[CentOS] an actual hacked machine, in a preserved state

Bennett Haselton bennett at peacefire.org
Tue Jan 3 23:32:42 UTC 2012


On 1/3/2012 2:10 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
> Here's the qualifying statement I made, in an attempt to preempt pedantic
> squabbles over my choice of arbitrary figures and oversimplified math:
>>> I am not a statistician,  but
> Here is a statement intended to startle you into re-examining your position:
>>> Simplistic probability puts the odds of success
>>> at 50% - either the attacker gets it right, or they don't.

Oh, did you mean something like, "Let's pick any value p as the 
probability of the attacker getting in by brute force in a given hour"?  
OK, that's different.  But it's still missing the point that if the odds 
of an event happening in the next year are less than the Earth crashing 
into the Sun, then it's not worth worrying about.

There's a more basic error in your math.  If there are two ways X and Y 
to attack a server, and X has a 1 in 100 chance of succeeding and Y has 
a 1 in 10^10 chance of succeeding, then if you reduce the chances of Y 
succeeding to 1 in 10^20, that's only an order of magnitude change in 
the likelihood of Y, *not* an order of magnitude change in the overall 
chance of a break-in, which changes by a negligible amount.
>>> Here's the intended take home message:
>>> The next guess has the same
>>> rough odds of being correct as the 100563674th guess.
> Yes, you have to worry about a brute force attack succeeding, every hour of
> every day that you give it a window to knock on.
>
> Here is you nitpicking over figures; acknowledging the opportunity for an
> improvement of several orders of magnitude and disregarding it, stuck in
> your misconceptions; and wholly missing the point.
>> Actually, each time you make a guess and it's wrong, the probability of
>> success goes up slightly for your next guess.  Imagine having 10 cups
>> with a ball under one of them.  The probability of turning over the
>> right cup on the first try is 1/10.  If you're wrong, though, then the
>> probability of getting it right on the next cup goes up to 1/9, and so on.
>>
>> But it's all a moot point if there are 10^24 possible passwords and the
>> odds of finding the right one in any conceivable length of time are
>> essentially zero.
>>
>>> Of course, no amount of guessing will succeed on a system that doesn't
>>> accept passwords.   System security, in terms of probability, seems to
> be
>>> an 'every little bit helps' sort of endeavour.
>> Well it depends on how literally you mean "every little bit" :)  If the
>> chance of a break-in occurring in the next year from a given attack is 1
>> in 10^10, you can reduce it to 1 in 10^20, but it's already less likely
>> than your data center being hit by a meteorite.  The real problem is
>> that it takes away from time that can be used for things that have a
>> greater likelihood of reducing the chance of a break-in.  If I had taken
>> the advice about ssh keys at the beginning of the thread, I never would
>> have gotten to the suggestion about SELinux.
>>
>> Bennett
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> I'm moving on from this - much better men than I have tried and failed here.
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