![[Politech logo]](http://www.politechbot.com/image/logo.gif){kind=logo}
Politech is the oldest Internet resource devoted to politics and technology. Launched in 1994 by Declan McCullagh, the mailing list has chronicled the growing intersection of culture, technology, politics, and law. Since 2000, so has the Politech web site.
This work is brilliant. Kudos to Jansson and Skala. Now, blocking software being overzealous and buggy is nothing new. This article is four years old, and still timely: http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/Declan_McCullagh/cwd.keys.to.the.kingdom.0796.article But it's somewhat surprising that CyberPatrol hasn't cleaned up its act since being embarrassed so throughly back then. -Declan ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2000 11:38:18 -0500 From: mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca Subject: Cyber Patrol 4 reversed March 11, 2000 - ANNOUNCEMENT Cyber Patrol(R) 4, a "censorware" product intended to prevent users from accessing undesirable Internet content, has been reverse engineered by youth rights activists Eddy L O Jansson and Matthew Skala. A detailed report of their findings, titled "The Breaking of Cyber Patrol(R) 4", with commentary on the reverse engineering process and cryptographic attacks against the product's authentication system, has been posted on the World Wide Web at this address: http://hem.passagen.se/eddy1/reveng/cp4/cp4break.html The abstract of the report: Several attacks are presented on the "sophisticated anti-hacker security" features of Cyber Patrol(R) 4, a "censorware" product intended to prevent users from accessing Internet content considered harmful. Motivations, tools, and methods are discussed for reverse engineering in general and reverse engineering of censorware in particular. The encryption of the configuration and data files is reversed, as are the password hash functions. File formats are documented, with commentary. Excerpts from the list of blocked sites are presented and commented upon. A package of source code and binaries implementing the attacks is included. Eddy L O Jansson srm_dfr@hotmail.com http://hem.passagen.se/eddy1/index.html Matthew Skala mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- the moderated mailing list of politics and technology To subscribe, visit http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------