You could have a buffer overflow attack talking advantage of a specific popular video player out there.
Since video players are usually not very security focused, someone determined could do it.
And since video torrents are unzipped, a single chunk can be replaced with the malicious chunk with the attack code. It can look like a tiny jitter depending on the chunk size/total video size.
Yep, and even if you feel the need for low-frequency attacks to keep seeding high, you could probably just fix a low chance of actually executing malicious behavior.
I wonder if you could model this similarly to populations. As in will the malware ever go extinct? Obviously an attacker probably won't stop seeding, but let's say shim does stop seeding. At this point x% of seeders have the payload. Seeders on average share the file y times. Will x tend to zero below a threshold of 50%?
And if the attacker does not stop seeding, will the infected quota stabilize?
Couldn't you get nearly the same intermittent-attack behavior just by saying something like "break out of codec, only do malicious behavior one time in 1,000"?
With a buffer overflow. Video players are supposedly pretty vulnerable to these kinds of attacks since they need to deal with many different types of media, which means there is quite a large attack surface and they have to accept all kinds of odd video files.
There's a book called "A Bug Hunters Diary" that explained this exact thing in a video played using a particular version of VLC. Quite far over my head how he did it but it was interesting to read.
It can use buffer overflow (which is often easier than it looks in a large codebase written with memory unsafe languages) to execute arbitrary code. Modern OS have protections from such attack vectors, but they are not sufficient enough and well-funded attacker can bypass them.
You could replace the video by an executable probably, I'm sure many users would launch it, especially if the source of the torrent is "reputable" and with positive comments.
Alternatively you could exploit a vulnerability in a codec library or something similar.
Plenty of people download executables on BitTorrent too, so it'd be easier just to target that. Go inject your malware into a popular torrent for pirating the latest version of Photoshop, or Windows, or a popular game.
