The RISKS Digest
Volume 19 Issue 49

Tuesday, 9th December 1997

Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems

ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…

Contents

What really happened on Mars Rover Pathfinder
Mike Jones
Potential software nightmare for International Space Station
Philip N. Gross
Mail from Microsoft Network Rejected by America Online
Edupage
Beware of HTML Mail
Tom Brazil
Navindra Umanee
Microsoft, CNET, BUGTRAQ and the 'land' attack
Geoffrey King
The ATM Debit Card Switcheroo
Lauren Weinstein
Reminder on Privacy Digests
PGN
Info on RISKS (comp.risks)

What really happened on Mars Rover Pathfinder

Mike Jones <mbj@MICROSOFT.com>
Sunday, December 07, 1997 6:47 PM
The Mars Pathfinder mission was widely proclaimed as "flawless" in the early
days after its July 4th, 1997 landing on the Martian surface.  Successes
included its unconventional "landing" — bouncing onto the Martian surface
surrounded by airbags, deploying the Sojourner rover, and gathering and
transmitting voluminous data back to Earth, including the panoramic pictures
that were such a hit on the Web.  But a few days into the mission, not long
after Pathfinder started gathering meteorological data, the spacecraft began
experiencing total system resets, each resulting in losses of data.  The
press reported these failures in terms such as "software glitches" and "the
computer was trying to do too many things at once".

This week at the IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium I heard a fascinating
keynote address by David Wilner, Chief Technical Officer of Wind River
Systems.  Wind River makes VxWorks, the real-time embedded systems kernel
that was used in the Mars Pathfinder mission.  In his talk, he explained in
detail the actual software problems that caused the total system resets of
the Pathfinder spacecraft, how they were diagnosed, and how they were
solved.  I wanted to share his story with each of you.

VxWorks provides preemptive priority scheduling of threads.  Tasks on the
Pathfinder spacecraft were executed as threads with priorities that were
assigned in the usual manner reflecting the relative urgency of these tasks.

Pathfinder contained an "information bus", which you can think of as a
shared memory area used for passing information between different components
of the spacecraft.  A bus management task ran frequently with high priority
to move certain kinds of data in and out of the information bus.  Access to
the bus was synchronized with mutual exclusion locks (mutexes).

The meteorological data gathering task ran as an infrequent, low priority
thread, and used the information bus to publish its data.  When publishing
its data, it would acquire a mutex, do writes to the bus, and release the
mutex.  If an interrupt caused the information bus thread to be scheduled
while this mutex was held, and if the information bus thread then attempted
to acquire this same mutex in order to retrieve published data, this would
cause it to block on the mutex, waiting until the meteorological thread
released the mutex before it could continue.  The spacecraft also contained
a communications task that ran with medium priority.

Most of the time this combination worked fine.  However, very infrequently
it was possible for an interrupt to occur that caused the (medium priority)
communications task to be scheduled during the short interval while the
(high priority) information bus thread was blocked waiting for the (low
priority) meteorological data thread.  In this case, the long-running
communications task, having higher priority than the meteorological task,
would prevent it from running, consequently preventing the blocked
information bus task from running.  After some time had passed, a watchdog
timer would go off, notice that the data bus task had not been executed for
some time, conclude that something had gone drastically wrong, and initiate
a total system reset.

This scenario is a classic case of priority inversion.

HOW WAS THIS DEBUGGED?

VxWorks can be run in a mode where it records a total trace of all
interesting system events, including context switches, uses of
synchronization objects, and interrupts.  After the failure, JPL engineers
spent hours and hours running the system on the exact spacecraft replica in
their lab with tracing turned on, attempting to replicate the precise
conditions under which they believed that the reset occurred.  Early in the
morning, after all but one engineer had gone home, the engineer finally
reproduced a system reset on the replica.  Analysis of the trace revealed
the priority inversion.

HOW WAS THE PROBLEM CORRECTED?

When created, a VxWorks mutex object accepts a boolean parameter that
indicates whether priority inheritance should be performed by the mutex.
The mutex in question had been initialized with the parameter off; had it
been on, the low-priority meteorological thread would have inherited the
priority of the high-priority data bus thread blocked on it while it held
the mutex, causing it be scheduled with higher priority than the
medium-priority communications task, thus preventing the priority inversion.
Once diagnosed, it was clear to the JPL engineers that using priority
inheritance would prevent the resets they were seeing.

VxWorks contains a C language interpreter intended to allow developers to
type in C expressions and functions to be executed on the fly during system
debugging.  The JPL engineers fortuitously decided to launch the spacecraft
with this feature still enabled.  By coding convention, the initialization
parameter for the mutex in question (and those for two others which could
have caused the same problem) were stored in global variables, whose
addresses were in symbol tables also included in the launch software, and
available to the C interpreter.  A short C program was uploaded to the
spacecraft, which when interpreted, changed the values of these variables
from FALSE to TRUE.  No more system resets occurred.

ANALYSIS AND LESSONS

First and foremost, diagnosing this problem as a black box would have been
impossible.  Only detailed traces of actual system behavior enabled the
faulty execution sequence to be captured and identified.

Secondly, leaving the "debugging" facilities in the system saved the day.
Without the ability to modify the system in the field, the problem could not
have been corrected.

Finally, the engineer's initial analysis that "the data bus task executes
very frequently and is time-critical — we shouldn't spend the extra time in
it to perform priority inheritance" was exactly wrong.  It is precisely in
such time critical and important situations where correctness is essential,
even at some additional performance cost.

HUMAN NATURE, DEADLINE PRESSURES

David told us that the JPL engineers later confessed that one or two system
resets had occurred in their months of pre-flight testing.  They had never
been reproducible or explainable, and so the engineers, in a very
human-nature response of denial, decided that they probably weren't
important, using the rationale "it was probably caused by a hardware
glitch".

Part of it too was the engineers' focus.  They were extremely focused on
ensuring the quality and flawless operation of the landing software.  Should
it have failed, the mission would have been lost.  It is entirely
understandable for the engineers to discount occasional glitches in the
less-critical land-mission software, particularly given that a spacecraft
reset was a viable recovery strategy at that phase of the mission.

THE IMPORTANCE OF GOOD THEORY/ALGORITHMS

David also said that some of the real heroes of the situation were some
people from CMU who had published a paper he'd heard presented many years
ago who first identified the priority inversion problem and proposed the
solution.  He apologized for not remembering the precise details of the
paper or who wrote it.  Bringing things full circle, it turns out that the
three authors of this result were all in the room, and at the end of the
talk were encouraged by the program chair to stand and be acknowledged.
They were Lui Sha, John Lehoczky, and Raj Rajkumar.  When was the last time
you saw a room of people cheer a group of computer science theorists for
their significant practical contribution to advancing human knowledge? :-)
It was quite a moment.

POSTLUDE

For the record, the paper was:

L. Sha, R. Rajkumar, and J. P. Lehoczky. Priority Inheritance Protocols: An
Approach to Real-Time Synchronization. In IEEE Transactions on Computers,
vol. 39, pp. 1175-1185, Sep. 1990.


Potential software nightmare for International Space Station

"Philip N. Gross" <philg@bart.nl>
Tue, 9 Dec 1997 22:25:43 +0100
After reading the 8 Dec 1997 *Aviation Week and Space Technology* cover
story <http://www.aviationweek.com/aviation/avi_stor.htm>, I have grave
doubts about the software stability of the enormously complex International
Space Station.  A few months of testing in a simulated environment and up
goes 3.5 million lines of code, developed by independent teams dispersed
worldwide.  The low-tech Mir with its straightforward computer failures may
one day be day be remembered nostalgically.  [PGN Excerpting:]

  The initial power-on testing of the U.S. Laboratory Module began at
  Marshall in early November 1997 and is planned to last into early 1998.
  Although the Lab Module is not to be launched until the fifth shuttle
  assembly flight, set for May 1999, it has the potential of affecting ISS
  launch scheduling much earlier because the Lab will be the electronic hub
  of the station and its software must be tested at Kennedy in connection
  with the two assembly flight payloads that precede it.  This critical
  Multiple Element Integrated Test (MEIT), set between September-December
  1998, will link the ISS software and hardware for shuttle assembly flights
  3A, 4A and 5A, requiring that software be developed well in advance of
  these tests.  The MEIT requirements, combined with training requirements
  for the first ISS crew, are creating a "huge tidal wave of software" [...]

* The hardware to be linked includes the Z-1 truss carrying electrical and
  fluid systems; the massive U.S. Photovoltaic Module power system, and
  simulated Node-1 avionics.

* There are at least 3.5 million lines of code from multiple U.S., Russian,
  European, Canadian and Japanese contractors, ``the most diverse software
  of any aerospace program ever conceived.''

* ``Everything is interrelated.  One thing affects the other and we have
  some very complex integrated schedules.  Software clearly has the
  potential for delaying the launch of the Laboratory Module and subsequent
  flights.''


Mail from Microsoft Network Rejected by America Online

Edupage Editors <educom@educom.unc.edu>
Tue, 2 Dec 1997 11:23:58 -0500
Mail sent to AOL users by MSN members using the latest version of the
service (version 2.5) is being rejected by AOL for undetermined technical
reasons.  Each company is convinced that the problem is at the other end,
and both claim to be anxious to resolve the problem.  (News.Com 1 Dec 1997;
Edupage, 2 Dec 1997)


Beware of HTML Mail

"braz" <braz@mnw.net>
28 Nov 1997 03:21:42 GMT
I received a spam mail today that was rather sinister.  Many spams that I
receive request that you click on the hyperlink to go to their site.  This
one, however, was much different.  I am running IE4.0, and I simply
highlighted the new message in my mailbox, and clicked on the subject to
read it.  It immediately downloaded and initialized a java applet that took
control of my browser, opened a session to their site as I sat in amazement.
I then quickly (out of fear) stopped the connection to that site, went back
to the mail message and viewed the source to see what was in it. Here is the
first few lines of the mail - I numbered the lines so they won't be
interpreted as HTML/E-mail here:

1. <html>
2. <head>
3. <title>webtour

Beware of HTML Mail

Navindra Umanee <navindra@cs.mcgill.ca>
Sat, 29 Nov 1997 22:56:20 -0500
I had a little chuckle when I first read Tom Brazil's little "incident"
with HTML mail and Microsoft software.  Surely, such a silly thing could
not possibly happen to *me* on my relatively secure Linux system.

Unfortunately, the exact same thing *did* happen to me and it was quite a
sobering experience. Like Tom, I killed Communicator and investigated the
matter.

My Mail User Agent on Linux is Mutt 0.76 but the *real* culprit was a neat
little entry in my ~/.mailcap,

text/html; netscape -remote 'openURL(%s)'

This was triggered by my MUA on finding "Content-type: text/html" in the
headers of the spam mail.

Fortunately, the solution in Linux is simple: Remove all such dangerous
entries from ~/.mailcap and /etc/mailcap (the latter, incidentally, is
maintained automatically by my Debian GNU/Linux system and had the
text-browser lynx as the entry for content-type text/html).

The risk?  Feeling too secure and thinking that it could never happen to
you...

Navin


Microsoft, CNET, BUGTRAQ and the 'land' attack (Milunovic, R-19.48)

Geoffrey King <geoff@austlii.edu.au>
Sat, 6 Dec 1997 17:46:31 +1100
I wish to point out the RISKS of relying on poorly researched media reports
for information about security ...

The previous issue of RISKS contained a report passed on from the CNET news
service about the 'land' attack. The CNET report which appears at
<http://www.news.com/News/Item/0%2C4%2C17009%2C00.html> carries a date of 4
Dec 1997 at 5pm PST.

For a start, the way in which the article was written indicates a general
misunderstanding of the bug and the possible exploitation thereof.

More seriously, the article also appears some 14 days after the first
posting (including exploit code) of the 'land' vulnerability to the BUGTRAQ
list. But todays "news" does coincide quite nicely with the announcement
that Microsoft would release patches. And please also note that the
statement of "Jason Grams, a product manager at Microsoft", that
"[o]bviously, this isn't a Microsoft-only problem, it's a pretty big
problem" is not entirely accurate. There are a number of operating systems
which are not vulnerable to this attack, including current releases of
Linux, Solaris, Irix, OS/2 and others ... other vendors, including CISCO,
acted immediately to warn of and patch vulnerabilities in their products.

Wired News published an excellent article as early as 21 Nov 1997.
<http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/8707.html>

While I'm writing about this particular problem, I might also quote from a
Microsoft executive asked recently about the possibility that the Internet
Explorer 'res://' bug and the Pentium bug could be combined.

    "It's not as simple as sitting down at an IE4 machine. We've
    tried it on several [machines] and we get a crash but that's
    it, which is certainly not a security hole," he said.

    <http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/8429.html>

Is that really acceptable coming from a major OS vendor?

A demonstration of the exploitation of the 'res://' Internet Explorer bug in
combination with the recently discussed Pentium bug is available at
<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/IE4res/> [WARNING: this
demonstration may crash your machine].

And here's a quote from a Microsoft technical note about security risks in
Windows95 file and print sharing:

    "The SMBCLIENT Samba network client allows users to send illegal
    networking commands over the network. At this time, the Samba
    client is the only known SMBCLIENT that does not filter out such
    illegal commands. SMBCLIENT users do not automatically gain access
    to the Windows 95 drive; these users must know the exact steps to
    send these illegal commands."

    <http://premium.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q128/0/79.asp>

    Glossary: Samba <http://samba.anu.edu.au/> is an implementation of
              the SMB protocols to allow UNIX servers to be used in a
              Microsoft environment, as both servers and clients.

Does anybody here want to volunteer for a trip to Seattle to explain to the
Microsoft 'engineers' that client-server security mechanisms probably
shouldn't rely on the good behaviour of the clients ??

It looks to me like it might be time to encourage a little more genetic
diversity in operating systems ... let's not build the world around this sort
of nonsense ...

Hmmm ... and does anybody here still think todays "news" is news ??

Geoffrey King <www.homosapiens.org>, Australasian Legal Information Institutea
Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney  +61(2) 9514 3176


The ATM Debit Card Switcheroo

PRIVACY Forum <privacy@vortex.com>
Thu, 20 Nov 97 21:44 PST
Reprinted from PRIVACY Forum Digest V06 #16 with permission

PRIVACY Forum Digest      Thursday, 20 November 1997      Volume 06 : Issue 16

            Moderated by Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com)
              Vortex Technology, Woodland Hills, CA, U.S.A.
                     http://www.vortex.com

Date:    Thu, 20 Nov 97 19:46 PST
>From:    lauren@vortex.com (Lauren Weinstein; PRIVACY Forum Moderator)
Subject: The ATM Debit Card Switcheroo

Greetings.  Longtime readers of this digest know that I have rather mixed
feelings about massive Wells Fargo Bank when it comes to security and
privacy issues.  When they were among the first to institute user-selected
passcodes to control telephone access to accounts, I publicly applauded.  On
the other hand, I've condemned their moves to terminate neighborhood bank
branches in favor of noisy, crowded, and privacy-unfriendly
"supermarket branches".  So it's been a mixed bag.

Unfortunately, that bag just got substantially more moldy.  Wells is
in the process at this time of the unsolicited replacing of apparently
millions of current ATM cards with what they call "ATM and Check Cards".
What these really are is combined ATM and *debit* cards (apparently
Wells doesn't like using the word "debit"--it doesn't appear
anywhere in the literature that accompanies the cards).

These cards, which are branded with the MC credit card logo, replace
customers' current ATM cards, which customers are informed will "expire
shortly".  Customers need to call a toll-free number from their home phone
(obviously for ANI phone number verification--which essentially is a
non-blockable caller-ID) to activate their new cards.  Also buried in the
pile of material accompanying the card, is a number to call if for some
reason the customer would prefer to keep using their old non-debit ATM card
instead.  (This second number is actually just the normal Wells toll-free
customer service number--you need to work your way to an operator to
"cancel" the new card.)

Wells Fargo customers (and customers of other banks) might well want to
consider refusing these sorts of debit cards--or making sure you never use
them except in an ATM.  While the card seems to add convenience at first
glance, in reality it is a big step *backwards* toward PIN-less access by
others to your money, with a range of potential problems--it could actually
be more dangerous than a conventional credit card!

A debit card of the kind Wells is distributing is used like a credit card.
Anywhere a MC would be accepted, the new card can be used.  The banks
promote this as a major value of the card (along with some credit-card like
"purchase protection" programs).  But just like with a real credit card, no
PIN is needed for purchases, only a signature.  And not even the signature
is required for telephone purchases, again, just like a conventional credit
card.

But unlike credit cards, the debit card doesn't result in a bill mailed to
you later, rather, it draws money immediately from your checking account.
Banks love this--it's like instant money with no float (the merchant pays
the same percentage for accepting the debit card as he or she would for a
normal credit card purchase).  But with a "real" credit card, you have a
chance to go over your bill and search for erroneous purchases *before*
paying.  Sure, it's a hassle if someone uses your credit card number for
unauthorized purchases, but a debit card usable without a PIN opens up a
whole new dimension.

The problem of course is that since the debit card draws immediately from
your checking account, without the protection of a PIN, anyone who has ever
seen your debit card, and has the number and expiration date, could use it
for purchases which will immediately draw down your checking account.  When
you get your monthly checking statement, these purchases will be
itemized--but the money has *already* long since been pulled from your
checking account by the time you get the statement.  Folks who check their
account status online every day will be in better shape, but most people
don't do this and shouldn't need to.

Having your checking account suddenly go dropping down toward zero has an
important side-effect.  The legitimate checks you've written can start
merrily bouncing, unless you're fortunate enough to have plenty of money in
an associated "overdraft" account of some sort.

Wells suggests that there are protections built into their debit card
system.  You're not responsible for purchases made by unauthorized parties
if you notify Wells what's going on.  That's well and good, but hardly
compensates for the hassle of bounced checks with potentially numerous
entities that can result from misuse of your debit card numbers.  Wells also
points out that there is a daily limit on debit card activity.  This is
true, but as far as I can tell that limit has no obvious relationship to the
amount of money in the checking account.  In cases I've seen myself, the
assigned daily limit was up to 10 times the average account balance!

PIN-less access of this sort to checking accounts is full of problems.  The
account can be accessed without a physical check, without a PIN, and without
your immediate knowledge.  For anyone who has "real" credit cards, ones
which bill and are paid conventionally, there seems to be little benefit (for
the customer!) to a debit card of this sort, at least compared with the
negatives and potential hassles that could result.  Even persons without
real credit cards might wish to think long and hard about the wisdom of
using a card that could so easily result in their checking account being
drained and their checks being bounced.

The irony of all this is that at a time when what we really need is some
form of PIN protection on conventional credit cards, the introduction
(especially unsolicited) of a PIN-less financial instrument of this sort
can only be viewed as a very bad idea.  The losses that are certain
to accrue will no doubt be handled like the untold millions in credit
card losses each year, via higher costs and bank fees for merchants and
other customers alike.

Lauren Weinstein, Moderator, PRIVACY Forum  http://www.vortex.com

  [I called and cancelled mine immediately upon receipt.
  no point playing "PIN, the tale on the don('t)key.~  PGN]


Reminder on Privacy Digests

<RISKS moderator>
17 Apr 1997
Periodically I remind you of TWO useful digests related to privacy, both of
which are siphoning off some of the material that would otherwise appear in
RISKS, but which should be read by those of you vitally interested in
privacy problems.  RISKS will continue to carry general discussions in which
risks to privacy are a concern.

* The PRIVACY Forum is run by Lauren Weinstein.  It includes a digest (which
  he moderates quite selectively), archive, and other features, such as
  PRIVACY Forum Radio interviews.  It is somewhat akin to RISKS; it spans
  the full range of both technological and nontechnological privacy-related
  issues (with an emphasis on the former).  For information regarding the
  PRIVACY Forum, please send the exact line:
     information privacy
  as the BODY of a message to "privacy-request@vortex.com"; you will receive
  a response from an automated listserv system.  To submit contributions,
  send to "privacy@vortex.com".

  PRIVACY Forum materials, including archive access/searching, additional
  information, and all other facets, are available on the Web via:
     http://www.vortex.com

* The Computer PRIVACY Digest (CPD) (formerly the Telecom Privacy digest) is
  run by Leonard P. Levine.  It is gatewayed to the USENET newsgroup
  comp.society.privacy.  It is a relatively open (i.e., less tightly moderated)
  forum, and was established to provide a forum for discussion on the
  effect of technology on privacy.  All too often technology is way ahead of
  the law and society as it presents us with new devices and applications.
  Technology can enhance and detract from privacy.  Submissions should go to
  comp-privacy@uwm.edu and administrative requests to
  comp-privacy-request@uwm.edu.

There is clearly much potential for overlap between the two digests,
although contributions tend not to appear in both places.  If you are very
short of time and can scan only one, you might want to try the former.  If
you are interested in ongoing discussions, try the latter.  Otherwise, it
may well be appropriate for you to read both, depending on the strength of
your interests and time available.
                                                  PGN

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