Fri Jan 15 11:43:40 EET 2021
Bitcoin trivia
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency:.
In our humble opinion it is more like crypto gold rather than currency, because it doesn't support fast transactions.
One of its main advantages is that the number of coins has known upper bound, preventing inflation.
In addition it is decentralized, making it "government resistant".
According to [1] it was invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto and started in 2009.
Its market capitalization is $713,435,159,726 (7.1 * 10^11) and just for comparison the GDP of Bulgaria is 67.93 billion (68 * 10^9) and Tesla's market capitalization is $800 billion (800 * 10^9).
We find it ironic that the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto is 23rd richest person in the world on January 4, 2021 :)
Unless otherwise stated, all dates apply to sources of Fri 15 Jan 2021.
Fri Oct 9 14:02:03 EEST 2020
Closed vs open source in light of the windows leak of 2020-09-25
Closed vs open source in light of the windows leak of 2020-09-25
There is debate which is more secure: closed or open source.
Since the answer is very complicated and depends on many factors, we are over simplifying things.
On 2020-09-25 microsoft's windows source leaked [1].
Closed source advocates claim closed source is more secure, since the closed is secret.
Q1: To what extent the m$ leak disproves the above claim about secrecy?
XXXfix
Assume that in the near future the number of m$ vulnerabilities:
- Greatly increase or
- Stay at the same level or
- Greatly decrease XXX?
Could this be related to the leak and what conclusions follow?
Sat Oct 3 13:47:00 EEST 2020
From the history of Microsoft (part 1)
From the history of Microsoft (part 1)
by Georgi Guninski Sat 03 Oct 2020 08:51:30 AM UTC, version 1.0.1
History is written by the winners, so here we write:
The software giant's Korean-language version of Visual Studio .Net carries the virulent Nimda computer virus to Asia.
Contaminates all other software with Hippie GPL rubbish. Microsoft CEO and incontinent over-stater of facts Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," during a commercial spot masquerading as a interview with the Chicago Sun-Times on June 1, 2001.
The Halloween documents comprise a series of confidential Microsoft memoranda on potential strategies relating to free software, open-source software, and to Linux in particular, and a series of media responses to these memoranda. Both the leaked documents and the responses were published by Eric S. Raymond in 1998.
%RIP Windows Phone, we are not crying much.
Its description mostly contained garbled text. Links for more information, help, and support were filled in with gibberish URLs with ".gov," ".mil," and ".edu" domains.
2001: Linux is cancer, says Microsoft.
2019: Hey friends, ah, can we join the official linux-distros mailing list, plz?
We tried to speak up, the oss vendor crowd liked m$.
- Closed source, source leaked and widely open. Possibly to fit Microsoft better in the so called open source community, unknown forces leaked m$' sources. MS hacked! Russian mafia swipes WinME source? 27 Oct 2000
On 2020-09-25 leaker billgates3 wrote, adding insult to injury:
"I created this torrent for the community, as I believe information should be free and available to everyone, and hoarding information for oneself and keeping it secret is an evil act in my opinion," the leaker said, adding that the company "claims to love open source so then I guess they'll love how open this source code is now that it's passed around on BitTorrent."
Fri Sep 11 14:04:06 EEST 2020
Text comics 1 (2020-09-11)
She: Did you know your gmail password reveals your personality? He: Really? My password is: E!=m*c^2 NSFW sha gi iba She: Your personality type is INTP. He: This can't be, assembler interrupts INT take numeric argument. Some remarks: 1. We have seen NSFW passwords on the internetz. 2. INTP exists. 3. Assembler interrupts really take numeric argument. 4. sha gi iba is not very random is certain language.
Mon Jun 1 09:19:29 EEST 2020
Exploitability of the integer overflows in djbdns 1.05?
Exploitability of the integer overflows in djbdns 1.05? TLDR: Are the integer overflows in djbdns 1.05 exploitable? Background: there are integer overflows and memory corruption in the library functions of qmail 1.03. For reference see [1] [2]. Some of the qmail vulnerabilities (integer overflows and negative index???) are present in djbdns 1.05. For example in alloc.c of djbdns: ==== /*@null@*//*@out@*/char *alloc(n) unsigned int n; { char *x; n = ALIGNMENT + n - (n & (ALIGNMENT - 1)); /* XXX: could overflow */ ===== This clearly overflows for n= -1 for example. It is natural to write an integer overflow, but documenting easy to fix security bug is beyond our understanding. Reachability of the bugs is not clear and might require gigabytes of memory to hit the problems by encoding integer in unary. In addition djbns limits the memory usage by |softlimit|, but we are not sure the limits are on all vulnerable programs. An island of tractability could be |alloc(atoi())| or |alloc(size * count)| Is djbdns exploitable by any of the qmail bugs? [1] http://www.guninski.com/where_do_you_want_billg_to_go_today_4.html [2] https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/05/19/8
Thu May 21 12:51:20 EEST 2020
Short notes on qmail security guarantee
Short notes on qmail security guarantee Disclaimer: written in hurry, could be wrong. djb offers monetary bounty for verifiable qmail exploit, called "qmail security guarantee" [1]. He hasn't awarded the bounty yet, despite several vulnerabilities found by us in 2005 [2] and in 2020 [3] Qualys discovered that at least one of the vulnerabilities works in default qmail install. Both of these vulnerabilities require more that 4GB memory. djb's main argument is that nobody gives a lot of memory to qmail-smtpd (and as djb might missed to all other qmail- components). We believe that the claim of memory limit is wrong for the following reasons: 1. qmail's install documentation doesn't mention memory limits 2. Qualys claims that their exploit works on the default install of all packages they have seen (and all package maintainers have missed memory limits). 3. djb shouldn't assume that 4-8GB will be enough for the normal functioning of qmail. In theory libc might require more RAM in the future. Currently mobile phones have 32+GB RAM and there is clear trend in grow of RAM. 4. By common sense, distributing software with known vulnerabilities is bad practice. 5. AFAIK djb teaches students about coding and security and he better lead by example of good coding. [1] https://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html [2] http://www.guninski.com/where_do_you_want_billg_to_go_today_4.html [3] https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2020/05/19/8
Fri Mar 13 13:43:06 EET 2020
Today is the first day of the rest of your life, enjoy it.
Sat Feb 15 18:53:44 EET 2020
Corona virus and Bill Gates and Windows
There is conspiracy theory that Bill Gates is related to the Corona Virus, search the web. We believe this theory is false, but Bill is responsible for the catastrophic epidemy Windows. Hopefully the Windows epidemy will vanish, mainly due to the androids and other viruses eating it.
Mon Dec 9 15:18:33 EET 2019
Shell wildcards considered dangerous?
Shell wildcards considered dangerous? Remote version of this affects wu-ftpd from 2003: https://www.debian.org/security/2003/dsa-377 Summary: For trusted command PROGRAM, executing PROGRAM *.EXT may lead to arbitrary code execution, e.g. for PROGRAM=EXT=tar The main idea is the wildcard to add program options. Open problem: Are popular programs other than tar vulnerable? Since shell wildcards are unlikely to change, should best practice include not using *.EXT in shell? Example exploit vector: starting program in untrusted directories. Poc: ==== $rm -rf /tmp/1 ;mkdir /tmp/1 ; cd /tmp/1 ; tar cf a.tar /etc/issue $ : > --to-command="yes .tar" #end creating, starts PoC tar xf *.tar #.tar (repeats) ====