this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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[–] DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Because it makes it the easiest thing to spoof an .exe which enables attacks of which you will never get out of. A legit.exe vs a spoofed legit.exe will be the exact same in every way except the coding in spoofed fucks you.

Edit: you're trading security risk for security risk that makes it easier to hide. Not worth it.

Edit 2: their is nothing 100% secure MD5 and Sha1 are both spoofable. Checksums and anything is capable of being man in the middle. You people act like you just found something that can't be broken. This is the real world the moment you switch most black hatters and white hatters will switch too...

[–] CheezyWeezle@lemmy.world 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure that these things work the way you think they do... an antivirus wouldn't just look for the name of an executable to be "legit.exe" but rather would look at what the program calls itself in it's manifest, compute the hash for the executable binary file, and compare that hash against a database of known good hashes. If the contents of the executable compute a hash identical to the known good hash, then you know the contents of the executable are clean.

[–] gronjo45@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Still getting into programming and having a bit of trouble understanding what a "manifest" is. What does this technically entail? Are "manifests" implemented differently by PL or OS?

[–] CheezyWeezle@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

The manifest (at least how I am using the term) is whatever metadata a file has, and the format and location of this metadata can differ between operating systems. Usually the manifest is generated by the operating system based off of header data from the file itself, and details about the file that the operating system can deduce, such as file size, origin, location, file type, etc. In Windows you can view this info by right clicking/opening the context menu on any file and selecting "Properties", on macOS by opening the context menu and selecting "Get Info", and on other OSes such as linux/freeBSD it will be something similar.

There are other usages for "manifest" depending on the context, for example a manifest.xml would be something a developer would include with an android app that has configuration settings and properties for the app.

[–] Gabu@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

Manifests are like an abstract for an executable.

[–] Amir@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 year ago

How is this getting upvoted. This is ridiculous garbage, every exe whitelist would obviously have checksums attached, not just a filename.

[–] xantoxis@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

Please don't reply to comments when you're talking out your ass, that doesn't help anyone. You don't know wtf you're on about, at all.

[–] starchturrets@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago

Not really, WDAC doesn't usually just look at the filename. It can look at the certificate it was signed by, or fallback to using hashes.

[–] CheezyWeezle@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lmao your edit 2 is completely silly. SHA-256 is what would be used for checksum verification, and SHA-256 is pretty much collision resistant, and even then if two files computed the same hash they would have such different contents/properties that it would be obvious they are not the same file. MD5 and SHA-1 have been phased out for any serious usage for a while now.

Seriously tho, if you don't know what you are talking about you should probably stop making a fool of yourself