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Back Doors Mean Wide-Open Danger


Finding back doors before they're compiled into applications can save time and money

By Alex Handy
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October 16, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 2)
SAN FRANCISCO — Keep your friends close and your hackers closer. Right now, as you read this, it's entirely possible that one of your company's programmers is writing exploitable code into a front-line application. The practice is not uncommon, and both the open source world and internal corporate teams are constantly placed at risk by rogue coders. But finding back doors isn't impossible; tests can detect such code before it can harm deployed software.

Chris Wysopal, CTO and co-founder of Veracode, gave a speech at the IT Security World Conference and Expo here in mid-September, and in it he detailed the numerous methods and reasons for writing back doors. While the methods are diverse and their implementation specific, he explained that the reasons tend to be less ominous: Most hackers who write back doors do so simply because they can. Examples of Open Backdoors

Sometimes, hidden back doors can amount to a signature from a programmer: they're something the coder simply does with all of his or her applications. For the same reason some programmers hoard old manuals and software, others may add back doors into applications simply for the sake of knowing they still control their projects, long after they're complete.

And still other back doors are explicitly used for targeted attacks.

Wysopal showed numerous examples of back doors found in the wild during his talk. The tactics used in these examples, he noted, can be used to help development teams track down such exploits during code audits.

The first and easiest way to find back doors, said Wysopal, is using static analysis. Dynamic analysis requires the actual backdoor code to be in use during analysis, which according to him is quite rare. “You can scan programs for all hashing routines, such as crypto. Go back in the data flow and see what's going into the data routines. If there's any static values going in, that's a flag,” Wysopal explained, adding that this type of activity is indicative of a back door that includes simple hidden login names and passwords.




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