From: Dave Aitel (daveimmunityinc.com)
Date: Tue Apr 11 2006 - 14:05:43 CDT

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The major weakness with HIDS is still the extremely tiny market share
any of them has managed to get. :>

I would imagine one hard thing with a Determina type solution is any
kind of code that doesn't lend itself to modification or static
analysis. Python, PHP, .Net or Java code, for example, would be
extremely hard to profile looking at basic code blocks. And the
problem with any anomoly based system is that when something goes
wrong, you have no real way to describe to the user what went wrong or
why. So you end up on the signature treadmill again, taking every
basic block and applying little if statements to the end of them to
check for particular vulnerabilities - not because you can't protect
the machine already, but because you need to tell the user exactly
what is going on. And, of course, checking basic blocks doesn't
protect you at all from heap overflows or other techniques when used
to change variables themselves - it just prevents you from changing
execution path. But execution path and "give me admin" can be two
different things.

It's potentially the lack of "completeness" and the managability
issues which are causing the market to say "Let's just wait for MS to
fix their own stuff".

Just a few thoughts while everyone spends time debugging the thousand
and one IE bugs. :>

- -dave

redsand wrote:

> Black Security is also currently doing some audits on the Determina
> Software Suite. Nothing has come of it yet but hopefully some
> positive results will come out of our testing soon. Any
> information may/hopefully will make it to our blogs or a formal
> piece of documentation.
>
> In the sales meeting, a Determina rep even claimed that ISS had a
> hack for it but couldn't prove it.
>
> On Tue, 2006-04-11 at 17:43 +0200, pageexecfreemail.hu wrote:
>
>> On 10 Apr 2006 at 16:13, Knape, Joe wrote:
>>
>>> My "group" has also been looking at a "suite" of products that
>>> includes a "Memory Firewall" and "LiveShield" from a company
>>> called Determina. They make some bold claims and I've been
>>> testing it in a lab setup but I'd like to hear if anyone has
>>> been using it in a real-world environment?
>>
>> Determina's product is based on the research done at MIT under
>> the DynamoRIO project. google for "program shepherding" (and the
>> mispelled "sheperding" version) to find all you wanted to know.
>> in my opinion, program shepherding is the only other technology
>> that measures up to PaX, and for now it does even more in fact
>> (deterministic ret2libc attack prevention).
>>
>> unfortunately source code has never been published, so some
>> claims of security cannot be verified (e.g., their research paper
>> mentions then unresolved issues with multithreaded apps).
>>
>

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