The coder's worst nightmare (2016)
quora.com
quora.com
Excerpts:
> They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called 'Robin Hood' and 'Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as 'ghost jobs' (daemons, in Unix terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.
> They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and killed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was gunned, the following sequence of events took place:
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me!
id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men!
id1: Thank you, my good fellow!
> Finally, the system programmers did the latter - only to find that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted!
Quoted in the Jargon File: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/meaning-of-hack.html
Original story: https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/xerox.txt
How does Robin (id1) manage to print the "I am under attack" message? Shouldn't a kill be immediate?
Couldn't they just do something like sending a SIGSTOP to processes, or use killall in a tight loop? I get it's not Unix, but it seems reasonable similar concepts should exist.
Also, this is more in line with Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
In this story this isn't Unix but I imagine the same should apply. If you're trying to terminate something with extreme prejudice, it shouldn't get any chance to print anything.
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me!
Things which are pending completion of I/O won't die as soon as SIGTERM or SIGKILL are sent to them. If you have ever tried to kill a process which had open file handles on a stale NFS mount, you have experienced this behavior. Causing it to happen deliberately is a lot more challenging, as well as not having a process actually be BLOCKED due to I/O, but it was[1] doable.
[1] haven't tried to do this in about a decade, so won't speak about the currency of this approach, but back then, with some clever assembly and a kernel module, it was doable.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
In short, the premise of the talk is: if you add a self replicating change to any self-hosted compiler:
- You can 'teach' the compiler to do things that are never explicitly stated in their source code, like, in this article, making the compiler modify programs that meet specific predicates.
- You can not trust that your compiler hasn't been modified without bootstrapping it yourself. You can't trust a program without trusting its compiler; and since compilers are programs, well it's turtles all the way down.
To build a trusted compiler, you have to bootstrap one yourself from some trusted manner, usually from hand-written assembly. In C, this would be akin to writing a small C compiler in assembly, using that to compile tcc, using that to compile a slightly larger C compiler, and that to compile clang or gcc.
But in other more complex languages, such as Rust, bootstrapping is not as clear cut. There's the Reproducible Builds project, but afaict there exists no minimal small Rust compiler you can bootstrap the latest one from: You have to go back the the original OCaml one and compile up from there, or just trust that the publicly available build is secure (which it most likely is).
I guess the lesson is that it's possible to inject hidden self-replicating behavior into any significantly complex system.
https://manishearth.github.io/blog/2016/12/02/reflections-on...
He modifies rustc with a predicate that replaces the string 'hello world' with something else. The method used to replicate the change is basically a self-modifying quine.
If a machine is compromised, it can't be recovered without access to a known-good machine.
About halfway through, I was ready to copy the source to another computer and compile it there instead, and then suggest they nuke the original computer.
Turns out I was right. I just didn't know how right I was, which could be important for whatever they plan to do to the person who hacked that computer.
I suppose the university could impose some kind of sanctions such as revoking the student's degree.
>printed some white supremacy message
So I'm missing some details here maybe, but isn't that easier to ask the ex-student? He's probably responsible for all of this right? I don't see how anyone could get away with such thing.
If we are going to do detective guess-work (#) get the list of students who took the test. This level of effort to poison a research lab suggests to me the questions raised some uncomfortable issues with one of the respondents, who happened to have compiler abilities and the ability to read the root password on the post-it note on professors desk.
(#) which frankly is how most detectives dive in - that one seems suspicious, look for evidence.
The point would be to have it simply persist - and ideally for a little while too - but do nothing useful other than for example allocate an additional string on a local stack somewhere or something.
Absolute best case scenario would be to announce its existence one year after successful infiltration. :D
Putting the ‘Code’ into DaVinci Code.
Because he would bill for less time if he just showed up with the compiler binaries and copied them over the rogue ones?
"Let's take pristine source across the air-gap, and manipulate it on the infected computer where there is nonzero risk that the wrong compiler could somehow compile it."
What if the kernel, C library or utilities in /bin and /usr/bin had been involved too?
- the original creator created a self-replicating virus that would modify this one program, making it unmodifiable.
- actually it was in the compiler. woop. can't fix it without external fixes
- creates a backdoor into the system, could have fucked with the whole campus' data
- he would have gotten away with it too, if not for the fact that he made this supremacist text
So basically, dang.
It's their way of rebelling against the establishment by trolling. Since a teenager can no longer troll by assuming a leftist position, they must do so by pretending to be far right.
The story is also about a former grad student so he is well into adult hood but probably started off as one of those teenagers just "trolling".
Bullies think bullying is fun. Spectators think the event is fun. The bullied one pays the price (don't ask me how I know).
Some bullies never grow. They think it's fun, it's a way of expressing themselves.
Yes, neither racism nor bullying is normal, but exhibitor of these behaviors normalize it.
No need for the rebound accusation. If you're a teenager trying to be "edgy" it's not working.
Source: I went to a high school.
Some adults also feel powerless, and act like teenagers when given the opportunity.
If your focus is on the consistent operation of your systems (computer systems, social systems, etc) then you'll view their actions as attacks.
Sometimes there are real consequences, to be sure. Often the actions originate as a joke or a tweak of sorts, from people who have undeveloped concepts of empathy or responsiblity.
I don't think this is solvable. Moral absolutism is appealing in theory, but in practice, the effects are negative for all parties.
Of course there's a line which, when crossed, requires some kind of countervailing reaction. I don't know how to define that line, and I don't particularly trust others to do so either. Harm is real, but complicated.
A lot of damage can be done in the grey area between "offended" and "injured".
Which isn't to say such views should be tolerated, merely that the approach taken for interacting with such individuals really should account for that.
Well you're wrong. Allow me to lay this out as thoroughly as I can: Teenagers love being edgy, i.e. they love outrage for the sake of outrage. Hitler is outrageous (and well-known), thus he features prominently in "rebellious" humor. There's nothing wrong with this, because the premise of the joke rests precisely ON the fact that associated atrocities are inappropriate, or perhaps the logic is absurd. The jokes only work because Hitler, or more generally racism, or whatever, is wrong, furthermore that the general consensus is indeed that is is wrong. In fact, the more you kvetch, the funnier it is (to a teenager).
Now, perhaps modern "jokes" have you confused into thinking that comedy is just a smug-and-response between some wank and the audience, but this is not so. Personally I want grit, I want ambiguity, I want the full range of human experience out of life. Humor is many things, but it is at least a way of getting a handle on the unsavory inevitabilities of life. If you want to succumb to a fear-based ideology and spend your life constructing an unlivable, bureaucratic tangle of anti-boogeyman legislation, go ahead, but do the humans a favor and leave us out of it.
>There are actual consequences to people.
No, there aren't. No child is being unknowingly radicalized by inappropriate jokes (except maybe as a response to the twits taking up arms against them).
Most teenagers aren't advocating that Hitler had good ideas and that all black people should be lynched. Just because you have experience with these racists (hopefully you weren't one as a teenager) does not mean its ok to pretend that its fine to normalize this behavior
It used to be considered "normal" to bully and ruin the lives of gay people as a teenager too. Now you'll be hard pressed to find anybody under eighteen that would willingly do that to a classmate. Society has changed and shitty behavior like racism, antisemitism, and homophobia get called out as they should.
When they don't you end up with groups like the proud boys and closet white supremacist like the grad student in the article.
You're right, they aren't.
>the proud boys
ah yes, the infamous multi-cultural white supremacist group who marry black women
>No, there aren't. No child is being unknowingly radicalized by inappropriate jokes (except maybe as a response to the twits taking up arms against them).
OP already provided an example of consequences. Not radicalization of white kids but racial trauma to black kids.
The person being targeted by their harassment campaign can't know and doesn't care that they're minors or they think they're kidding or whatever.
The harm is the same and the right-wing radicalization of young white men online is an extremely serious problem. People in this age range have killed people for this idealogy!