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Date:      Sun, 13 Jun 2004 07:29:26 +1000
From:      Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy@optushome.com.au>
To:        Thordur Ivar <thib@mi.is>
Cc:        freebsd-security@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Hacked or not appendice
Message-ID:  <20040612212926.GL1596@cirb503493.alcatel.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <20040612130307.2c4483cb.thib@mi.is>
References:  <019101c45072$a8b9cfe0$3501a8c0@pro.sk> <20040612130307.2c4483cb.thib@mi.is>

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On Sat, 2004-Jun-12 13:03:07 +0000, Thordur Ivar wrote:
>I have on a CD a number of binarys ( sources actually ) ( e.g. ls,
>find, grep, awk, sed, locate e.t.c. ) and when I belive that a
>machine has been cracked I remove the network cable from that machine
>and mount the cdrom build the sources and start looking. If I need
>something in that process I put it on my USB memstick from a 'trusted
>machine' and move it by hand over.

[Please wrap your mail before 80 characters]

Why would you trust the toolchain on a potentially hacked machine?
There's an old paper by Ken Thompson that dicusses patching the C
compiler to recognize the login sources and re-introduce a backdoor -
even it was removed from the login sources.

You would be much better off booting a fixit CD-ROM and using that
rather than trusting anything on the potentially hacked system.

-- 
Peter Jeremy



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