Re:What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works
by fnordfnordfnord on Saturday March 11, 2017 @11:53AM
(#13846076)
>If you treat the software as a black box and only study run time behavior, you have no idea if you have tripped a countermeasure that silences the malicious behavior; if you study the control flow directly, you can look for such countermeasures.
It would be great to find such a countermeasure, and be able to trigger it reliably, or assert the behavior on a permanent basis. Considering that particular weakness of such countermeasures though, wouldn't the safest [for the attacker] default countermeasure likely be to simply crash the device?
Re:What the CIA WikiLeaks Dump Tells Us: Encryption Works
by maxerickson on Saturday March 11, 2017 @12:04PM
(#13846122)
Could be.
A user that knows about malicious code (which you would have to in order to trigger it to go silent) in a binary just shouldn't use the binary at all though.
The broader point is more important: compiled software isn't a black box, treating it like a black box is not the only or best way to analyze it.
If you were really worried about what a particular binary would do, trusting that the binary matched the source and studying runtime behavior would both be a waste of time compared to fully analyzing the binary in question.
If you treat the software as a black box and only study run time behavior, you have no idea if you have tripped a countermeasure that silences the malicious behavior; if you study the control flow directly, you can look for such countermeasures.