Book Review


Silence on the Wire
A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks

Michal Zalewski
No Starch Press, 2005, 281 pages

  name

J ust when you thought it was safe to go back on the Internet, Michal Zalewski goes and lists some new ways an attacker can get information about your computer. It's not necessary to plant a trojan on someone's Windows computer to get information; just monitoring their keystroke timing, or monitoring the LEDs on their modem or network card, Zalewski warns, can give enough information to make you dangerous. Information is leaking from your computer and your network in dozens of ways. Even though analyzing it may only retrieve a fraction of a bit from each packet, it can greatly reduce the search space for cracking a user's ssh session. Passive fingerprinting can also be used to track users and map out even the most well-protected network. Zalewski also describes, in non-technical terms, his original research that showed how to use strange attractor analysis of IP initial sequence numbers to identify a user's operating system, which could lay the groundwork for an attack. Zalewski was well known on the Internet in security mailing lists like Bugtraq back in the days when it was useful; although it's not really a field guide, this well-written but relatively nontechnical book uses a narrative, jargon-free style to introduce new network administrators to a class of security problems that they might not have considered.
name
Created July 15, 2007 Back