James Burgess

Ninjas everywhere take note of this act of bravery and selflessness. We need more ninjas like this.

I’ve happened across this ingenious invention - soap.

Soap is a handheld pointing and screen traversal device, constructed from a simple wireless optical mouse. You can find a video of it in action at YouTube (which also tells you how to make one).

I’m so impressed by this, I think I’m going to make myself a gaming soap! If you also fancy making one, there’s a full video guide on the website (also available as a PDF).

Rootkits have been the bane of the operating system programmer’s existence for many years now. Their goal? To access computer systems, undetected - opening them up to all form of malicious attack. Most of the rootkits that have relied on low-level access, such as through bugs and security exploits have been closed relatively quickly by people like Microsoft (in Windows), but still, there remains the problem of kernel-mode rootkits.

Last year, Microsoft gave word of their partnership with the University of Michigan to create SubVirt, a kernel-mode rootkit that could go virtually undetected on any x64 architecture system. Based on a VM principle, the rootkit allows uninhibited access to the system software and hardware from a remote location whilst providing no performance hit for the system user (other than the obvious bandwidth usage associated with the transmission of data to the external access point). Add to this the simply worrying question as to why Microsoft Research was asked to develop such a rootkit, and maybe it’s time to start seriously worrying about privacy when connected to the Internet.

However, SubVirt isn’t the big player anymore. In mid-2006, Joanna Rutkowska of Invisible Things released word of her new development - BluePill. Be afraid… be very afraid.

Whilst Microsoft now claim that Vista x64 prevents kernel-mode rootkits through better management and protection, BluePill subverts this, and all other known protections on modern operating systems - either in principle or in practice. Add to this that it doesn’t, in any way, require any modification of the data storage devices (as SubVirt does), and there you have it - undetectable access to a remote computer.

As Joanna says on her blog regarding BluePill:

The idea behind Blue Pill is simple: your operating system swallows the Blue Pill and it awakes inside the Matrix controlled by the ultra thin Blue Pill hypervisor. This all happens on-the-fly (i.e. without restarting the system) and there is no performance penalty and all the devices, like graphics card, are fully accessible to the operating system, which is now executing inside virtual machine. This is all possible thanks to the latest virtualization technology from AMD called SVM/Pacifica.

Where is this leading us in terms of security and privacy? Or have I just been wearing my tin-foil hat for too long? The Matrix may be real after all…