[/font][/b]superworms and cryptovirology full seminar material
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Understanding the potential extent of future attacks is the key to successfully protecting against them. Designers of protection mechanisms must take into account the potential ferocity and sophistication of viruses that are just around the corner. That's why we think that the potentially destructive capabilities of fast-running worms such as the Warhol worm, Flash worm and Curious Yellow need to be scanned to the fullest extent possible. When re-visiting some past virus techniques, we can find some using cryptographic tools in their malicious activity. This alarming property, combined with the speed of so-called "superworms", is explored in the present work.
The most striking and alarming trends in today's computer attacks are the high automation and speed, the increasing sophistication of attack tools, the vulnerability discovery rate that is difficult to maintain, the increased permeability of firewalls and nature Highly asymmetric threat. Surveillance organizations name worms as one of the four most alarming types of attacks today.
The most notable incidents that caused such concern are the outbreaks of Code Red, Code Red II, Nimda and, more recently, linux.slapper worms. The four worms stood out for their extraordinary speeds of propagation; However, in terms of damage, they were classified as a low threat. This discrepancy between levels of propagation techniques and destructive capacities was immediately detected and several interesting works were produced which (sometimes too emotionally) put the situation into perspective and explored the limits of the destructive potential of rapidly propagating malicious entities and cooperation.
However, this potential becomes even more overwhelming when it comes to combining the speed of worms with the ferocity of some past viruses. Cryptography, as some point out, is often considered a science that provides us with tools to enforce integrity and confidentiality; However, its undoubted strengths can be used to attack these same properties. Some of the viruses studied were based on cryptographic tools to cause damage that is quite difficult to undo.