“In essence, the way the laws are phrased now, there is no way to ever comply… even as a non-security company,” says researcher Halvar Flake, a.k.a. Thomas Dullien, CEO and head of research at Sabre Security. “If I walked into a store now and told the clerk that I wish to buy Windows XP and I will use it to hack, then the clerk is aiding me in committing a crime by [selling me] Windows XP,” Dullien says.
“The law doesn’t actually distinguish between what the intended purpose of a program is. It just says if you put a piece of code in a disposition that is used to commit a crime, you’re complicit in that crime.”
Dullien says his company’s BinNavi tool for debugging and analyzing code or malware is fairly insulated from the law because it doesn’t include exploits. But his company still must ensure it doesn’t sell to “dodgy” customers. Thierry Zoller, security engineer for German security firm n.runs, says he has removed his homegrown Bluetooth hacking tool, and renowned PHP researcher Stefan Esser earlier this month took down all of the proof-of-concept exploits he had developed for the Month of PHP Bugs in March.
It’s unclear whether the long arm of the German law could reach them, so some aren’t taking any chances: The exploit-laden Metasploit hacking tool could fall under German law if someone possesses it, distributes it, or uses it, for instance.
“I’m staying out of Germany,” says HD Moore, Metasploit’s creator and director of security research for BreakingPoint Systems. The law basically leaves the door open to outlaw any software used in a crime, notes Sabre Security’s Dullien.
Interestingly, German lawmakers met plenty of expert resistance to the computer crime law reforms — but passed them anyway. Lindner says he told officials that the German implementation of the EU Cybercrime Convention — from which the law originated — is not in line with the EU version, which excludes security industry, academic, and private security research. Dullien says he thinks legislators were pressured to pass a new law because the old one was flawed. “And they had to implement the EU directive on cybercrime, making it illegal to provide software whose ‘principal purpose’ is committing a crime,” he says.
The law, which went into effect on August 10, mandates fines or prison sentences for any person who violates 202a or 202b “by providing access to, selling, acquiring, leaving at the disposition of someone, distributing or otherwise making accessible” passwords or access control information.
http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=132255