Greed, politics, and CanSecWest

I’ve been following with amusement the developments coming out of the recent CanSecWest hacking contest. While most of the headlines have focused on the “quick death” of the MacBook Air system on day two, the really juicy bits didn’t emerge until later in the event. In fact, it wasn’t until after the Vista box fell to an Adobe Flash exploit that the fur really began to fly.

The opening salvo was fired, unsurprisingly, by the Mac community. In his RoughlyDrafted blog, Daniel Eran Dilger questioned the validity of the event while throwing mud in all directions: at the winning hacker for his public hostility towards Mac OS X, at the event coordinators for sensationalizing the Mac’s downfall, and at the FOSS community for not wanting to tarnish its sacred cow (Ubuntu) publicly.

The aspersions were indeed cast far and wide. And while the hyperbole was thick and the exchanges quite heated, three themes managed to emerge from Mr. Dilger’s ranting (and from the various blogospheric responses):

1. That hacking has become so commercialized, top “black hats” would rather sell their exploits on the black market (to spammers, et al) than waste time in a stupid contest.

2. That the lack of Linux hacks was the result of a predominance of “Torvaldian fanbois” among the hacker elite (no real surprise there).

3. That Mac OS X fans are (still) the sorest of losers.

The whole, sad ConSecWest charade reminded of why I hate these cross-platform comparisons. The playing field is never truly level, the rules tend to be overly broad and easily circumvented, and nearly everyone has some hidden agenda — even the supposedly impartial event coordinators (in this case, sensationalism).

I thought the specter of Linux fans closing ranks to inflate their platform’s image was particularly telling. That several participants later admitted (privately) to deliberately ignoring several promising bug-related attack vectors (including a Flash-based exploit similar to the one that took out Vista) simply shows that you can’t believe a word these FOSS people say about anything. They’ll lie through their teeth if it helps to gloss over the imperfections within their anointed distro.

In the end, the only platform without a champion was Windows Vista, which is not surprising since nobody will admit to being a fan anymore (all the cool kids have jumped ship to “Workstation” 2008). You know a platform is on its way out when it falls prey to a pervasive, and thus potentially devastating, hack and nobody says a word in its defense.

The problem with CanSecWest is that it’s too broadly focused. Here’s hoping that next year they kick out the whiners (Mac fans) and losers (Vista fans) and just let the Linux/FOSS freaks have at it. Because nothing brings out the crazies like a nice distro-on-distro cage match.