Another Review, Another Pre-Review

Amazon.com just posted my five star review of Network Warrior:

Network Warrior is the best network administration book I've ever read.

I spend most of my reading time on security books, but because I lean towards network security I like reading complementary sources on protocols and infrastructure.

Gary Donahue has written a wonderful book that I highly recommend for anyone who administers, supports, or interacts with networks. Network Warrior may be the best book I will read in 2007.

Yeah, I liked it that much. I devoured this book, staying up until 1 am or more several nights in a row.

I'm looking forward to reading Mark Kadrich's Endpoint Security. I think this book will directly affect how I approach some projects at work. I really hope it can help me better understand how to deal with endpoint security in 2007. It's taken me a while to get this book. For some reason it was published in "March 2007" but only available recently.

I'd like to briefly mention a new book that's great, but which I won't read and review: Exploiting Online Games: Cheating Massively Distributed Systems by Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw. I reviewed drafts of this book and I think the underlying message behind the code is extremely important. To understand why, please read this post by Brian Chess. He makes a much better case than I could. Because I am so time-crunched, and I really do not care about the details of exploiting WoW, I am not going to review Exploiting Online Games. I will have a couple copies to share at Black Hat for students or teaching assistants who make my life easier in class!

Comments

dre said…
Because I am so time-crunched, and I really do not care about the details of exploiting WoW, I am not going to review Exploiting Online Games

Strange.

Distributed systems... grid computing... reminds me of... financial trading systems. I wonder if any of the concepts in the book that apply to distributed systems would apply to similarly designed distributed systems?

Large amounts of UDP traffic... server-side... reminds me of... DNS amplification attacks (e.g. using SOA RR's). I wonder if the book will cover network traffic and scaling issues, UDP in particular, and I wonder we'll see a repeat of GameSpy's problems of the past?

Huge client-side code... unvalidated input... reminds me of... XSS worms against web browsers. I wonder if some sort of client-side input validation issue in gaming clients, similar in manner and attack pattern as XSS - could cause worms of similar power to affect each other - or even go Cross Application Scripting like XAS did in the recent URI Use and Abuse paper?

Somehow I think exploiting WoW has some deeper meaning to the world of information security than you do.
6:53 PM
Richard Bejtlich said…
Dre,

Those are all good ideas and you are not alone in thinking of them. However, when I thumb through a book with pages and pages of code relevant to WoW, I don't see the need to read the specifics.
7:24 PM
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6:40 AM
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