Before we delve into the intricacies of individual methods of anti-debugging let’s use this post to define the classes of anti-debugging that we will be discussing. While other classes may exist, the definition of these classes is an attempt to include the majority of anti-debugging methods in use today. There is some overlap between classifications and we may have left out some methods due to limited exposure or effectiveness.

API Based Anti-Debugging
API based anti-debugging is the most straightforward and possibly the easiest to understand for a typical developer. Using both documented and undocumented API calls, these methods query process and system information to determine the existence or operation of a debugger. From single line calls such as IsDebuggerPresent() and CheckRemoteDebugger() to slightly more complex methods including debugger detaching and CloseHandle() checks. These methods are generally trivial to add to an existing code base and many can even be implemented in as few as two or three lines.

Exception Based Anti-Debugging
Exception based anti-debugging is slightly different than your basic API based techniques. Many times when a debugger is attached to a process, exceptions are trapped and handled by the debugger without regard to passing the exception back to the application for continued execution. Occasionally these exceptions can even crash or terminate a process when run under a debugger and be handled gracefully when running clean. It is these discrepancies that makes exception based anti-debugging techniques possible.

Process and Thread Block Anti-Debugging
Some of the API based anti-debugging methods use published functions to query information from within the process and thread blocks for our running code. Many API based detections can be subverted within a debugger by hooking the API call and returning values that indicate a clean process. One way around this subversion is to directly query the process and thread blocks, bypassing the API calls. Direct analysis of the process and thread blocks, while more complex, can lead to a more accurate and high assurance result.

Modified Code Anti-Debugging
One of the methods that a debugger uses to signal a breakpoint is to insert a break byte into the running code at the location that it wishes to stop execution. The process execution breaks when this value is seen, giving control to the debugger. When the program is resumed, the breakpoint value is removed and replaced with the original byte, the execution backed up one byte, and the program is resumed. Detection of software based breakpoints can be achieved by analyzing the process for modifications from the expected norm.

Hardware and Register Based Anti-Debugging
A second way that a debugger can break the execution of a process is by using a hardware breakpoint. A hardware breakpoint relies upon CPU registers to store the pertinent information and to detect when the target break addresses are seen on the bus. A break interrupt is triggered at the appropriate time based on these register values. Reading or modifying the hardware can allow for the detection of a debugger.

Timing and Latency Anti-Debugging
Finally timing and latency can be used as an effective anti-debugging method. When executing a program within a debugger, specifically when single stepping, a much larger latency occurs between execution of instructions. This latency can be detected and compared against a reasonable threshold to detect the existence of a debugger attached to our process.

Each of the classes of anti-debugging outlined above has merit when used individually to protect a process. While none of them can be assured to ever protect a program from a determined reverse engineer or debugger, implementation of these techniques (or many of them if appropriate) can sufficiently slow down the debugging process and hopefully make the attacker spend his time on other, easier, ventures. In the remainder of this series on anti-debugging we will review in depth some of the more interesting methods of each of the above classes. So bring along your debugger and your development environment and let the games begin.

Economists have long understood the corollary concept of Coase's ceiling, a point above which organizations collapse under their own weight -- where hiring someone, however competent, means more work for everyone else than the new hire contributes. Software projects often bump their heads against Coase's ceiling: recall Frederick P. Brooks Jr.'s seminal study, The Mythical Man-Month (Addison-Wesley, 1975), which showed how adding another person onto a project can slow progress and increase errors.

What's new is something consultant and social technologist Clay Shirky calls "Coase's Floor," below which we find projects and activities that aren't worth their organizational costs -- things so esoteric, so frivolous, so nonsensical, or just so thoroughly unimportant that no organization, large or small, would ever bother with them. Things that you shake your head at when you see them and think, "That's ridiculous."

Sounds a lot like the Internet, doesn't it? And that's precisely Shirky's point. His new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, explores a world where organizational costs are close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely connected groups of unpaid amateurs can create an encyclopedia larger than the Britannica and a computer operating system to challenge Microsoft's.

Shirky teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, but this is no academic book. Sacrificing rigor for readability, Here Comes Everybody is an entertaining as well as informative romp through some of the Internet's signal moments -- the Howard Dean phenomenon, Belarusian protests organized on LiveJournal, the lost cellphone of a woman named Ivanna, Meetup.com, flash mobs, Twitter, and more -- which Shirky uses to illustrate his points.

The book is filled with bits of insight and common sense, explaining why young people take better advantage of social tools, how the Internet affects social change, and how most Internet discourse falls somewhere between dinnertime conversation and publishing.

Shirky notes that "most user-generated content isn't 'content' at all, in the sense of being created for general consumption, any more than a phone call between you and a sibling is 'family-generated content.' Most of what gets created on any given day is just the ordinary stuff of life -- gossip, little updates, thinking out loud -- but now it's done in the same medium as professionally produced material. Unlike professionally produced material, however, Internet content can be organized after the fact."

No one coordinates Flickr's 6 million to 8 million users. Yet Flickr had the first photos from the 2005 London Transport bombings, beating the traditional news media. Why? People with cellphone cameras uploaded their photos to Flickr. They coordinated themselves using tools that Flickr provides. This is the sort of impromptu organization the Internet is ideally suited for. Shirky explains how these moments are harbingers of a future that can self-organize without formal hierarchies.

These nonorganizations allow for contributions from a wider group of people. A newspaper has to pay someone to take photos; it can't be bothered to hire someone to stand around London underground stations waiting for a major event. Similarly, Microsoft has to pay a programmer full time, and Encyclopedia Britannica has to pay someone to write articles. But Flickr can make use of a person with just one photo to contribute, Linux can harness the work of a programmer with little time, and Wikipedia benefits if someone corrects just a single typo. These aggregations of millions of actions that were previously below the Coasean floor have enormous potential.

But a flash mob is still a mob. In a world where the Coasean floor is at ground level, all sorts of organizations appear, including ones you might not like: violent political organizations, hate groups, Holocaust deniers, and so on. (Shirky's discussion of teen anorexia support groups makes for very disturbing reading.) This has considerable implications for security, both online and off.

We never realized how much our security could be attributed to distance and inconvenience -- how difficult it is to recruit, organize, coordinate, and communicate without formal organizations. That inadvertent measure of security is now gone. Bad guys, from hacker groups to terrorist groups, will use the same ad hoc organizational technologies that the rest of us do. And while there has been some success in closing down individual Web pages, discussion groups, and blogs, these are just stopgap measures.

In the end, a virtual community is still a community, and it needs to be treated as such. And just as the best way to keep a neighborhood safe is for a policeman to walk around it, the best way to keep a virtual community safe is to have a virtual police presence.

Crime isn't the only danger; there is also isolation. If people can segregate themselves in ever-increasingly specialized groups, then they're less likely to be exposed to alternative ideas. We see a mild form of this in the current political trend of rival political parties having their own news sources, their own narratives, and their own facts. Increased radicalization is another danger lurking below the Coasean floor.

There's no going back, though. We've all figured out that the Internet makes freedom of speech a much harder right to take away. As Shirky demonstrates, Web 2.0 is having the same effect on freedom of assembly. The consequences of this won't be fully seen for years.

Here Comes Everybody covers some of the same ground as Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks. But when I had to explain to one of my corporate attorneys how the Internet has changed the nature of public discourse, Shirky's book is the one I recommended.

This essay previously appeared in IEEE Spectrum.

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Air Platform, Information Systems, Space Platforms, Human Systems

The technology within this topic is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services. Offerors must disclose any proposed use of foreign nationals, their country of origin, and what tasks each would accomplish in the statement of work in accordance with section 3.5.b.(7) of the solicitation.

OBJECTIVE: Develop visualization techniques for planning and execution of Cyberspace operations.

DESCRIPTION: Fulfilling the Air Force mission “… to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace” requires effective C2 tools for the observation, planning and execution of cyberspace operations. Conventional battlespace visualization tools were developed for the physical world (i.e., geospatially oriented), where the battlespace, weapons and effects are concrete, often observable entities. Cyberspace and its critical electronic infrastructures are an artificial world that must be created, modified and sustained by the warfighter. This artificial world of cyberspace has concrete links back to the physical world that shape the information landscape, affect the decision-making process, and control the communication channels crucial to C2.

Standard, geospatially oriented C2 tools are not suitable for providing cyber combatants with comparable situation awareness to understand events, evaluate options, and make decisions in the electromagnetic domain. The combatants in the cyber domain needs to be able to quickly see and understand not just the physical relationships of the traditional battlespace, but also the logical relationships and information dependencies in the abstract landscape of cyberspace. Cyber C2 visualizations need to provide information for strategy, tactics and execution of effects that may, or may not, have physical correlates. Examples of these cyber events include network attack detection, attack identification, damage assessment, denial of service (DOS) warnings, and information warfare or cyber-attack operations.

For example, a commander may be planning to intentionally disrupt a portion of his network to investigate a cyber-attack. He will need to understand what ripple effects will occur across the functionally diverse and geographically distributed network. These ripple effects will have both a cyber component (e.g., locations that will lose connectivity or suffer degraded performance characteristics) and a real-world component (e.g., information about enemy forces may be unavailable or delayed, reducing blue force effectiveness) that must be visualized, explored and tasked from within his C2 tools.

Decision makers will greatly benefit from innovative visualization tools that can improve their understanding of all aspects of the Cyber domain. These aspects include 1) the current state of the information environment, the physical and virtual battlespace and enemy and friendly capabilities and vulnerabilities; 2) the scope and scale of courses of action that affect information or information networks; 3) the primary effects and ripple effects of an operation in both the physical and cyber battlespaces, and 4) the risks for collateral damage associated with cyber warfare activities.

PHASE I: Identify cyberspace characteristics relevant to C2 visualization. Identify correlation methods and visualization techniques to understand battlespace, operations, and effects. Define metrics to evaluate efficacy. Document results in a written report, including mockups of proposed visualizations.

PHASE II: Construct a working prototype to demonstrate integrated visualization of cyber data showing 1) the status of information environment, 2) its effect on the conventional battlespace, and 3) the status of information operations. Evaluate effectiveness using metrics defined in Phase I.

PHASE III / DUAL USE: Military application: Additional military applications include command and control environments, like the Air Operations Centers (AOCs). Commercial application: Monitoring and defending infrastructures (e.g., financial and energy) against cyber-attacks. Visualization cyberspace is beneficial for security of commercial communication and information networks.

REFERENCES:

1. ‘Air Force leaders to discuss new ‘Cyber Command’

2. Laura S. Tinnel, O. Sami Saydjari, and Joshua W. Haines, An Integrated Cyber Panel System, IEEE Computer Society,

3. Anita D’Amico and Stephen Salas, Visualization as an Aid for Assessing the Mission Impact of Information Security Breaches, IEEE 2003.

4. Tim Bass, “Cyberspace Situational Awareness Demands Mimic Traditional Command Requirements,” AFCEA Signal Magazine, February 2000.

KEYWORDS: visualization, cyber, human factors, planning, situation awareness, command and control, HCI

Reference. SITIS Topic Details, Visualization for Command and Control of Cyberspace Operations

See also:  http://www.dodsbir.net/solicitation/sbir083/af083.doc

Squid and their relatives have eyes that are sensitive to polarised light and to them and are known to use it to signal to one another. Their predators on the other hand, like seals or whales, don't share this ability and cannot see the squids' signals.

Most of all, the polarised iridescent light, is not affected by the chromatophores and passes through unaltered. This means that camouflaged squid can have entire visual conversations while remaining invisible to passing predators. In the world of squid, conversations carry secrets wrapped in lies.

Special Session: Situation Management I

Paper: Complex Event Processing approach for strategic intelligence

Authors: Nicolas Museux, Juliette Mattioli, Claire Laudy and Helene Soubaras

Abstract: One of the key issues of strategic intelligence within a crisis situation is to build an early assessment of the situation, based on a context sensitive information interpretation and through a well constructed situation representation. Our proposal is based on the conjunction of a conceptual modelling to represent situations out of document analysis and a reactive rule-based modelling to analyse them according to a domain knowledge and a goal. This paper focuses on this Situation Analysis process. But we present our global approach and sum-up the Situation Representation and its objectives. We introduce the Complex Event Processing formalism used for the analysis and dynamic recognition of such situations. We illustrate our approach through a case study taken from what happened during the energy crisis in California in 2001.

Presenter Biography: Dr. Nicolas Museux is a research scientist in the PLATON lab, at THALES Research and Technology. He had his engineering diploma in computer science in 1998. Then he started his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science Systems and Control at the Computer Science Center of e’Ecole des Mines de Paris, and THALES Research and Technology. His Ph.D. focused on the application of constraint programming in distributing low-level digital signal processing programs onto multiprocessors architectures, to optimize data management and computing duration. After he obtained his Ph.D. in 2001, he worked until the end of 2004 on several projects in the PLATON lab linked with combinatorial optimization. Since 2005, Dr. Nicolas MUSEUX works on the Situation understanding research program. Its objectives are to identify, to specify and to design tools for situation model based reasoning in order to address situation analysis, risk assessment and situation projection.

OnAir has so far tested their calling/texting-only service on two aircraft--one operated by Air France, one by TAP Portugal--even though RyanAir announced plans that its planes would started being unwired with the service by late 2007. Still no word on that fleet progress.

Qantas will apparently launch cached Web browsing and limited Web email (probably through a proxy) along with instant messaging, with full Internet service coming "later in 2009." This is clearly due to a lack of satellite coverage that was just remediated a few weeks ago (see below). The first plane with limited service, a new A380, should be in flight 20-October-2008.

The Morning Herald seems to overstate the importance and scope of a complaint filed by the union representing American Airlines' flight attendants. The detailed coverage in the U.S. had more to do with the potential for issues, and likely attendants lack of interest in policing yet another media on the plane. Filtering doesn't work, the attendants probably already know, and this may just be a negotiating point with the airline.

On why Qantas is waiting until late 2009? This requires unwinding how OnAir gets its signal.

Aeromobile and OnAir both rely on Inmarsat satellites for their service. Both companies had several years ago staked their futures on the fourth-generation network Inmarsat was to inaugurate with three satellites that would use beamforming to allow precise delivery of nearly 500 Kbps per receiver, with hundreds or thousands of regions being able to be targeted from a single satellite. Inmarsat's third-gen network--don't confuse this with 3G cellular ground-based networks--can deliver about 64 Kbps per channel.

Now, unfortunately, Inmarsat was three years late on launching its trans-Pacific bird. While the company claims 85 percent coverage of the earth and 98 percent coverage of population, there's a big gap over the Pacific that also prevents them from having good overlap between the U.S. and Japan/China/Korea, as well as the southern Pacific, covering Australia. Since the biggest market for long-haul flights would likely be Australia, Japan, and China, traveling trans-Pacific or trans-hemispheric routes, that gap is rather large.

Aeromobile opted to build out a service, deployed only by Emirates airline as far as I can tell, that uses the 3G service since it was available, and most necessary equipment is already installed on most over-water planes. OnAir was waiting for 4G, which has necessitated a long wait, but allowed them to launch in Europe with a seemingly next-generation service. Given that OnAir is controlled by an airline-owned integration firm, SITA, and by Airbus, they're not going anywhere.

Inmarsat finally lofted its third satellite on Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 19-August-2008, and the launch and separation was reported as successful. Previously, the company has needed up to a year to verify and deploy its 4G satellites. (You can read extremely close coverage of the launch at a Web site devoted to space enthusiasm.)

However, the dirty little secret about Inmarsat's BGAN is that it costs a fortune to heft bandwidth across it. Thus, in-flight broadband over BGAN, if it's ever available, is going to be changed on an extremely high per-MB rate. None of the providers want to say this. This is in contrast to Row 44 (and, once, Connexion by Boeing), which relies on leased Ku-band transponders where they can fix costs and they require high volumes to keep per-bit costs efffectively low.

OnAir's launch of calling on Air France's service involves paying a few euros per minute for calls, which might help you understand what data costs could ultimately run.

Jon used a desktop computer attached to a GPS satellite simulator to create a fake GPS signal. Portable GPS satellite simulators can fit in the trunk of a car, and are often used for testing. They are available as commercial off-the-shelf products. You can also rent them for less than $1K a week -- peanuts to anyone thinking of hijacking a cargo truck and selling stolen goods.

In his first experiments, Jon placed his desktop computer and GPS satellite simulator in the cab of his small truck, and powered them off an inverter. The VAT used a second truck as the victim cargo truck. "With this setup," Jon said, "we were able to spoof the GPS receiver from about 30 feet away. If our equipment could broadcast a stronger signal, or if we had purchased stronger signal amplifiers, we certainly could have spoofed over a greater distance."

During later experiments, Jon and the VAT were able to easily achieve much greater GPS spoofing ranges. They spoofed GPS signals at ranges over three quarters of a mile. "The farthest distance we achieved was 4586 feet, at Los Alamos," said Jon. "When you radiate an RF signal, you ideally want line of sight, but in this case we were walking around buildings and near power lines. We really had a lot of obstruction in the way. It surprised us." An attacker could drive within a half mile of the victim truck, and still override the truck's GPS signals.

Italian free space optics test hits 1.2 terabits per second (in Italian, Google translation): Researchers in Pisa, Italy, along with colleagues from two Japanese institutions, crossed 1.2 Tbps in a test. Free space optics typically uses infrared lasers, and can work over a distance of kilometers.

More Canadian Wi-Fi health fears: This time in an island in Montréal. One of the concerned citizens: "This is something that is really under the radar. People do not know that long-term health hazards are associated with wireless technology." They don't know that because all verifiable, repeatable, well-conducted, academic tests so far indicate that there's no such health hazard associated with EMF. The concerned folks are raising an alarm about Wi-Fi being broadcast island wide, but are not paying attention, obviously, to the AM/FM radio, satellite radio, cellular, cordless, and thousand other wireless uses that are bombarding them right now, often at far higher signal levels.

Wi-Fi in a tub: I'm not going to say anything more.

QuickerTek adds antenna to 300 mW ExpressCard for MacBook Pro: Users of Apple's higher-end laptops can drop $200 to get a 300 mW Draft N (802.11n) ExpressCard and 5 dBi external antenna with a mounting clip. That's a lot of power, and it's important to recall that have a louder signal doesn't mean that distant base stations can necessarily hear you better. Draft N devices typically pair better listening (receive sensitivity) with higher transmission power, however.

Mac product ties location settings to Wi-Fi position: Centrix has updated its $29 Mac OS X location preferences program NetworkLocation to take advantage of Skyhook Wireless's Wi-Fi positioning data. You can now tie the package of settings that control what email account you use, iChat status, programs launched, disks mounted, and other factors, to where you're currently at.