System at War

8/7/2019 System at War

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/system-at-war 1/4

-=System at war=-

BEGIN

A long time ago, at a network far, far away...

There exists a system called “Kaypro”. This system is the dream home of all theprocesses. Every process in the network wants to live in it and fork their child processes.

But it is the time of intra-system war, as forces of the “Lord Brontok” tries to take overthe system with the most striking process called “root-rm”, a privileged root programwith the power to destroy an entire file system at a keystroke, and unfortunately he was

succeeded. He takes over the system from the “User Alliance”, the original creator anduser of the system.

This is not the first time the system is facing the evil forces of “Lord Brontok”. A longtime ago about 16000000 clock cycles, “Lord Brontok” attacks, but never succeeded andMoved to Chest by the protagonist process of that time called “avast.exe”. But after thefirst hang-up of the system “User Alliance” removed it, as it is demanding for morememory.Unfortunately, “User Alliance” made a greatest mistake of the system, “Lord Brontok”has now breached the Chest and came into execution again.

Before this, the system was the heaven for the processes. The two friendly and famousalliances of the system called “Free Software” and “Commercial Software” made thesystem intelligent. But due to some misunderstanding they dived into a fight formonopoly.

The famous process from the “Free Software” alliance, namely, “avast.exe” (the one whodefeated the “Lord Brontok”) forked a child process called “foo.exe”. “foo.exe” has thepower to “Heal the viruses till death” even in the critical system environment as he wasthe descendent of the Anti-virus family.

The process called “nod32.exe” from the “Commercial Software” alliance also forked theprocess, namely, “bar.exe”. She was so beautifully coded and syntactically correct neitherprocess in the system has seen. She is able to gain illegal access to system’s kernel andcan even pop-up the root terminal.

Both the processes were coded for each other as their name specifies “foo-bar”. They metby fate during a Round-Robin schedule and fall in love. They both created a pool of process called “FUBAR”, to fight against the “Lord Brontok”, as their alliances weredeleted by him. They have to avenge their fathers and make the system clean.



“foo.exe” becomes the Admin Commander of the processes and “bar.exe” became thefuzzer. When the “Lord Brontok” was made aware of the fact that the “foo-bar” are aboutto take revenge, he attacked.

The Admin commander (foo.exe) was feeling quite pleased with the progress of theattack when his XO called out.

“Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?”

“Hold your fire – that last power failure must have caused a trap through zero. It’s notusing any cpu time, so don’t waste signal on it.”

At last, “FUBAR” survived the attack. “foo.exe” was worrying about the next attack. Hehas to stop “Lord Brontok”, if not the core dump is imminent. He went to a friend

“firewall.exe” to know about the mysterious “Lord Brontok”.

“What shall I do to heal Brontok?” asked foo.exe.

“Take your father’s bytesaber, foo.” said firewall “It’s time to learn the ways of theSource now”.

“The… Source?” foo queried, wide-eyed.

“The Source – the cosmic template of the System, within which all knowledge and powercan be held. But you must always beware of the Dark Side…”

Later, after the meeting, foo.exe read-write the ways of writing source in his criticalsection.

Firewall.exe also suggest him to meet The Oracle “FAQ”, living somewhere in this hugesystem. Now, its time for foo.exe for the intra-systemial transmission.

He went to “search.exe” and queried for “FAQ” and search.exe replied$PATH=/usr/spool.

Foo.exe then went to $PATH to see FAQ.

As our hero entered /usr/spool he was met by a newsgroup of User protection bits.

“State your UID!” commanded by a burly syscall.

“We’re running under /usr/guest” said foo.exe. “This is our first time on the system.”

“Let’s see our temporary privilege bits, please.”

“Uh…”



“Lucky Dog, You’re free to go about your business. MOV along now.” said burly.

Foo.exe asked very important things about “Lord Brontok” to the Oracle “FAQ” and alsowrote the contents to his critical section.

After returning to $HOME, he started preparation for the attack to heal Brontok.exe.

Meanwhile, he received a transmission from “Lord Brontok” for him”

“@#$DF)*#@)$@#” a particularly unstructured piece of code.

“I will kill you, like your antecedents” decoded by his coroutine.

Then bar.exe in rage sends a transmission “#!@DW$TGQ$#!T#”(You’ll be deallocated)to the “Lord Brontok”. This transmission makes the Brontok angry and makes his mindto execute the deadly program “root-rm”.

“Are you sure you can tcptraceroute this transmission?” foo queried.

“Yes!” bar replied.

“Hurray, I traced him.” silly excited bar.exe said.

Then foo-bar disappeared through a nearby exit().

bar.exe being a fuzzer found a loophole to get into the fort of the “Lord Brontok”. Theyeventually, breached the security walls.

Foo.exe told the bar.exe what the FAQ said to him.

“FAQ told me that if we have to defeat the Brontok I will need the 20 clock cycles insingle round and since the system’s kernel is using Round-Robin with 10 clock cycles ina round we can never make it.” Said foo.exe.

“I know how to write a shellcode to rewrite the EBP of the stack, so you will be executed

twice” said bar.exe.

“cool” said foo.exe.

Foo.exe getting 20 clock cycled, wrote the kill code in the cache and plant it as the logicbomb. So, whenever the Brontok call code from gcwcd.dll, the bomb will explode.

Unfortunately Brontok.exe saw them in the cache and started attacks with the INT, HUP,ILL, XCPU signals and lastly with the dangerous KILL signal. However, luckily hewrote the bomb already.



“That’s the shutdown sequence if I ever saw one!” shouted bar.exe and ran into the shipwith the foo.exe close behind “Crank up the sysclock, foo!”.

“You said this crate is fast enough. Get outta here!” foo.exe said grimly to his navigationcoroutine.

“bar.exe, initialize this heap. I will try to keep their buffers full” said foo.exe.

“They’re firing at us!” shouted foo.exe “Can’t you do anything”

“Making the jump to system space takes time.” Navigation coroutine growled “Onemissed cycle and you could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames.”

Bright chunks of position-independent code flashed by as the ship jumped through thekernel page tables. The group emitted a sigh of relief as they indirected into free space.

Foo.exe then realized that he forgot to set the privileges for the bomb he planted.

“What the F..!” shouted bar.exe on foo.exe”

Foo.exe used his hacking knowledge to get into the terminal of the Brontok and executedthe command “chmod ugo+rwx bomb.exe”.

“That was simple, you must apologize to me.” Growled foo.exe

After 1200 clock cycles, foo.exe executed another command “grep brontok.exe /”

.:no such directory

They Healed the “Lord Brontok” till deletion and evil Brontok empire finally destroyedand his last words to foo-bar

MAY THE SOURCE BE WITH YOU!

Written By:

Ashwini kumar Malviya

IT, Final Year

SIRT&S

System at War

Documents

Transcript of System at War