Information Security News: Decades after creation, viruses defy cure

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>

http://news.com.com/2009-7349_3-5111410.html

By Robert Lemos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
November 25, 2003

Of all the accomplishments in the annals of technology, Fred Cohen's 
contribution is undeniably unique: He introduced the term "virus" to 
the lexicon of computers.

The University of New Haven professor used the phrase in a 1984 
research paper, in which he described threats self-propagating 
programs pose and explored potential defenses against them. When he 
asked for funding from the National Science Foundation three years 
later to further explore countermeasures, the agency rebuffed him. 

"They turned it down," said Cohen, who is also principal analyst for 
research firm Burton Group. "They said it wasn't of current interest." 

Two decades later, countless companies and individuals are still 
paying for that mistake. The technology industry has yet to find a 
blanket solution to the ever-growing list of viruses and worms that 
constitute the greatest risk to computers on the Internet. Every year, 
companies lose billions of dollars when forced to halt work and deal 
with infectious digital diseases, such as Sobig and Slammer. 

While much attention has been paid to the malicious online attackers 
who exploit technology's vulnerabilities, little has been documented 
about the origins of the virus. Its early iterations were not created 
by malcontent teenagers or antisocial geeks but by campus researchers, 
system administrators and a handful of old-school hackers who thought 
that the ability to reproduce their programs automatically was a neat 
trick. 

The result is a tale of technical genius, academic naivete, 
bureaucratic arrogance and humans' penchant for tearing down 
institutions simply for the sake of doing so. 

Sarah Gordon, senior research fellow at Symantec Security Response, 
caught her first computer virus more than a decade ago. She became so 
fascinated with the phenomenon that she spent several years studying 
the underground world of virus writers. 

"The design of the Internet facilitates the distribution of 
information--all sorts of information; it's a double-edged sword," 
Gordon said in a recent e-mail interview. "Even if (viruses) are not 
designed to be intentionally malicious or dangerous, if they get 
outside of a controlled environment, there can be unexpected results." 

That was precisely what happened with the fathers of the computer 
virus: The exponential doubling of viral code can greatly magnify 
minor errors and become the difference between a harmless prank and a 
devastating attack. Unlike the simple technologies behind isolated 
attacks on the Internet, the ability to propagate adds a level of 
complexity that often stymies the virus writers themselves. Although 
many programs quickly fizzle out, others have far outgrown the 
intentions of their authors. 

Cohen had an inkling of much of the future when he first thought up 
the idea in November 1983 as a University of Southern California 
graduate student. During a weekly seminar on computer security, he 
conceived of a program that could infect other systems with copies of 
itself. 

"All at once, a light bulb came on, and I said, 'Aha!'" Cohen 
recalled. "Within a few seconds, I knew how to write the program and 
that it would work." 

His adviser at the time, Len Adleman--well known as a creator of 
public-key encryption and the "A" in a popular form of the security 
technology known as RSA (Rivest, Shamir & Adleman)--suggested that the 
programs were the digital analogy of viruses. The name stuck. 

The birth of a concept

In a paper published the next year, he defined a virus as "a program 
that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a 
possibly evolved copy of itself." Cohen proved that such a virus could 
spread through any system that allows information to be shared, 
interpreted in a general manner and given away, despite the presence 
of security technologies. 

To demonstrate its potential dangers, Cohen created a test program to 
see how quickly the virus could spread and undermine the security of a 
mainframe computer system. He implanted the program in a command that 
presents Unix file structures graphically, then conducted five attack 
runs. 

The virus managed to "gain system rights"--essentially seizing control 
of the computer--within an average of half an hour. The shortest run 
took five minutes. 

"It could spread with all the security technologies out there at the 
time," Cohen said. "The concept showed that the least trusted user is 
the weakest link, and the program can quickly spread up to the most 
trusted user." 

Cohen's work provided a concrete definition of a virus and showed how 
other programs, such as worms, are a subset of that definition. But a 
few viruslike programs existed before his research, and many of its 
theoretical underpinnings were established by John von Neumann, one of 
the founding fathers of computer science. 

Born in Hungary in 1903, von Neumann was responsible for seminal work 
in many branches of computer science, mathematics and physics, 
including logical analysis of a strategy called game theory and the 
newly born branch of quantum physics. Between 1948 and 1956, he 
extended much of the work of one of his peers, famed computer 
scientist Alan Turing. 

Turing had come up with an idea for a universal computing system, a 
logical construct that could solve a wide variety of problems by using 
a processor and a tape to store programs and data. Computers still use 
the basic division of labor Turing identified: processors and storage. 

Von Neumann expanded Turing's concept to the creation of a universal 
constructor, a system that could replicate itself. This 
self-reproducing automaton, as he called it, used tens of thousands of 
elements--each of which could be in any of 29 states--to create 
another automaton on an imaginary grid. The system was so complex that 
it took more than 40 years for even a limited version of it to be 
implemented in hardware. 

Survival of the fittest program

Von Neumann's work later served as the foundation for a new branch of 
computer science known as cellular automata theory, and it inspired 
other researchers to create simpler computer "creatures" and the field 
of artificial life. His pioneering research also spurred three Bell 
Labs researchers to put his ideas into action in the early 1960s. 

In August 1961, researcher Victor Vyssotsky invented a game, dubbed 
"Darwin," in which small programs competed with one another to 
dominate a digital landscape. His colleague Douglas McIlroy programmed 
much of the game, including the code that would run the simulation. 
The third researcher, Robert Morris Sr., created a lethal digital 
creature that evolved and passed along its successful attack to its 
progeny. 

"It was clear that by tinkering the rules to introduce a bit of 
uncertainty into the game, we could have revived it after Morris' 
devastating entry, but we had other things to do," said McIlroy, now 
an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Dartmouth 
College. The game ran on an IBM 7090 system and was largely forgotten. 

However, the researchers and their progeny were to have a profound 
impact on computers and the Internet. 

Morris went to work for the National Security Agency. In November 
1988, his son, Robert Jr., created the first worm to spread widely 
across the Internet. While "Darwin" didn't survive the evolution of 
its IBM 7090 computer system, the researchers' recreational activities 
led to the invention of a more popular game called "Core War," where 
players write battle programs in a language called Redcode and duke it 
out in a virtual-memory arena dubbed the Memory Array Redcode 
Simulator, or MARS. Many aficionados still play the game on the 
Internet. 

But those digital creatures were all contained in artificial 
environments. It took a different game to help introduce viruses to 
computers and spread infections worldwide. 

That game was "Animal," a program akin to "20 Questions," which became 
highly popular among mainframe computer operators in the 1970s. The 
game would ask a person to think of an animal and then ask questions 
for clues as to the type of creature it was. If the program guessed 
wrong, it would ask the player to provide a question and an answer 
that would differentiate the new animal. 

John Walker, a UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Calculator) systems 
programmer for a large multinational firm, created his own version of 
the game in 1974, improving it so that erroneous information one 
player enters could eventually be corrected by another. The game was 
an immediate hit. 

"I started getting calls from people at other UNIVAC installations 
asking for tapes of the game," he said. 

 From games to viruses

In the pre-Internet days, Walker found himself telling people to mail 
him a tape, onto which he would copy the program and return it. He 
quickly tired of the laborious process: "It was really annoying and 
got me thinking on how best to distribute the game. That's when I 
thought about making it self-reproducing." 

In January 1975, Walker created another program, "Pervade," which 
would hitch a ride with a new version of "Animal." Any time someone 
played the "Animal" game, Pervade would also start running to check 
directories, duplicate itself in any directory that didn't already 
have a copy and overwrite any older versions. 

Walker recalls reflecting on the implications of the program for a 
couple of months to ensure that he hadn't made any damaging errors. 
Then he released it. 

Within a week, UNIVAC administrators at another corporate office 
started reporting that "Animal" had suddenly appeared on their system. 
Weeks later, other companies discovered the program on their systems 
as well. 

"A few months later, a lot of people started talking about it, and 
that meant more people were asking for it," Walker said. "It 
propagated as much by word of mouth as by copying itself to new 
directories." 

The Pervade program stopped working when UNIVAC released a new version 
of the operating system that changed its directory structure. But 
Walker insists that a modified copy of his program could have easily 
overcome its new security features. 

"UNIVAC was putting forth all these security methods, and here was an 
example of a threat that all the defenses couldn't do anything about," 
he said in comments Cohen would echo a decade later. Walker went on to 
found Autodesk in the early 1980s, and he remains the largest 
individual stockholder in the company. 

In a testament to the unpredictable nature of viruses, even Walker 
guessed wrong about how long his self-replicating creation would last. 
He recently talked to an administrator of a Unisys 2200 system, a 
descendent of the UNIVAC computers, who reported that the program 
still runs on his machine. 

"It's still looking for file system tables that are 30 years out of 
date," Walker said. 

The host in the machine

Viruses proliferated exponentially with the popularity of desktop 
computers. Not only did individual computers enlarge the pool of hosts 
a virus could infect, but they also yielded a new techno-savvy 
generation armed with the knowledge to create such programs. 

Rich Skrenta fit the bill to a tee: A Pittsburgh-area ninth-grader in 
1982, he knew a lot about the Apple II and loved to use software to 
play practical jokes on his classmates. The then-teenager supplied his 
friends with Apple II programs to which he had added some custom 
"features," such as the machine's ability to shut down automatically 
after being used just a few times or to display a taunting message. 

"After I had done this a number of times, no one would take games from 
me anymore," said Skrenta, now the president of his own, 
soon-to-be-launched search start-up, Topix.net. "And so, I was 
puzzling on how to get my tricks onto their disks." 

That's when he got the idea to write a self-propagating program that 
would infect Apple II disks. Skrenta's idea for "cloner" programs--he 
didn't employ the term virus--would infect a popular command on the 
system disks used by the Apple II. The program he created, called Elk 
Cloner, counted how often a disk had been used and, on every fifth 
run, made the computer shut down or perform some other "trick." Every 
50th time the computer started up, Elk Cloner would display a little 
poem. 

Four years later, two Pakistani brothers, Amjad and Basit Farooq Alvi, 
created the first computer virus to infect IBM PCs. Known as the Brain 
virus, the brothers used the program as a piece of true viral 
marketing: Each copy caused a message to flash on the screen, 
advertising the brothers' company, Brain Computer Services of Lahore, 
Pakistan. 

"Beware of this VIRUS...Contact us for vaccination," stated the 
message, which can be found on their Internet site today. 

That was only the beginning. Although viruses and worms took more than 
a decade to emerge in significant numbers, they soared in subsequent 
years. By the end of 1990, about 200 viruses had been identified. 
Today, that number has jumped to more than 70,000. Although less than 
1 percent of those viruses have compromised computers on the Internet, 
more than 80 percent of companies suffered a digital infection, 
according to the Computer Security Institute. 

Symantec's Gordon said most virus creators--not unlike their 
predecessors--still don't understand the ability of the programs to 
spread throughout the Internet. "They tend to be curious--often 
articulate individuals with a variety of relationship and interaction 
styles," she said. 

Cohen, however, said the scientific heavy lifting for today's Internet 
viruses was done in the 1980s. Everything else, he said, is just 
mechanics. 

"Everything that we know now was known then," he said. "Everything we 
see now is just an engineering solution based on old science."  



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