques,” which is awesome. Games that are fun and advance the state of the art are very hard to create. It’s a seriously cool achievement.
My next question is, how close is the game to the reality of secure software development? How can we transfer knowledge from one to the other? The rules seem to drive backdoors into most code (assuming they all work, (n-1)/n). That’s unlike reality, with a much higher incidence of backdoors than exist in the wild. I’m assuming that the code will all be custom, and thus short enough to create and audit in a game, which also leads to a higher concentration of backdoors per line of code. That different concentration will reward different techniques from those that could scale to a million lines of code.
More generally, do we know how to evaluate hiding techniques? Do hackers playing a game create the same sort of backdoors as disgruntled employees or industrial spies? Because of this contest and the Underhanded C Contests, we have two corpuses of backdoored code. However, I’m not aware of any corpus of deployed backdoor code which we could compare.
So anyway, I look forward to seeing this game at Defcon, and in the future, more serious games for information security.
Previously, I’ve blogged about the Underhanded C contest here and here
Hi Adam, thanks for everything. I cannot claim to have created the games. I’m only dealing cards. It was Ariel Futornansky who designed the exploit! and backdoor hiding games.
WRT reality… I think of these as experiments which replicate certain scenarios. Of course, with this experiments we will not be able to “sample” all possible backdoorhiding techniques. More humbly, we will start with a small body of examples and move on after that.
Cheers,
Ariel