full-disclosure - The 'good worm' from HP

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Message-ID: <200408232031.i7NKVNUZ029892@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu)
Subject: The 'good worm' from HP 

On Mon, 23 Aug 2004 01:34:32 BST, The Central Scroutinizer said:
> Would it not be better to have a standard secure backdoor provided by a 
> security package that could downloaded or installed by disk and works hand 
> in hand with port scanning software, if this is really necassary. I am

No, it would not be a good idea.

> supprised Microsoft have not released such a peice of software; maybe a 
> third party have.

Many third parties have done so, going all the way back to BackOrifice.

Think it through - there's 2 basic possibilities:

1) The machine is a Windows machine that's centrally administered and
controlled via Active Directory or similar system, as in many corporate
environments. In the AD world, it's well understood how to push fixes via Group
Policy, and other central-management schemes already have their own schemes for
doing it (even if it's a 'for i in `cat boxes.to.update`; do ssh $i...').
So in these environments, you don't need a backdoor.

2) The box isn't a member of an Active Directory or other similar
distributed-management scheme.  In this case, you don't want a back
door, because you have no sane way to validate who's doing the push of
software.  So you can't securely use a backdoor.

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