3 ms·

The next question is why didn’t the high end shops spending a ton of money and recruiting effort on crypto and state malware like NSA .. or Russia(?) figure thi

by dmix 3y ago

The next question is why didn’t the high end shops spending a ton of money and recruiting effort on crypto and state malware like NSA .. or Russia(?) figure this out already or did they

whatshisface 3y ago
Because figuring out what a worm does doesn't help if it has already done it, and for that matter they're supposed to remain undetected. Furthermore people already cannot tell whether code has backdoors, or what ML classifiers do for that matter. Unfortunately, the biggest industrial use case is making wi-fi routers that are absolutely impossible to install OpenWRT on, etc...
- whitemary 3y ago
  > people already cannot tell whether code has backdoors I was feeling crazy after reading that.
tivert 3y ago
> The next question is why didn’t the high end shops spending a ton of money and recruiting effort on crypto and state malware like NSA .. or Russia(?) figure this out already or did they There's no way to know. But the NSA (at least) has a documented history of making crypto breakthroughs and keeping them secret (e.g. public key crypto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classified_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classi..., differential cryptanalysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis#His...).
- withinboredom 3y ago
  The fun open secret about working as a researcher for the NSA is that even after you leave the NSA, any and all research must be approved by them before publishing.
KMag 3y ago
There are more efficient ways to hide malware from current scanners, and on the flip-side, the scanners that use heuristics/ML to classify the sequence of system calls made by the binary wouldn't be affected by this sort of obfuscation.

3 ms·

The next question is why didn’t the high end shops spending a ton of money and recruiting effort on crypto and state malware like NSA .. or Russia(?) figure thi

by dmix 3y ago

The next question is why didn’t the high end shops spending a ton of money and recruiting effort on crypto and state malware like NSA .. or Russia(?) figure this out already or did they

whatshisface 3y ago
Because figuring out what a worm does doesn't help if it has already done it, and for that matter they're supposed to remain undetected. Furthermore people already cannot tell whether code has backdoors, or what ML classifiers do for that matter. Unfortunately, the biggest industrial use case is making wi-fi routers that are absolutely impossible to install OpenWRT on, etc...
- whitemary 3y ago
  > people already cannot tell whether code has backdoors I was feeling crazy after reading that.
tivert 3y ago
> The next question is why didn’t the high end shops spending a ton of money and recruiting effort on crypto and state malware like NSA .. or Russia(?) figure this out already or did they There's no way to know. But the NSA (at least) has a documented history of making crypto breakthroughs and keeping them secret (e.g. public key crypto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classified_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography#Classi..., differential cryptanalysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis#His...).
- withinboredom 3y ago
  The fun open secret about working as a researcher for the NSA is that even after you leave the NSA, any and all research must be approved by them before publishing.
KMag 3y ago
There are more efficient ways to hide malware from current scanners, and on the flip-side, the scanners that use heuristics/ML to classify the sequence of system calls made by the binary wouldn't be affected by this sort of obfuscation.