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precedence: bulk Subject: Risks Digest 20.90

RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest Monday 5 June 2000 Volume 20 : Issue 90

FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS (comp.risks) ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

***** See last item for further information, disclaimers, caveats, etc. ***** This issue is archived at <URL:http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.90.html> and by anonymous ftp at ftp.sri.com, cd risks .

Contents: "Incompatible software" blamed for phone-book fiasco (PGN) Remote control of your car via GM's OnStar (Armando Fox) India plans to piggyback internet on railway control cables (R Bakowski) Trash compactor kills shoplifter (Chris Meadows) How not to distribute white papers (Avi Rubin) 1984 comes late to the UK (Martyn Thomas) Social engineering in the real world (Bruce Schneier) Computer Security: Will We Ever Learn? (Bruce Schneier) Symantec's antiviral returns false positives on network.vbs (Richard Thieme) Re: Junk-mail filters (Amos Shapir, Ron Bean, Ray Todd Stevens, Markus Peuhkuri) Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

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Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 11:39:08 PDT From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com> Subject: "Incompatible software" blamed for phone-book fiasco

Pacific Bell has apparently printed 400,000 new phone books that include names, phone numbers, and addresses of telephone customers who are supposed to be unlisted. The California state public utilities commission has granted a request from Cox Communications for a restraining order against Pac*Bell. Incompatible software is blamed, but perhaps it was human error in forgetting to remove the protected fields from a retrieval request? Perhaps one of our RISKS-reading insiders can enlighten us.

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Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 15:33:20 -0700 From: "Armando Fox" <fox@cs.stanford.edu> Subject: Remote control of your car via GM's OnStar

At WWW-9 in May, there was a presentation about the OnStar system which will be standard equipment on some GM vehicles and a factory-installed option on most others. OnStar uses cellular telephony and GPS to provide location-specific services to drivers; current services are provided by a human being ("advisor") who answers the phone when you push the OnStar button in your car, but there is provision for data services to be delivered later. Look at http://www.onstar.com - the system is already in production operation in some cars.

One interesting feature is a control channel back *into* the car: the OnStar transceiver is integrated with some of your car's control systems, so that it can (upon receipt of the correct signal from an OnStar advisor) unlock the doors, flash the headlights, honk the horn, etc. Presumably some of these features are in place to assist rescue personnel -- OnStar automatically dials a 911 advisor if it detects you've had an accident (e.g. if it detects that the airbag was deployed).

The obvious risk: If I were a cell phone data services hacker, I'd know what my next project would be. I asked the OnStar speaker what security mechanisms were in place to prevent your car being hacked. He assured me that the mechanisms in place were "very secure". I asked whether he could describe them, but he could not because they were also "very proprietary". *Sigh*

Armando Fox <fox@cs.stanford.edu>, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Stanford, CA 94305-9040 +1 650 723 9558 http://gunpowder.stanford.edu/~fox

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Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 08:05:58 -0400 From: "R Bakowski" <ron@belwood.com> Subject: India plans to piggyback internet on railway control cables

May 30, 2000

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_769000/769635.stm

As reported by the BBC today, India has embarked on a pilot project to bring affordable Internet service to rural India by exploiting the "almost always" available spare capacity of the electrified railway tracks' communications and control cabling. Included in the plan are cybercafe kiosks at railway stations along the project's initial 40km stretch of track as well as wireless service from one of the stations to surrounding homes. There are more than 60,000 km of railway in India.

Looks like an accident waiting for a moment to happen.

Ron Bakowski, Belwood Information Technologies Inc. ron@belwood.com

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Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 22:53:46 -0500 From: Robotech_Master <robotech@eyrie.org> Subject: Trash compactor kills shoplifter

Not a risk of a computer per se, but a risk of automation.

In the tradition of the reluctant mobster's "pressing engagement" in _Goldfinger_, it seems a hapless shoplifter, looking for a place to hide, dived into a trash compactor...which triggered automatically, crushing her to death.

The whole story is at <URL:http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/05/31/compactor.death.ap/index.html> but particularly noteworthy is the line, "The compactor starts automatically when it senses a certain weight, [Police Officer Glen Woods] said." The risk inherent in such a weight-related trigger should be readily apparent.

Chris Meadows aka Robotech_Master <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~robotech/> robotech@eyrie.org robotech@jurai.net ICQ UIN: 5477383

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Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 17:45:34 GMT From: rubin@research.att.com (Avi Rubin) Subject: How not to distribute white papers

I was reading a white paper from Microsoft about Windows 2000 security. In particular, I am interested in how the Encrypted File System (EFS) works. Someone at Microsoft informed me that there was a new version of the white paper available at http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/library/howitworks/security/encrypt.asp

Great. I went to that site, and I found a copy of the introduction and a link to the paper. The only catch was that the only way to download the paper is to download a file called encrypt.exe. Once you download this file, you can run the program, which unzips a word file. Obviously, Microsoft is doing this to save storage space on their server and to reduce latency on the downloads.

Of all companies, Microsoft should be the last one to encourage users to get into the habit of downloading .exe programs and running them. The way I handled it was to download the file to a sacrificial machine that I use for this purpose. Then, I took it off the network and ran the program. I then physically copied the .doc file to a floppy and transfered it using sneakernet to my regular PC. Of course, I was still taking a chance. If the downloaded program were malicious, then it could do its damage the next time I connect the machine to the network. The problem is that it is very difficult to know that a program is harmless, just because it does something that you expect it to do. I could not believe that this is how Microsoft distributes its white papers. It is beyond comprehension.

Avi Rubin

http://avirubin.com/

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Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 23:10:35 +0100 From: "Martyn Thomas" <mct@hollylaw.demon.co.uk> Subject: 1984 comes late to the UK

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill has just been passed by the UK House of Commons.

Amongst other provisions, the Bill contains powers to force all ISPs to introduce mechanisms to copy all internet traffic to a Government interception agency in real time. Whilst the data should only be disclosed to a limited set of agencies following senior authorisation (itself a profound erosion of civil liberty) the "traffic data" (defined to include the URLs of pages accessed) is available to any public authority for almost any purpose it considers part of its normal business.

Encryption? The Bill gives the police and security services the power to demand keys. You've lost them? Prove it [how?] or go to jail for 2 years.

Want to complain? You can be served with a gagging order that requires that you tell no-one that your keys (or their keys) have been compromised, on penalty of five years in jail.

The Bill starts in the House of Lords in two weeks time, but seems likely to pass without substantial weakening.

The risk? Why would any business (or anyone else) want to use any UK-based ISP under these circumstances?

Martyn Thomas, Holly Lawn, Prospect Place, Bath BA2 4QP UK 01225 335649

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Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 22:14:02 -0500 From: Bruce Schneier <schneier@counterpane.com> Subject: Social engineering in the real world

http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/05/25/security.breaches.01/index.html

The best line is:

"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing," said Attorney General Janet Reno....

This, of course, means that she is in favor of full disclosure of network vulnerabilities.

Bruce Schneier, CTO, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. Ph: 408-556-2401 3031 Tisch Way, 100 Plaza East, San Jose, CA 95128 Fax: 408-556-0889

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Date: Mon, 15 May 2000 15:06:31 -0500 From: Bruce Schneier <schneier@counterpane.com> Subject: Computer Security: Will We Ever Learn? (CRYPTO-GRAM, May 15, 2000)

[From CRYPTO-GRAM, May 15, 2000, in RISKS with permission, by Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. <schneier@counterpane.com> See Bruce's free Internet security newsletter: http://www.counterpane.com]

Computer Security: Will We Ever Learn?

If we've learned anything from the past couple of years, it's that computer security flaws are inevitable. Systems break, vulnerabilities are reported in the press, and still many people put their faith in the next product, or the next upgrade, or the next patch. "This time it's secure," they say. So far, it hasn't been.

Security is a process, not a product. Products provide some protection, but the only way to effectively do business in an insecure world is to put processes in place that recognize the inherent insecurity in the products. The trick is to reduce your risk of exposure regardless of the products or patches.

Consider denial-of-service attacks. DoS attacks are some of the oldest and easiest attacks in the book. Even so, in February 2000, coordinated, distributed DoS attacks easily brought down several high-traffic Web sites, including Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com and CNN.

Consider buffer overflow attacks. They were first talked about as early as the 1960s -- time-sharing systems suffered from the problem -- and were known by the security literati even earlier than that. In the 1970s, they were often used as a point of attack against early networked computers. In 1988, the Morris Worm exploited a buffer overflow in the Unix fingerd daemon: a very public use of this type of attack.

Today, over a decade after Morris and about 35 years after these attacks were first discovered, you'd think the security community would have solved the problem of security vulnerabilities based on buffer overflows. Think again. Over two-thirds of all CERT advisories in 1998 were for vulnerabilities caused by buffer overflows. During an average week in 1999, buffer overflow vulnerabilities were found in the RSAREF cryptographic toolkit (oops), HP's operating system, the Solaris operating system, Microsoft IIS 4.0 and Site Server 3.0, Windows NT, and Internet Explorer. A recent study named buffer overflows as the most common security problem.

Consider encryption algorithms. Proprietary secret algorithms are regularly published and broken. Again and again, the marketplace learns that proprietary secret algorithms are a bad idea. But companies and industries -- like Microsoft, the DVD consortium, cellular phone providers, and so on -- continue to choose proprietary algorithms over public, free alternatives.

Is Anyone Paying Attention?

Sadly, the answer to this question is: not really. Or at least, there are far fewer people paying attention than should be. And the enormous need for digital security products necessitates people to design, develop and implement them. The resultant dearth of experts means that the percentage of people paying attention will get even smaller.

Most products that use security are not designed by anyone with security expertise. Even security products are generally designed and implemented by people who have only limited security expertise. Security cannot be functionality tested -- no amount of beta testing will uncover security flaws -- so the flaws end up in fielded products.

I'm constantly amazed by the kinds of things that break security products. I've seen a file encryption product with a user interface that accidentally saves the key in the clear. I've seen VPNs where the telephone configuration file accidentally allows a random person to authenticate himself to the server, or that allows one remote client to view the files of another remote client. There are a zillion ways to make a product insecure, and manufacturers manage to stumble on a lot of those ways again and again.

No one is paying attention because no one has to.

Computer security products, like software in general, have a very odd product quality model. It's unlike an automobile, a skyscraper, or a box of fried chicken. If you buy a product, and get harmed because of a manufacturer's defect, you can sue...and you'll win. Car-makers can't get away with building cars that explode on impact; chicken shops can't get away with selling buckets of fried chicken with the odd rat mixed in. It just wouldn't do for building contractors to say thing like, "Whoops. There goes another one. Sorry. But just wait for Skyscraper 1.1; it'll be 100% collapse-free!"

Software is different. It is sold without any claims whatsoever. Your accounts receivable database can crash, taking your company down with it, and you have no claim against the software company. Your word processor can accidentally corrupt your files and you have no recourse. Your firewall can turn out to be completely ineffectual -- hardly better than having nothing at all -- and yet it's your fault. Microsoft fielded Hotmail with a bug that allowed anyone to read the accounts of 40 or so million subscribers, password or no password, and never bothered to apologize.

Software manufacturers don't have to produce a quality product because there is no liability if they don't. And the effect of this for security products is that manufacturers don't have to produce products that are actually secure, because no one can sue them if they make a bunch of false claims of security.

The upshot of this is that the marketplace does not reward real security. Real security is harder, slower, and more expensive, both to design and to implement. Since the buying public has no way to differentiate real security from bad security, the way to win in this marketplace is to design software that is as insecure as you can possibly get away with.

Microsoft knows that reliable software is not cost effective. According to studies, 90% to 95% of all bugs are harmless. They're never discovered by users, and they don't affect performance. It's much cheaper to release buggy software and fix the 5% to 10% of bugs people find and complain about.

Microsoft also knows that real security is not cost-effective. They get whacked with a new security vulnerability several times a week. They fix the ones they can, write misleading press releases about the ones they can't, and wait for the press fervor to die down (which it always does). And six months later they issue the next software version with new features and all sorts of new insecurities, because users prefer cool features to security.

The only solution is to look for security processes.

There's no such thing as perfect security. Interestingly enough, that's not necessarily a problem. In the U.S. alone, the credit card industry loses $10 billion to fraud per year; neither Visa nor MasterCard is showing any sign of going out of business. Shoplifting estimates in the U.S. are currently between $9.5 billion and $11 billion per year, but you never see "shrinkage" (as it is called) cited as the cause when a store goes out of business. Recently, I needed to notarize a document. That is about the stupidest security protocol I've ever seen. Still, it works fine for what it is.

Security does not have to be perfect, but the risks have to be manageable. The credit card industry understands this. They know how to estimate the losses due to fraud. Their problem is that losses from phone credit card transactions are about five times the losses from face-to-face transactions (when the card is present). Losses from Internet transactions are many times those of phone transactions, and are the driving force behind SET.

My primary fear about cyberspace is that people don't understand the risks, and they are putting too much faith in technology's ability to obviate them. Products alone cannot solve security problems.

The digital security industry is in desperate need of a perceptual shift. Countermeasures are sold as ways to counter threats. Good encryption is sold as a way to prevent eavesdropping. A good firewall is a way to prevent network attacks. PKI is sold as trust management, so you can avoid mistakenly trusting people you really don't. And so on.

This type of thinking is completely backward. Security is old, older than computers. And the old-guard security industry thinks of countermeasures not as ways to counter threats, but as ways to avoid risk. This distinction is enormous. Avoiding threats is black and white: either you avoid the threat, or you don't. Avoiding risk is continuous: there is some amount of risk you can accept, and some amount you can't.

Security processes are how you avoid risk. Just as businesses use the processes of double-entry bookkeeping, internal audits, and external audits to secure their financials, businesses need to use a series of security processes to protect their networks.

Security processes are not a replacement for products; they're a way of using security products effectively. They can help mitigate the risks. Network security products will have flaws; processes are necessary to catch attackers exploiting those flaws, and to fix the flaws once they become public. Insider attacks will occur; processes are necessary to detect the attacks, repair the damages, and prosecute the attackers. Large systemwide flaws will compromise entire products and services (think digital cell phones, Microsoft Windows NT password protocols, or DVD); processes are necessary to recover from the compromise and stay in business.

Here are two examples of how to focus on process in enterprise network security:

1. Watch for known vulnerabilities. Most successful network-security attacks target known vulnerabilities for which patches already exist. Why? Because network administrators either didn't install the patches, or because users reinstalled the vulnerable systems. It's easy to be smart about the former, but just as important to be vigilant about the latter. There are many ways to check for known vulnerabilities. Network vulnerability scanners like Netect and SATAN test for them. Phone scanners like PhoneSweep check for rogue modems inside your corporation. Other scanners look for Web site vulnerabilities. Use these sorts of products regularly, and pay attention to the results.

2. Continuously monitor your network products. Almost everything on your network produces a continuous stream of audit information: firewalls, intrusion detection systems, routers, servers, printers, etc. Most of it is irrelevant, but some of it contains footprints from successful attacks. Watching it all is vital for security, because an attack that bypassed one product might be picked up by another. For example, an attacker might exploit a flaw in a firewall and bypass an IDS, but his attempts to get root access on an internal server will appear in that server's audit logs. If you have a process in place to watch those logs, you'll catch the intrusion in progress.

In this newsletter and elsewhere I have written pessimistically about the future of computer security. The future of computers is complexity, and complexity is anathema to security. The only reasonable thing to do is to reduce your risk as much as possible. We can't avoid threats, but we can reduce risk.

Nowhere else in society do we put so much faith in technology. No one has ever said, "This door lock is so effective that we don't need police protection, or breaking-and-entering laws." Products work to a certain extent, but you need processes in place to leverage their effectiveness.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. Bruce Schneier, CTO, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. Ph: 408-556-2401 3031 Tisch Way, 100 Plaza East, San Jose, CA 95128 Fax: 408-556-0889

[A version of this essay originally appeared in the April issue of *Information Security* magazine. <http://www.infosecuritymag.com/apr2000/cryptorhythms.htm>]

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Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 11:44:34 -0500 From: Richard Thieme <rthieme@thiemeworks.com> Subject: Symantec's antiviral returns false positives on network.vbs

And that's just the beginning.

When the alert from Symantec's Systemworks 2000 Anti Virus told me an e-mail carried the network.vbs worm, I followed steps to quarantine the file. By the time the alert sounded again - on another email - I realized that it was detecting not the worm itself but the source code for the worm which was included in e-mails on a security list to which I subscribe. The first alert had isolated the entire e-mail box on Eudora Pro to which a filter directed that e-mail. The second time, it would have done the same to my inbox, with all of the stored e-mail in it. I copied the e-mail out of my inbox, deleted and recreated an inbox, then rebooted and transferred the e-mail back to the inbox. But that other mailbox was in quarantine. I struggled in vain to reach someone at Symantec - they want $30 up front to tell them that they made a mistake - so I tried their web site response forms. That of course brought me nothing but a rash of documents sent by automated processes about all the recent .vbs worms but of course not one answered my question, i.e., how can I get my e-mail box out of quarantine? So I sent the quarantined "file" to Symantec with a note asking for the contents of the e-mail box back. No human being read that note either - I received an automated reply telling me that the file was a clean text file with no virus (duh), and when I finally was able to contact a human being after more hours of voice mail and round-about calls, I reached a "help technician" who had no idea what to do ("the guy who knows these things isn't here today") so he asked around until he could tell me that the file was destroyed - like that village in Viet Nam - in order to save it. I asked what one had to do to get the contents of a quarantined file back and he said no one ever requested that before.

Procedural errors, inadequate training, human mistakes, automated replies that are irrelevant, voice mail hell, screw-the-customer costs , it's-your-problem-not-ours -- it's all here in this scenario, my e-mail file is gone, and now when I am now told by Symantec Anti Virus that e-mail has arrived with network.vbs on it, I know that I should -- do what, exactly?

Richard Thieme, ThiemeWorks, PO Box 170737, Milwaukee Wisconsin 53217-8061 1-414.351.2321 cell: 1-414.704.4598 http://www.thiemeworks.com

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Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 18:16:31 IDT From: amos@nsof.co.il Subject: Re: Junk-mail filters (Cattarin, RISKS-20.89)

> Body contains [...]

Ooops!

> [Your moderator chose to create a supplemental issue, > RISKS-20.89x

Too late... The first line I quoted above was probably the reason why this issue of RISKS was not posted on the news server I use (and of course neither was the 20.89x issue), so I had to pull them directly off your site by FTP. I hope this message goes through!

Amos Shapir, nSOF Parallel Software, Ltd., Givat-Hashlosha 48800, Israel Tel: +972 3 9388551 Fax: +972 3 9388552

[Also noted by Timothy Prodin. NOTE TO READERS: If you did not receive RISKS-20.89, it was undoubtedly the victim of filtering. Try the archives. PGN]

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Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 10:09:18 -0500 (CDT) From: "Ron Bean" <rbean@execpc.com> Subject: Re: Junk-mail filters (Cattarin, RISKS-20.89)

A couple of years ago I put together a procmail filter using similar kinds of rules. However, the first rule I used was to delete any Bcc: mail that comes from an unknown source (ie, a From: address that's not on a list of friends, relatives, business contacts, subscribed mailing lists, etc). My log files showed that 96% of the spam was being deleted by the Bcc: filter and not even getting to the "clever" ones. So I just kept the Bcc: filter and dumped most of the rest (actually it looks for messages that *don't* have my address in some *other* header line, ie, To: or Cc:).

I've only had a couple of false positives, and none were on the Bcc: filter-- Bcc: mail almost never comes from an *unknown* source. Of course I have to turn the filter off temporarily any time I subscribe to a mailing list, until I can see a couple of sample messages and find something in the header for the filter to look for.

The real risk is letting someone else define spam for you, without explaining their methods.

(Do they have an option to automatically accept e-mail from anyone in your address book file? Or to build some other kind of exception file? Seems like an obvious thing to do...)

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Date: Sat, 3 Jun 2000 19:09:57 -0500 From: "Ray Todd Stevens" <raytodd@kiva.net> Subject: Re: Junk-mail filters (Cattarin, RISKS-20.89)

It sounds to me that a need feature is missing for the filtering. It would seem that an important question for this type of filtering is "is this someone I e-mail a lot". Maybe this is a risk of building very complicated systems on top of a weak foundation.

Ray Todd Stevens, Senior Consultant, Stevens Services, R.R. # 14 Box 1400 Apt 21, Bedford, IN 47421 (812) 279-9394 Raytodd@tima.com

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Date: 31 May 2000 15:42:46 +0300 From: Markus Peuhkuri <puhuri@ws18.tct.hut.fi> Subject: Re: Junk-mail filters (Cattarin, RISKS-20.89)

While automatic junk mail identification would be useful, I can't recommend word based filtering because of too many false positives. Swedish for "six" (i->e) can be a bit problematic word. Maybe they should use "five and one more".

A few years ago I lost some US$20 because of Subject-words filter; (the mail was stored in a junk folder which I checked every now and then -- too late in that case).

Currently, I do filtering based on To: and From: fields

* mail must be addressed to some of my addresses (mail list traffic is separated before) * sender must be someone I know (I've sent mail to)

If both conditions are satisfied, then mail is accepted to my primary inbox, otherwise it is put in low-priority folder.

Markus Peuhkuri ! http://www.iki.fi/puhuri/

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Date: 13 Dec 1999 (LAST-MODIFIED) From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

The RISKS Forum is a MODERATED digest. Its Usenet equivalent is comp.risks. => SUBSCRIPTIONS: PLEASE read RISKS as a newsgroup (comp.risks or equivalent) if possible and convenient for you. Alternatively, via majordomo, SEND DIRECT E-MAIL REQUESTS to <risks-request@csl.sri.com> with one-line, SUBSCRIBE (or UNSUBSCRIBE) [with net address if different from FROM:] or INFO [for unabridged version of RISKS information] .MIL users should contact <risks-request@pica.army.mil> (Dennis Rears). .UK users should contact <Lindsay.Marshall@newcastle.ac.uk>. => The INFO file (submissions, default disclaimers, archive sites, copyright policy, PRIVACY digests, etc.) is also obtainable from http://www.CSL.sri.com/risksinfo.html ftp://www.CSL.sri.com/pub/risks.info The full info file will appear now and then in future issues. *** All contributors are assumed to have read the full info file for guidelines. *** => SUBMISSIONS: to risks@CSL.sri.com with meaningful SUBJECT: line. => ARCHIVES are available: ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks or ftp ftp.sri.com<CR>login anonymous<CR>[YourNetAddress]<CR>cd risks [volume-summary issues are in risks-*.00] [back volumes have their own subdirectories, e.g., "cd 19" for volume 19] http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/VL.IS.html [i.e., VoLume, ISsue]. http://the.wiretapped.net/security/textfiles/risks-digest/ . ==> PostScript copy of PGN's comprehensive historical summary of one liners: illustrative.PS at ftp.sri.com/risks .

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End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 20.90 ************************