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The End is Extremely F'ing Nigh

The last days: CIS583

It's exam week. Things began last Friday with the Attack-Defense lab for our Systems Assurance course. Things got off to a rough start when the opposing team's firewall had a network card die. Really, I don't know how to remotely overwrite the EPROM in a RealTek 81237 NIC. *subtle grin*.

Even after the card was replaced, their router wouldn't route. So it turned into them probing us for exploits. I compiled a version of ssh and sendmail that reported the wrong (and very old) versions on connect so that they might be stuck trying to exploit fixed holes. Fortunately they never penetrated our defenses.

Much of the week and weekends have been studying and writing papers. One that might be of interest to Doug and the other Mixers is an idea for using isolation kernels to prevent memory leakage from anonymity nodes. So basically, if someone r00ts your box, they can't see what your anonymity server is doing. I haven't really figured out all the stuff that the isolation kernel needs to check (obviously strict interrupt handling, buffer and cache cleaning, zero'ing of memory on deallocation). For the truly paranoid, the performance hit might even be worth it.

The CIS600 final

I probably should not have stayed after the final for that class. I got precisely 0 correct answers on the final exam. I'll be holding out for the curve, even though that goes against every academic fiber in my being. Consequently, I am wearing a holey polypropylene shirt right now, which doesn't have "fibers" in the traditional sense.

The rest of this week promises a lighter load. Just two exams, both relatively easy, and two papers. One of those is 90% written (just needs diagrams) and the other is a process that will write itself in CCS, pardon the pun.