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cryptovirology
Posted Date: 01 May 2008 Resource Type: Articles/Knowledge Sharing Category: Computer & Technology
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Posted By: sharu Member Level: Gold
Rating:  Points: 6
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CRYPTOVIROLOGY
INTRODUCTION
Cryptovirology is the study of the applications of cryptography to malicious software [Yo95, YY96a]. It is an investigation into how modern cryptographic paradigms and tools can be used to strengthen, improve, and develop new malicious software (malware) attacks. Cryptography is a blessing to information processing and communications (as atomic fission is to energy production), because it allows people to store information securely and to conduct private communications over large distances. Cryptovirology attacks have been devised to: give malware enhanced privacy and be more robust against reverse-engineering, give the attacker enhanced anonymity when communicating with deployed malware (e.g., over public bulletin boards and Usenet newsgroups [YY96a ,YY97a]), improve the ability to steal data, improve the ability to carry out extortion, enable new types of denial-of-service, enable fault-tolerance in distributed cryptoviral attacks, and so on. Also, recent work shows how a worm can install a back door on each infected system that opens only when the worm is presented with a system-specific ticket that is generated by the worm's author. This is called an access-for-sale worm [SS03b]. Cryptography has traditionally been used for defensive purposes. Ciphers defend against a passive eavesdropper. Public key infrastructures defend against an active adversary that mounts a man-in-the-middle attack. Digital signature algorithms defend against a forger. E-cash systems defend against a counterfeiter and a double-spender. Pseudorandom bit generators defend against a next-bit predictor, and so on. Cryptovirology extends beyond finding protocol failures and design vulnerabilities. It is a forward-engineering discipline that can be used for attacking rather than defending.
Cryptovirology is developed from the perspective of survivability. A cryptovirologist attacks a computer system or network in the same sense that a cryptanalyst attacks a cryptosystem. Should we stop trying to cryptanalyze cryptosystems and hope that they will be secure? Of course not. By the same token we should not stop trying to anticipate what attackers might do once they break into our computers. Cryptovirology is a proactive anticipation of the opponent's next move and suggests that certain safeguards should be developed and put into place.
Every major technological development carries with it a certain degree of power. This power is often beneficial to society, but more often than not it can also be severely misused. A perfect example of such a technology is atomic fission.. "What are the potential harmful uses of Cryptography?"We believe that it is better to investigate this aspect rather than to wait for such attacks to occur. The set of attacks that is presented involve the unique use of strong (public key and symmetric) cryptographic techniques in conjunction with computer virus and Trojan horse technology. They demonstrate how ncryptography (namely, difference in computational capability) can allow an adversarial virus writer to gain explicit access
control over the data that his or her virus has access to (assuming the infected machines have only polynomial-time computational power), whereas from an
information theoretic point of view (assuming all parties are all-powerful) this is impossible. This idea is then extended to allow a distributed virus to gain itself explicit access control over the information on infected machines, provided it is not detected early enough and vigorously destroyed. This shows that viruses can be used as tools for extortion, potential criminal activity, and as munitions in the context of information warfare, rather than their traditional reputation of being merely a source for disturbance and annoyance. In general, we define cryptovirology to be the study of the applications of cryptography to computer viruses. It is said that cryptography has been used to help prevent viral attacks (i.e., by providing strong integrity checks) and to try to hide a virus's structure, yet formal cryptographic paradigms have never before been used successfully as a weapon in viral attacks.
In describing the first set of attacks, a new virus model is proposed. The model is motivated by biological organisms that are capable of modifying the host to depend on the organisms themselves. Such a virus forces a symbiotic relationship between itself and its host. Alternatively, this dependency may also be derived from an effect that the virus has on the host, such that only the author of the virus can reverse the effect. As we shall point out, this later situation is a mere approximation to the former.
Preventive measures are described in response to the attacks. They are a step in the right direction to help prevent and recover from such attacks. In fact, it is shown that the public availability of cryptographic tools without proper access control, can put the data on a computer system at serious risk.
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Responses
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| Author: Raghav 06 May 2008 | Member Level: Gold Points : 2 | Very good topic
raghav
| | Author: Shanthi M 24 May 2008 | Member Level: Diamond Points : 2 | very interesting topic.
Thank you for your information.
| | Author: Vidya 24 May 2008 | Member Level: Diamond Points : 2 | useful information
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