[118612] in Cypherpunks
Re: Unplugged! The biggest hack in history
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Broiles)
Mon Oct 4 02:38:53 1999
Message-Id: <4.2.0.58.19991003231344.00bc0940@mail.wenet.net>
Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 23:23:38 -0700
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>
In-Reply-To: <199910040345.WAA18405@einstein.ssz.com>
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Reply-To: Greg Broiles <gbroiles@netbox.com>
Sean Roach wrote (after arguing with Majordomo):
>Excuse my ignorance, fully demonstrated in my previous post on the
>subject, but isn't the phone network a hybrid network? Filtered from
>both directions? Granted, this wouldn't be worth much on a twisted
>pair, but if it's true then it would have been easier to tap the line
>from within the phone switch by catching the split data upstream of
>the switch, and putting one modem on each direction. Or so it
>sounds.
Yes, this process would be easier if the phone company can provide access
to one side or the other of the conversation. It's still not a walk in the
park, nor is it as easy as hooking up an extra eavesdropping modem at each
end, because as Vin noted, the modems participate actively in
negotiating/shaping the stream of data, and the modem on your end isn't
necessarily going to follow the hops that the first two modems made.
Then again, perhaps there's a nice hack here waiting for an enterprising
cypherpunk to blow things wide open - as modems turn into software and
become just processes on the main CPU, their code guts become more
accessible to people who want to play with them. If someone manages to
disassemble a Winmodem (or one of the similar hybrid devices used on some
high-end Macs which do much of the modem's work using motherboard
processor(s) and DSP's) and understand what's going on, they may have the
makings of a modem eavesdropper's toolkit.
--
Greg Broiles
gbroiles@netbox.com
PGP: 0x26E4488C
