expert misuse of the term "virus"

in the past, the argument many experts have used against putting in the effort to actually correct people's misconceptions about what a computer virus is and what it does and how it's different from other forms of malware have centered on the idea that it doesn't really matter to a victim what kind of malware they have. when they have malware on their computer, all they care about is getting rid of it. i can understand this school of thought, even though i've never agreed with it. however, the world has changed. 

this is a post stuxnet world and defenders/victims aren't the only ones we need to consider anymore. we now have people barking orders to create digital weapons, and the details of those orders matter. if they say make me a virus then someone will make them a virus even if they didn't understand what they were asking for - and there's evidence to suggest they don't. 

stuxnet is generally believed to have been a targeted, covert operation, but it used a noisy, untargetable* type of malware - a computer virus (or more specifically a worm). there were and are better ways to achieve the ends we believe the creators of stuxnet were after, so one can only assume that high level decisions were made in ignorance of the differences between malware types and the consequences those differences would have on that type of operation.

the question, then, of whether to put in the effort to educate people about the proper use of the term virus can no longer be answered by looking exclusively at the victims who want their computers to be clean. it is now also necessary to consider aggressors who want to use malware as a weapon to serve national interests. as misguided as such behaviour is, we have to accept that it's happened and will continue to happen, and actually knowing the differences between malware types may mean the difference between a surgically precise operation, or one with a lot of collateral damage. 

this isn't to say that i think we should start helping aggressors create and/or launch their digital weapons. i still don't believe in helping the bad guys, and even if i believed such nationalistic aggressors weren't bad guys (which i don't), i don't believe there's any way to help them without also helping those who are much more unambiguously bad. what i am saying, however, is that this particular form of ignorance that experts have been too lazy to address can cause real harm and ignoring it means ignoring the opportunity to reduce the unintended harm such people will cause.

(*many believe stuxnet was highly targeted, but there's a distinction to be made. while it's destructive payload was highly targeted to a very specific environment, it's self-replication was not - it spread far beyond it's intended target)

the folly of offensive cyberwarfare

i often feel like i can't speak freely about cyberwarfare (due almost entirely to my principles about not helping or giving ideas to those who make things worse, be they criminals or warmongers), but it's hard to deny the importance of the subject, and frankly when i read what others have written i can't help but think they haven't really thought things through very well.

when it comes to the development and use of digital weapons there are a couple of key points whose implications need to be understood and kept in mind. the first of these is the problem of attribution. the difficulty in attributing the source of a computer attack is both tactically advantageous, and strategically constraining. the advantages should be obvious - you can attack an opponent without the opponent knowing who is responsible for the attack (unless you screw up and reveal yourself). the problems begin, however, when you consider that the opposite is also true - one or more of your opponents can attack you without you being able to tell who it was.

consider what that means. if you can't tell who is attacking you, how can you possibly retaliate? imagine you're blindfolded, you're ears are plugged, you're handed a gun, and stuck in a room with other people who may or may not also have blindfolds, earplugs, and guns. if someone starts shooting at you, how can you realistically return fire to defend yourself without knowing where to shoot? without the ability to target the your opponent you cannot retaliate, you cannot end him before he ends you. further, when the threat of retaliation becomes empty like this, deterrence no longer works. as a result, so-called cyberweapons have no defensive value.

in the absence of attribution, a conflict must consist entirely of first strikes. there is no retaliation, there is no deterrence, there is no scaring an enemy off by showing what you can do, there is no point to visibly stockpiling armaments. that is significantly different from most conventional models of warfare. this is one of the reasons why cyberwarfare must only ever accompany traditional warfare - only then can combatants avoid firing blindly in the dark.

another important aspect of digital weapons to keep in mind is the fact that they're digital. they're code, bits and bytes inside a computer. what is the one thing computers are exceptionally good at doing with those bits and bytes? copying them. imagine a world where it's expensive to develop guns and tanks and bombs from scratch, but it costs virtually nothing to copy them. that is the world of cyberwarfare, and that is a world that actually does not favour the attacker, per se, but rather one that favours the forager (one of the things sun tzu teaches is to forage on the enemy) because s/he gets the most benefit (a sophisticated digital weapon) for the least cost.

when weapons cost a lot to develop from scratch but very little to copy, what conditions do you suppose would make their development and use make sense? if you could eliminate the possibility of copying and re-use, if the weapon assured you a decisive victory over your opponent then it wouldn't matter that it would be falling into your opponent's hands simply by you using it. unfortunately in the real world a nation has many opponents. they cannot all be fought at once and so a decisive victory against all whose hands such a weapon may fall into is not possible. 

what's more, not all of those opponents are necessarily other nation states. the low cost of copying weapons means that the barrier to entry on this battlefield is lowered and more mundane opponents like terrorists or even sophisticated criminals can join the fray. as you can well imagine, those kinds of opponents are far less disciplined and restrained than a nation state would be.

our best example of a digital weapon thus far is stuxnet. it's believed to have cost millions of dollars and many man-years of effort to develop, and now anyone who wants a copy can download it for free from the internet. i would be remiss if i failed to point out that by now stuxnet is pretty well neutered (since the windows vulnerabilities it exploited have been patched and most anti-malware will detect it's presence) and it would actually take a fair bit of time and money to replace the neutered bits so it could be re-used; but there was a time before that was true when stuxnet was still in many people's hands and could have been re-used at a much lower cost. as strange as it may sound, the malware's discovery and subsequent neutering actually served to mitigate the potential for it's re-use. it's creators are lucky it happened before the malware could be re-used against them, their allies, or other interests they might have. that might not be the case next time.

it's a peculiar irony that the people most capable of developing digital weaponry (the technologically advanced and dependent) are the same people who have the most to lose if such weaponry is used against them. this should make it obvious that defense, not offense, is where one's money and effort would better spent. just so i'm not that guy who makes overly general, hand-wavy suggestions, here are some ideas that are more specific than just "you should do defense":

• fault tolerant designs
• redundancy is already something we know how to do, but we don't always do it well (as the 2003 blackout clearly demonstrated). the internet is said to be so fault tolerant that if part of it goes down the rest will just route around it. there are many paths to the same destination. obviously that's a property we want for power, communications, water, etc. it's something we should be designing for and unfortunately because it costs it's something we need to pay for. 
• ease of recovery is something we perhaps don't think quite as much about. how easy is it to replace physical equipment that no longer operates as intended? how easy is it to overwrite logical systems from backups? how many minutes, hours, or days does it take? aiming to minimize that time also serves to minimize the impact of anything unfortunate happening to the system in question.
• system hardening
• vulnerability research and patching is something that already enjoys a certain measure of success in consumer and enterprise environments. if a nation wants to protect it's critical infrastructure then perhaps more money and energy should be poured into researching vulnerabilities in that critical infrastructure.
• eliminating or rethinking external connections (including both network connections as well as removable media) basically stands in direct opposition to the trend of hooking more and more of our most important systems up to one of the most dangerous networks on the planet (the internet). as with most things, the business incentives that are driving the current trend need to be accounted for. the cost saving benefits of remote connections are understood, but there are other ways of achieving that goal without resorting to the internet - that's simply the cheapest/easiest option
• whitelisting of code and possibly even data on critical infrastructure systems, because quite frankly why should new unknown material be introduced to these systems? it may make sense to occasionally and in a very controlled way apply fixes or make changes corresponding to changes in the industrial processes those systems are a part of, but in general those machines should be unchanging and that should probably be enforced. as a corollary, eliminating dual use is probably a good idea too. there's no reason you should be writing your TPS report on a machine that can control whether the lights stay on. 
• early warning detection
• while some may argue otherwise, training of personnel actually can work and i can think of no better example of this right now than the recent case of a planted malware-laden USB flash drive that an employee decided was suspicious an took directly to IT.
• sensors within protected systems performing things like integrity monitoring (to help minimize and scrutinize changes to those systems), behavioural profiling of software components, logging, etc.
• evasion
• disinformation can be useful in a couple of ways. it can raise the cost of successfully performing an attack by tricking the attacker into doing useless things, and it can also trick the attacker into doing something that sets off an alarm (ie. they walk into a trap).
• decoy systems that look and act for all intents and purposes just like the real ones can reduce the impact and success of attacks, especially if they have the same warning sensors the production systems do, by turning the problem of attacking the right system into a game of chance for the attacker. holding out baits for the attacker to reveal their presence and/or intentions can certainly confer advantages on a defender.

i've made a few veiled (and not so veiled) references to sun tzu. while some people may argue that "the art of war" is over-played and not particularly relevant to information security, when it comes to warfare of any kind i think it's very relevant:

Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

that is to say, of course, that we need to take up a defensible position first before we start attacking. by most accounts (including president obama's) we aren't there yet.

quick thought on cyberwarfare

one of the topics that keeps coming up in discussions of cyberwarfare is 'attribution'. that ability to know where an attack came from, who's responsible for it, etc. it keeps coming up because many of us recognize that it's very difficult to do with attacks in cyberspace.

this is a source of confusion for many because our model of warfare involves things like deterrence, counter attack, and appropriate response. without attribution these things aren't possible.

cyberattacks are often likened to missiles or other kinetic warfare weapons where attribution is a much more straightforward process - i think the confusion is rooted in this comparison. instead of thinking about overt warfare, cyberwarfare would be better likened to covert warfare - black ops, wet works, that sort of thing. there is no meaningful attribution with these sort of warfare and so there is no meaningful deterrence or response to such attacks. it is an area of warfare where there is attack without counter attack, where one attacks simply because it is strategically advantageous.

don't picture these so-called cyberweapons as being like electronic missiles that anyone can launch simply by pressing a button, that gives entirely the wrong sort of character to the topic. if you must consider them cyberweapons at all (ie. if you must focus on the tool instead of the attack itself) think of them as guns with silencers on them. or better yet, think of them as knives, used with surgical precision and giving away no clue to those in the vicinity where the attack came from.

these aren't the cyberweapons you're looking for, move along

i was reading robert graham's post about how cyberwar is fiction and i found myself not quite agreeing with it.

to be sure, the concept has been overhyped a lot and had his post been exclusively about that then i would have agreed with him wholeheartedly.

additionally, had it rested on the contention that so-called cyberwar actions that have naively been attributed to nation-states were actually the work of online militias lacking official endorsement from their respective governments, i would have agreed with that too.

but as the title of his post suggests, he goes as far as to say that cyberwar, and even cyberweapons are complete fiction, and that does not ring true. i'll do my best to avoid committing an act of cyber-douchery by condoning those particular terms, but the ideas they are meant to represent are not so far beyond the scope of reality as robert suggests.

virtual weapons, or perhaps logical weapons, would be the more straightforward of the two supposed fictitious concepts. robert contends that there are no such weapons, only tools. i would counter, however, with the assertion that a tool intended to cause harm (be it physical harm, logical harm, or some combination of the two) is a weapon. followers of the malware field know all too well there's no shortage of such tools in actual existence, so such weapons are far more than just a flight of fancy or an analogy taken too far.

robert's point regarding warfare is a little more involved. he's right that the way cracking works diverges wildly from the traditional western notions of realworld warfare involving tanks and planes and overwhelming forces, but just because the west has supersized everything including the way they wage war, doesn't mean that's the only way it can be waged. war doesn't have to be mindless (get a bigger dog indeed) and banal, it can also be subtle under the right circumstances. as robert described the opportunistic nature of cracking and how that was fundamentally incompatible with the goal-oriented nature of the military, i found myself thinking about how much better it would fit with the guerrilla warfare approach. i then started to think about the (perhaps apocryphal) stories of CIA operatives fostering insurgent forces in foreign lands to help overthrow governments and install political puppets friendly to US interests. surely that would be a case of one nation waging a secret war against another (if real), and surely it's more opportunistic in it's execution than what is normally depicted in war movies and the like.

as such, it seems to me that the concepts of cyberweapons and cyberwar are not fiction, at least not with a sufficiently general definition of weapon and war. the specific terminology may be poorly chosen, and the concepts misapplied in practice, but that's not really the same as being fiction.