Plenty of technical details as well as invaluable overviews of system vulnerabilities and results of attacks

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	• Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks Michal Zalewski No Starch Press, 2005 - 312 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

a reductionist scrutiny

Makes you ponder. "Silence" is not a book about using the latest version of an IDS like Nessus, where you get tons of detail about all its abilities. Instead, Zalewski goes back to the basics of IP and TCP. Much of the book revolves around low level fields in the IP or TCP headers. And how different operating systems often have different policies about filling these fields. A Microsoft OS and a Unix OS would initialise a TTL with different values. So what? Well, a passive surveillance of traffic might give a reasonable guess as to the OS, based on observed TTLs coming from that machine.

Other aspects also come under similar reductionist scrutiny. Some of you with a maths background might appreciate the book's analysis of the pseudo random number generators using in making sequence numbers. There are 3 dimensional plots of these outputs, which show very different shapes for different OSs. More importantly, most do not exhibit good randomness. Zalewski eloquently demonstrates these shortcomings.

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Plenty of technical details as well as invaluable overviews of system vulnerabilities and results of attacks

Silence On The Wire: A Field Guide To Passive Reconnaissance And Indirect Attacks by computer security expert Michael Zalewski could deserves the widest possible readership for its powerful message on computer vulnerabilities in a today's computer-oriented society. From tracking the source of attacks to security issues in ethernet systems and internet security, Silence On The Wire provides plenty of technical details as well as invaluable overviews of system vulnerabilities and results of attacks. If you have a computer, and are concerned with online scams and attacks, then you need to read Silence On The Wire!

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Heavy Geekdom and yet..

First: this is ultra-heavy geek territory, but it's not necessarily computer geeks only. What I mean is that although this is all computer and networking related, any general engineering geek-type will probably enjoy it.

What I particularly liked is the author's attention to detail. I'd start reading a chapteer and think "Yeah, I know this", but then realize that he was just leading me through the basics because he had something important and interesting to say that I probably did NOT know.. and that was usually true.

And although there is a lot of ink devoted to explaining the background of things you may already know, I didn't mind it because the author has style and wit and presents things with a slant that makes it fun to read even when I already knew everything.

Before I was done with this, I cornered my geek son-in-law and had him read one chapter. He's very busy right now, and hasn't had time to read two other books I gave him last month. He read the chapter and I said "You want this when I'm done, right?". He said "Oh, yeah. Definitely".

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Deep and penetrating look at security

Irrespective of the myriad proclamations of systems or products being hackerproof, bulletproof and the like; given enough time and money, everything is breakable. Security purists may argue that one-time pads are provably and perfectly secure. While that is correct in the pristine halls of academic cryptography, the real world is littered with many one-time pads of dubious security.

The fact that everything is breakable from an information security perspective is good news to Luddites and bad news for the paranoid. Hopefully, most people fall between those two opposites and with that, Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks is an fascinating book on knowing when to be suspicious and when to be complacent.

The premise of the book is that there are countless ways that a potential attacker can intercept information and sniff data. The title points out that these silent stealth-like attacks are often difficult to detect, and all the more so to defend against. The better you understand the threats, the better you can monitor and defend against them.

The author writes about his work with data reconnaissance and details how computers and networks operate, with a special emphasis on how they process and transmit data. With such transmissions, there are significant security threats; which is what this book details.

Make note that this is not a For Dummies type of book. It is written for security engineers and experienced system administrators that have a heavy background in networking and security. Electronic engineers will feel very much at home with the many schematics and encodings in the code. The book is written for those that are very comfortable with programming and complex networks.

The books 260 pages contain four parts and 18 chapters. Part one details the long journey that a keystroke takes. Between the keyboard and the ultimate destination of the data, there are myriad ways the data can be misappropriated. These include traditional attacks, in addition to protocol attacks and problems with the CPU.

Part 2 details how data is transmitted and the various avenues of attack that can be launched against the data. Note that the subtitle of the book is a field guide to passive reconnaissance and indirect attacks. The book is all about the passive types of attacks that are often quite prevalent, yet overlooked. In the section The Art of Transmitting Data, the author details the electronic mechanisms on how data traverses a network and the avenues of attacks. One of the easiest attacks is the monitoring of modem or router lights. With the proper analysis and deduction, an attacker can surmise a significant amount about the nature of the traffic.

Part 2 closes with an interesting overview of how to provide better security to switched Ethernet networks. The author notes that that Ethernet networks don't provide a universal and easy way to ensure the integrity and confidentiality (two pillars of security) of the data they transmit, or are they engineered to withstand malicious, intentionally injected traffic. Ethernet is simply a means for interfacing a number of local, presumably trusted systems. With such a premise, it is no wonder that security issues abound.

Part 3 spends about 100 pages on routing and security issues involved with TCP/IP. While there is not a significant amount of new information in these chapter (passive fingerprinting, fragmentation attacks, sequence number issues and more have been heavily documented), it provides a good overview of the inherent insecurity with the TCP/IP set of protocols.

Part 4 is closes with the authors notion of parasitic computing, which is when computations and storage in normal network traffic are hidden. With parasitic computing, data can be stored in mail queues and ICMP echoes, where remote hosts perform remote computations on them.

If you are looking for a book on quick tips to securing your network, Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks will not fill your need. This is a book written for those that want to know what goes on deep in the recesses of their computers, switches and network protocols. After reading the book, some may view it as an exercise in theoretical problems that bare little resemblance to the real world. But the fact is that many security problems that are originally labeled as theoretical and academic, end up being quite practical and devastating. Many software vendors will reply to a threat with a reply that it only applies to a lab scenario, only to quickly retreat and create a patch.

On the down side, the book can be dry at times. When you combine mathematical formulas, electronic engineering and abstract computer security, the book occasionally reads like James Joyce.

Overall, Silence on the Wire: A Field Guide to Passive Reconnaissance and Indirect Attacks is a most valuable book. It is a densely back whirlwind of deep technical information that gets to the very underpinning of computer security. Silence on the Wire makes you think about serious security problems that you never thought of before, or were even aware existed. Read it and get ready to be humbled.

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This One Goes On The Short List of

Excellent!

Zalewski's book is packed with information. The level of detail and technical difficulty of a lot of the information seem to make the book geared more toward those already familiar with computer security and information warfare rather than security novices. Those who are familiar with computer and network security may feel that parts of the book are too basic or beneath the level they are looking for, but Zalewski generally has a goal in mind and is just laying the groundwork to build up to it.

Most people in computer security, and even home users with little understanding of network security, are familiar with the major types of overt attacks (viruses, worms, phishing scams, spyware, etc.) and the countermeasures to protect their systems (antivirus, antispyware, firewalls, IDS, etc.), but this book uncovers the ominous volumes of data that can be extracted and exploited using passive reconnaissance techniques.

The book is called a "Field Guide" in the subtitle and it reads more or less like one. It provides the information and details you need in the trenches to wage an effective war against information insecurity. This is one that I would dub a "must read" for anyone working directly with network security.

[...]

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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