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How to 0Wn the Internet in Your Spare Time

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How to 0Wn the Internet in Your Spare Time USENIX Association Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Security Symposium San Francisco, California, USA August 5-9, 2002 THE ADVANCED COMPUTING SYSTEMS ASSOCIATION © 2002 by The USENIX Association All Rights Reserved For more information about the USENIX Association: Phone: 1 510 528 8649 FAX: 1 510 548 5738 Email: [email protected] WWW: http://www.usenix.org Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein. How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time Stuart Staniford∗ Vern Paxsony Nicholas Weaver z Silicon Defense ICSI Center for Internet Research UC Berkeley [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract 1 Introduction If you can control a million hosts on the Internet, you can do enormous damage. First, you can launch dis- The ability of attackers to rapidly gain control of vast tributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks so immensely numbers of Internet hosts poses an immense risk to the diffuse that mitigating them is well beyond the state-of- overall security of the Internet. Once subverted, these the-art for DDOS traceback and protection technologies. hosts can not only be used to launch massive denial of Such attacks could readily bring down e-commerce sites, service floods, but also to steal or corrupt great quantities news outlets, command and coordination infrastructure, of sensitive information, and confuse and disrupt use of specific routers, or the root name servers. the network in more subtle ways. Second, you can access any sensitive information We present an analysis of the magnitude of the threat. present on any of those million machines—passwords, We begin with a mathematical model derived from em- credit card numbers, address books, archived email, pirical data of the spread of Code Red I in July, 2001. We patterns of user activity, illicit content—even blindly discuss techniques subsequently employed for achiev- searching for a “needle in a haystack,” i.e., information ing greater virulence by Code Red II and Nimda. In this that might be on a computer somewhere in the Internet, context, we develop and evaluate several new, highly vir- for which you trawl using a set of content keywords. ulent possible techniques: hit-list scanning (which cre- ates a Warhol worm), permutation scanning (which en- Third, not only can you access this information, but you ables self-coordinating scanning), and use of Internet- can sow confusion and disruption by corrupting the in- sized hit-lists (which creates a flash worm). formation, or sending out false or confidential informa- tion directly from a user’s desktop. We then turn to the to the threat of surreptitious worms that spread more slowly but in a much harder to detect In short, if you could control a million Internet hosts, “contagion” fashion. We demonstrate that such a worm the potential damage is truly immense: on a scale where today could arguably subvert upwards of 10,000,000 In- such an attack could play a significant role in warfare ternet hosts. We also consider robust mechanisms by between nations or in the service of terrorism. which attackers can control and update deployed worms. Unfortunately it is reasonable for an attacker to gain con- In conclusion, we argue for the pressing need to de- trol of a million Internet hosts, or perhaps even ten mil- velop a “Center for Disease Control” analog for virus- lion. The highway to such control lies in the exploita- and worm-based threats to national cybersecurity, and tion of worms: programs that self-propagate across the sketch some of the components that would go into such Internet by exploiting security flaws in widely-used ser- a Center. vices.1 Internet-scale worms are not a new phenomenon [Sp89, ER89], but the severity of their threat has rapidly grown with (i) the increasing degree to which the In- 1 We distinguish between the worms discussed in this paper— ∗Research supported by DARPA via contract N66001-00-C-8045 active worms—and viruses (or email worms) in that the latter require yAlso with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University some sort of user action to abet their propagation. As such, they tend to of California, Berkeley. propagate more slowly. From an attacker’s perspective, they also suf- zAdditional support from Xilinx, ST Microsystems, and the Cali- fer from the presence of a large anti-virus industry that actively seeks fornia MICRO program to identify and control their spread. 5 5 5 5 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 v v c c t t n n 0 L c c e e o o L 9 a a 1 1 0 9 N 1 1 O O N N D D J J N 0 1 B g t B 2 p p l L c 0 L u e e u 0 g J A S S O g 0 n i n 0 i Code Red I v2 k 0 2 k c 0 c a 5 a Code Red I v2 t Code Red II t t 1 t A A Nimda Code Red II s s t t s s 0 o o Nimda 0 H 0 H 0 e 1 0 t e t 0 o 0 o m 1 m e e 0 R R 0 t 0 t c 5 0 c n 0 i n t 5 i s t i s i D D 0 0 020406080 050 100 150 Days Since Sept. 20, 2001 Days Since July 18, 2001 Figure 1: Onset of Code Red I v2, Code Red II, and Nimda: Figure 2: The endemic nature of Internet worms: Number Number of remote hosts launching confirmed attacks corre- of remote hosts launching confirmed attacks corresponding to sponding to different worms, as seen at the Lawrence Berkeley different worms, as seen at the Lawrence Berkeley National National Laboratory. Hosts are detected by the distinct URLs Laboratory, over several months since their onset. Since July, they attempt to retrieve, corresponding to the IIS exploits and 139,000 different remote Code Red I hosts have been con- attack strings. Since Nimda spreads by multiple vectors, the firmed attacking LBNL; 125,000 different Code Red II hosts; counts shown for it may be an underestimate. and 63,000 Nimda hosts. Of these, 20,000 were observed to be infected with two different worms, and 1,000 with all three worms. (Again, Nimda is potentially an underestimate because ternet has become part of a nation’s critical infrastruc- we are only counting those launching Web attacks.) ture, and (ii) the recent, widely publicized introduction of very large, very rapidly spreading Internet worms, surreptitious worms. These spread more slowly, but in a such that this technique is likely to be particularly cur- much harder to detect “contagion” fashion, masquerad- rent in the minds of attackers. ing as normal traffic. We demonstrate that such a worm today could arguably subvert upwards of 10,000,000 In- We present an analysis of the magnitude of the threat. ternet hosts. We begin with a mathematical model derived from em- pirical data of the spread of Code Red I v2 in July and Then in Section 6, we discuss some possibilities August, 2001 (Section 2). We then discuss techniques by which an attacker could control the worm using employed for achieving greater effectiveness and viru- cryptographically-secured updates, enabling it to remain lence by the subsequent Code Red II and Nimda worms a threat for a considerable period of time. Even when (Section 3). Figures 1 and 2 show the onset and progress most traces of the worm have been removed from the of the Code Red and Nimda worms as seen “in the wild.” network, such an “updatable” worm still remains a sig- nificant threat. In this context, we develop the threat of three new techniques for highly virulent worms: hit-list scanning, Having demonstrated the very serious nature of the permutation scanning, and Internet scale hit-lists (Sec- threat, we then in Section 7 discuss an ambitious but tion 4). Hit-list scanning is a technique for accelerat- we believe highly necessary strategy for addressing it: ing the initial spread of a worm. Permutation scanning the establishment at a national or international level is a mechanism for distributed coordination of a worm. of a “Center for Disease Control” analog for virus- Combining these two techniques creates the possibility and worm-based threats to cybersecurity. We discuss of a Warhol worm,2 seemingly capable of infecting most the roles we envision such a Center serving, and offer or all vulnerable targets in a few minutes to perhaps an thoughts on the sort of resources and structure the Cen- hour. An extension of the hit-list technique creates a ter would require in order to do so. Our aim is not to flash worm, which appears capable of infecting the vul- comprehensively examine each role, but to spur further nerable population in 10s of seconds: so fast that no discussion of the issues within the community. human-mediated counter-response is possible. We then turn in Section 5 to the threat of a new class of 2So named for the quotation “In the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame.” 2 An Analysis of Code Red I a monthly resurgence, as seen in Figure 2. Why it con- tinues to gain strength with each monthly appearance re- mains unknown.3 The first version of the Code Red worm was initially seen in the wild on July 13th, 2001, according to Ryan We call this model the Random Constant Spread (RCS) Permeh and Marc Maiffret of Eeye Digital Security model.
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