Evolution is punctuated equilibria

Guest editorial by Dino Dai Zovi

In evolutionary biology, the theory of punctuated equilibiria states that evolution is not a gradual process but instead consists of long periods of stasis interrupted by rapid, catastrophic change.  This is supported by fossil evidence that shows little variation within a species and new species that appear to come out of nowhere.  These changes are found to occur in small groups on the periphery of the central population where selection pressures are higher and often in response to changes in the external environment.  Eventually those peripheral groups replace the dominant species in an abrupt change.  While this theory has also been applied to the social sciences and business, it also applies to Internet security.

In the late 80’s, it was the “summer of love” era on the Internet.  Research institutions and universities were freely connecting to each other in a way that would make anyone of modern Internet sensibilities blush.  Internet sites regularly engaged in risky behavior, including exchanging traffic without the use of a protective firewall to protect against accidental infections (as such things were rare in those days).  Most users used weak passwords and some (Richard Stallman, notably) used none at all.  And then, just like in the Guns N’ Roses music video, the party was unceremoniously ended in the sudden cold November rain.  The Morris Worm swept through the Internet, taking machines down faster than anyone could imagine.  The era of innocence and non-disclosure of security vulnerabilities on the Internet had come to a close.

After the Internet worm, a variety of organizations were quickly established in order to track and address vulnerabilities in the Internet infrastructure.  The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was established to handle any similar situations and a variety of mailing lists such as Phage, the Zardoz Security Digest, and Core Security Mailing List were established to discuss and track security vulnerabilities.  All of these lists and groups, however, were closed communities and the CERT security advisories were light on details in fear that revealing full details would enable attackers.  Thus began the era of partial-disclosure of security vulnerabilities.

A small full-disclosure movement began to grow on the periphary of the Internet.  This community believed that CERT was doing the community a disservice by not pressuring vendors to address vulnerabilities and revealing full information because system administrators were not able to determine whether they were vulnerable or not and should take the potentially disruptive risk of patching security vulnerabilities.  With full-disclosure, all parties are notified of the vulnerability at the same time.  Vendors are pressured to address serious vulnerabilities quickly and users have enough information to decide whether they should work around the vulnerability and/or apply the patch when it becomes available.  This community was centered around the Bugtraq mailing list.  This community quickly grew through the mid 90’s and early 2000’s until it became the dominant method of vulnerability disclosure on the Internet.

If the late 80’s was the era of free love on the Internet, the late 90’s and early 2000’s was the era of free exploits.  Fully working exploits for serious vulnerabilities were regularly published on Bugtraq often as part of the disclosure of the vulnerability.  These were often remote privileged code execution exploits in serious Internet infrastructure like BIND, SSH, NCSA HTTPD, Sendmail, and Apache.  These exploits allowed administrators to easily test if they were vulnerable or not.  If they ran the exploit and they got a remote shell, they were definitely vulnerable.  Similarly, if someone wanted to take joyrides on the Internet, all they had to do was subscribe to Bugtraq, wait for an exploit to be posted, and then start scanning for vulnerable machines.  Thus were “script kiddies” born.  This environment continued through the early 2000’s.

The early to mid-2000’s could be considered the hangover from the free love 80’s and free exploit 90’s of the Internet.  Instead of Internet worms being a one-time event, they became an almost regular occurrence with ILOVEYOU (May 4, 2000), Code Red (July 13, 2001), Code Red II (August 4, 2001), Nimda (September 18, 2001), SQL Slammer (January 24, 2003), Blaster (August 12, 2003), and many others in between.  Many of these worms used exploits that had been posted publicly to Bugtraq to spread.  Clearly something was not right.  This onslaught of Internet-crippling worm outbreaks quickly brought about several evolutions in Internet security: “responsible” disclosure, the home router firewall, and Microsoft’s Security Push and Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL).  It was no longer enough to respond to security vulnerabilities and incidents as they happened; Internet security required proactive measures to protect against future disasters.

From 2003 until roughly the present, “responsible” disclosure and the duality of offensive security research and defensive security products have driven the security industry forward.  Security researchers have investigated and discovered volumes of security weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and attacks.  All of these have required security patches, restructuring, and risk mitigating technologies née product opportunities: anti-virus, firewalls, intrusion detection/prevention, patch management, etc.  Hundreds of vulnerabilities have been “responsibly” disclosed and patched.  Patching has become a monthly Shamanistic ritual for most IT departments.  There are now defensive security products to defend against every possible perceived security threat (imagined and real).

With all of this, Internet malware has only become more prevalent on users’ systems.  The United States Departments of Commerce, State, and Defense, have sustained targeted attacks and on multiple occasions detected large amounts of sensitive information being remotely extracted from their networks.  There is a serious DNS cache poisoning vulnerability that currently affects 50% of the nameservers on the Internet, almost a month after the issue has been disclosed throughout the tech and mainstream media and a week after a highly-effective exploit for it has been publicly released.  The Internet security community is holding its breath waiting for (hoping for?) widespread attacks, perhaps to justify their continued existence.

Clearly, we are not any closer to securing the Internet, if that is even possible.  If anything, the dangers on the Internet have gotten worse as the malicious actors have changed from joyriding teenagers to Internet worms to espionage and organized crime.

Right now, Internet security is due for another period of rapid change.

* Dino Dai Zovi is an information security professional, researcher, and author.  He is perhaps best known in the security and Mac communities for discovering the vulnerability and writing the exploit to win the first PWN2OWN contest at CanSecWest 2007.  He publishes the Trail of Bits blog and can also be found on Twitter.