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posted by CoolHand on Saturday April 25 2015, @08:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the quantum-homework dept.

Bruce Schneier has written about The Further Democratization of QUANTUM, the NSA's program for packet injection:

...when I was working with the Guardian on the Snowden documents, the one top-secret program the NSA desperately did not want us to expose was QUANTUM. This is the NSA's program for what is called packet injection­ -- basically, a technology that allows the agency to hack into computers. Turns out, though, that the NSA was not alone in its use of this technology. The Chinese government uses packet injection to attack computers. The cyberweapons manufacturer Hacking Team sells packet injection technology to any government willing to pay for it. Criminals use it. And there are hacker tools that give the capability to individuals as well. All of these existed before I wrote about QUANTUM. By using its knowledge to attack others rather than to build up the Internet's defenses, the NSA has worked to ensure that anyone can use packet injection to hack into computers.

And now it's become a homework assignment:

Michalis Polychronakis at Stony Book has assigned building QUANTUM as a homework assignment. It's basically sniff, regexp match, swap sip/sport/dip/dport/syn/ack, set ack and push flags, and add the payload to create the malicious reply. Shouldn't take more than a few hours.

The assignment is due May 1st.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by CRCulver on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:44PM

    by CRCulver (4390) on Saturday April 25 2015, @10:44PM (#175185) Homepage
    The reason the NSA gets blamed is because its mandate requires it to both gather intelligence through exploits and strengthen the security of network technologies for the benefit of the broader public. (Though as Bruce Schneier and others have pointed out, this is a schizophrenic mandate for a single organization.) Neither the Chinese government nor Hacking Team are answerable to the American public as the NSA theoretically is, so what's the point in blaming them?
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