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Microsoft No Longer a 'Laughingstock' of Security?
Journal written by Toreo asesino (951231) and posted by
Zonk
on Fri Sep 21, 2007 09:51 AM
from the set-the-bar-high-guys dept.
from the set-the-bar-high-guys dept.
Toreo asesino writes "In a Q&A with Scott Charney, the vice president of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft, Charney suggests that security in Microsoft products has moved on from being the 'laughing stock' of the IT industry to something more respectable. He largely attributes this to the new Security Development Lifecycle implemented in development practices nearly six years ago. 'The challenge is really quite often in dealing with unrealistic expectations. We still have vulnerabilities in our code, and we'll never reduce them to zero. So sometimes we will have a vulnerability and people say to me, "So the [Security Development Lifecycle (SDL)] is a failure right?" No it isn't. It was our aspirational goal that the SDL will get rid of every bug.'"
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the bar is set so high. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to sometimes wonder how, when security is considered so important, how Microsoft has been allowed to take so long. It's also a bit funny to consider how high the bar is set that they get credit for achieving "no longer the laughingstock..." status.
It kind of reminds me of the cell phone industry and their "high" standard where they get away with advertising braggadocio like "the provider with the fewest dropped calls". It's funny, I grew up with a phone infrastructure where I never experienced a dropped call -- granted, a less complex (wired) achievement, but had "wired" phone service been invented today, I suspect the standard would have been "less dropped calls", too... because maximized profit dominates the industries' collective motivations, not quality products.
(Case in point... if you'd ever owned the amazing Harmony() remote controls before they were bought by Logitech, they were wonderful devices -- rock solid, great feel to them... now, they're sexied up with cheap buttons, lousy feel, and questionable reliability. And get ready, Logitech just bought Slimline devices. Thought the Squeezebox was a great gadget? Better get the remaining quality ones before profit-think forges it into a cheap crappy imitation of it's former self.)
And, to save you all a little time.... mod(self, -1, offtopic);
rear-view mirror (Score:5, Interesting)
So really, they are not saying anything different than they have always said. "Back then" when their products were insecure, they insisted that their products were secure. Now, they are admitting that "back then" their products were not secure, and are continuing to insist that their products are secure.
Why should we believe them? Once bitten, twice shy, and with good reason.
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Re:rear-view mirror (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse_2007_08.php [av-comparatives.org]
Those results are in improvement. The March results had them finding only 82%. Meanwhile, much more viable commercial products are around 99+%. Still, even for them, letting 50 out of every thousand bugs in doesn't say much about their security, even if OneCare is so much worse.
Re:May we be... (Score:4, Insightful)
While I certainly wouldn't say that the three have perfect security (and certainly not WRT dumb admin/user mistakes), I can say with confidence that they can rightfully be claimed as being among the most secure out there. Windows cannot, not has ever been, able to credibly claim that. Whether it can do so in the future remains to be seen.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also a bit funny to consider how high the bar is set that they get credit for achieving "no longer the laughingstock..." status.?
Do you mean how low the bar is set? It seems kind of funny to me to hear someone from Microsoft admit that they were a laughingstock, and that they're looking for kudos for not being a laughingstock. It reminds me of Chris Rock's bit about people who brag, "I've never been to jail!" What do you want, a cookie?
Anyway, I guess it's true that Microsoft has gotten more sec
but has it improved? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait a sec. Don't project your own values onto a group that may not share them, nor assume a causal relationship where no data has been shown to indicate one.
So the claim is that it's no longer a laughing stock in the realm of security. All right then. Let's pretend for a moment that claim is true. The next question is why?
There are at least two possible answers:
We can see from the systems affected by vulnerabilities that the former has not happened, no redesign. Maybe it's the latter, better PR.
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Re: Straight from the MS playbook... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is classic Microsoft MO: as soon as a Windows version has been released for a few months, start badmouthing the previous versions. They did the same with XP to 2K/ME, ME to 98, NT4 to NT 3.5, etc.
Just Vista marketing. Nothing to see here, move along.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I recently opined on this subject and I'd rather not retype it, so here's the copy/paste from a few weeks ago. Please excuse the parts that are obvious retorts and don't really apply here....
1. I wasn't bashing Linux or OSX or anything else for being insecure. Well, I suppose you could say I was, but if you do, you'd have to acknowledge that I was bashing them all equally. And I certainly gave them credit for being more secure than
Yeah, 'cause clean code is soooo easy to write. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, the little things, like always remembering your </i>, and never forgetting to preview your work.
Glass houses.
Projectile stones.
Whatever.
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Phone Quality (Score:5, Informative)
What's really funny is that 20 years ago, wired long distance carriers were waging advertising battles over who had the clearest call. Sprint's "Pin Drop" ads probably set the bar in this respect.
So, while you take the wired phone service for granted, it hasn't been that long since call quality was a very important part of a consumers purchasing system.
Go back another 20 years to the '60s and you still had a significant portion of the phone network that was manually switched by human operators.
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Says who? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Says who? (Score:4, Funny)
How can you [Allow | Cancel] "Allow" say that they [Allow | Cancel] "Allow" are still a [Allow | Cancel] "Allow" laughingstock?
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Re:Says who? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Says who? (Score:4, Interesting)
I admin a combination of 2000/2003/2003r2 boxes and there are still things that make a security-minded sysadmin's head spin.
-The boxes *still* advertise and have a great number of open ports.
-Root is *still* is allowed remote access by default. System root, under a domain controller still advertises itself as ready and waiting for you to login.
-Did I mention root remote control is still enabled by default?
-I doubt most win32 sysadmins have any idea the number of undocumented systems logging in and doing who-knows-what to the system. If they configured and read their logs the way I do, at least a few of them would wonder what the heck is going on.
-Don't get me started with their Rube Goldberg security objects system. Complex and extremely difficult to use, yet exceptions abound when trying to simultaneously harden a system and keep the undocumented features from throwing errors.
Their security reputation has been purchased and PHB's everywhere are lulled into another false sense of security. The good news is I'll never run out of work because they require so much baby sitting compared to a Linux server.
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Poor security makes money. (Score:5, Informative)
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Riggghhhht! (Score:3, Funny)
Get that man a dictionary! (Score:4, Funny)
He keeps saying those words... I do not think they mean what the thinks they mean...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
not there yet (Score:2, Interesting)
I say, set a standard (Score:5, Interesting)
Of COURSE they're not the laughing stock... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Of COURSE they're not the laughing stock... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should downloaded (i.e. tainted / potentially unsafe) code have any rights at all except to its own files by default? Should it be able to read your documents, open a network connection and send them out? Should it be able to format your disk? Hell, why even have a globally accessible file system at all?
We can't improve the users much, so we're going to have to improve the OS. Actually, some of the early security models were much better than the ones we use now, but carried too much overhead for the machines of the day.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Botnets (Score:4, Insightful)
A good example - IIS (Score:5, Insightful)
There are only two "Important" bulletins for IIS 6, while IIS 5 has almost 30 bulletins over the same inital time period. It is amazing how far IIS has come since that nightmare that was IIS 4.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...and Microsoft doesn't play down threats? Hark to the ol' l0pht website:
l0pht - "Making the theoretical practical since 1992."
Re:A good example - IIS (Score:5, Interesting)
You do realise that you are measuring the "quality" of IIS by counting the number of security flaws that Microsoft will admit to having fixed?
You're not counting the number of known flaws. You're not counting the number of flaws that Microsoft knows about. You're not even counting the number of flaws that they've actually fixed. You're interpreting this change in the numbers as indicating an improvement, when it might just as easily indicate that they fix less flaws than they used to.
And don't forget that Microsoft has a long history of not bothering to fix security flaws until significant numbers of exploits have been noticed in the wild. We can only guess at how many unfixed flaws there are in IIS today.
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Re:A good example - IIS (Score:4, Insightful)
Three vunlerabilies, none classified as "highly" or "extremely" critical, all patched.
Apache 2.x Vulnerability Report since 2003 [secunia.com]
33 vunlerabilies, 3% classified as "highly" critical, 9% unpatched, 3% only partially patched.
Sorry, I know if offends the delicate sensibilites of slashdotters, but IIS6 has a virtually perfect record since its release.
You spouted a lot of speculation that IIS6 has tons of undisclosed flaws, but you've provided zero evidence. If there are so many flaws, why have they not manifested themselves? Microsoft is better on security than they were in the past, whether you like it or not. Deal with it.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Security isn't just something you can pin on the software vendor and expect them to solve all your problems. It takes good system admins to keep the systems up-to-date with security patches and have them on a network that is designed for security.
They left the port open. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, they had.
But the problem was that that port was left OPEN on machines that DID NOT NEED IT OPEN.
With security, you CANNOT rely upon the end user to keep current on patches. Your system HAS to be able to defend itself WITHOUT those patches.
And the simple way to do that is to not have ANY open ports by default.
Security is a process. You are arguing about the high end, theoretical levels
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You bring up two things there. One, you can't rely on the end user to stay current with their patches. Microsoft went ahead and setup Automatic Updates. Therefore the end user doesn't really have to think about it. The box will reboot itself automatically once a month to install the latest patches.
Your second point about a box being able to defend itself without
MIcrosoft guy says MS's security is ok? (Score:4, Insightful)
-jcr
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
SQL Server 2005 - http://secunia.com/product/6782/?task=advisories [secunia.com]
IIS6 - http://secunia.com/product/1438/?task=advisories [secunia.com]
Vista too is looking good so far too, but it's very new, and only time will tell - http://secunia.com/product/13223/?task=advisories [secunia.com].
Re:MIcrosoft guy says MS's security is ok? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Pardon? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mate, people have stopped laughing, not because Microsoft has changed but because we've become so desensitised to the security issues it no longer brings the same attention it used to; its expected.
If Microsoft do want to correct their security issue, they need to start at the bottom and work their way up; they need to go through their product, they need to document, clean up, remove parts that are security risks, replace parts which are added because they're nice rather than needed. They need to stop the lie that 'computers are easy to use' when in reality, they're complex machines that actually might require a bit of book reading and learning (to the screams of the ignorant out there).
They also start needing to stop re-inventing the wheel and start working in groups; yes, groups are inefficient but like any brain storming, issues are raised which the original author might not have thought about - when you're an organisation all thinking along the same line, you can't adequately scrutinise the specification for every possible scenario - that is why standardisation is desirable. Issues of compatibility and security can be raised, and addressed. Microsoft on the other hand thinks because it has the cash and are a big organisation, it can address all the concerns internally.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Partly due to the maturation of the criminal population. Today's criminal population is now computer literate and have discovered how much money is to be made in taking advantage of Window's vulnerabilities. The iloveyou virus was both brilliant and retarded. It was brilliant in that it could replicate itself in so many ways and so quickly, which is what caused all of the destruction. Most of the damage was not from
Windows APIs are inherently insecure. (Score:5, Informative)
Until Microsoft abandons the entire "security zone" model and makes the HTML control default to a secure or "closed" state completely under the management of the calling application Windows security will never be anything but a joke. The recent hole in Yahoo Instant Messenger, for example, is primarily Microsoft's fault... because the "security zones" should not be able to "fail open". Blaming Yahoo for not 'sanitizing' the input is nuts.
No other HTML rendering library works this way. The two leading alternatives... Mozilla's Gecko and KDE's KHTML (and thus Apple's Webcore)... both implement a closed sandbox. If an application wants the page to have more capability, it must explicitly install hooks to grant it that capability. This way when an application renders a page using Gecko or KHTML there's no possibility of there being prepared holes to attack. In addition, when they DO install a controlled hole in the sandbox, they know that they're the only agency doing so... there's no concerns about some insecure ActiveX control in the system becoming an avenue of attack.
Until Microsoft completely changes the API for the HTML control they won't solve their image problem, and they shouldn't expect to... because until they do this, they have a problem and the image only reflects that.
ActiveX use in the HTML control, of course, is completely insane. Given all the layers of bandaids and patches and dialogs and settings and security levels wrapped around them, it's actually less effort to explicitly install a plugin than to open IE up to the point where you can use a "trusted" ActiveX control. They need to deprecate and eventually eliminate this.
There are other problems, too. Applications have to parse command lines completely, using their own code to break them up into arguments and perform wildcard expansion. Both OS X and Linux use the UNIX "exec" call, which doesn't require the application to add this additional evaluation step. Many of the "URI" related holes found in applications on Windows... including several recent ones involving IE, Firefox, and Second Life... are due to this flaw in Microsoft's APIs.
There's a second flaw in their URI handlers, and that is the inability to separate internal handlers that may expose more powerful capabilities than a sandboxed object should have access to with the ones that are designed for use by untrusted documents. The 'patch' to fix this is to try and sanitise the list of URI handlers that each application will use. This, like any other "sanitization-based" approach, is inherently flawed. They need to create a second registry that only supposedly secure applications will use... and then they won't need to worry about web pages containing links to ".CHM" files.
(Apple, by the way, has copied this flaw from Microsoft. But at least they don't share the rest of the burden)
The lack of a standard mechanism to bind network services to specific interfaces is a third problem. In UNIX most network services have traditionally been run from inetd, so if you replace inetd with something like xinetd or tcp wrappers you can prevent services from listening to anything but the local interface "localhost". This means that a firewall on UNIX is an extra defense, where on Windows it's the only way to keep insecure protocols from accepting connections from external sources.
For Microsoft to get the same reputation for security that UNIX based systems have earned, it will have to correct these flaws. The easiest way, perhaps, would be for it to BECOME a UNIX-based system. It wouldn't take much, so much of the API is already inherited from Microsoft's one-time infatuation with UNIX, and they ship a subset of teh UNIX API with Windows in the POSIX subsystem.
Or, though it would be less desirable from the point of view of people who have to write portable code, they could implement their own secure APIs and make the existing ones a deprecated and eventually optional add-in.
But so long as they keep the current API unchanged in all details, though, they can not solve these problems they're faced with.
Bridges not falling down is unrealistic? (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, that bridge in Minnesota just collapsed. How long have we been building bridges? We know how to build bridges, right? Sometimes people just have unrealistic expectations of what we can do.
I don't know anyone who thinks a major bridge in major US city in the richest country in the world not collapsing is an "unrealistic expectation". I actually DO agree that having zero security holes in any software as large as Windows (or Linux) is an unrealistic goal. Comparing that to a major bridge disaster that never should have happened is kind of a strange comparison though.
And they're not being asked to have "zero holes". (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not what they're being asked for. What they're being asked for is for systematic holes to be eliminated, so they don't have to keep being patched over and over again. I've listed some of the systematic holes in the design that they keep getting bit by in the message I posted just before yours.
The thing that really bothers me is that people are accepting the argument that holes Mic
The good news (Score:5, Funny)
Security? How about reliability (Score:3, Insightful)
The apparent cause of the problem? Windows update happily auto-updated the wireless driver, neglecting to check that the firmware was compatible, and neglecting to also offer a firmware update. MS Security might have improved, but I don't think their reliability has. Many big corps tread carefully with update patches for this very reason.
Scotts mom and Internet security .. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, all you have to do is build a Desktop System that can't be compromised by opening an e-mail attachment or clicking on a URL
"more people are like, 'Microsoft got its act together, and others should follow their lead,' technologists say, 'OK, our job is done -- what next?'"
"What I explain to people is that this isn't actually a technology problem we are solving; it's a crime problem"
Self serving imaginary made up quotes and a nonsensical opinion expressed. Making it a twenty year felony crime for hacking Windows isn't going to make Windows any more secure
Re:STILL the Laughing Stock! (Score:5, Informative)
Shift-Right-Click -> Run-As -> The-Following-User?
I do it all the time...
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, Microsoft has Windows and IE asking so many security messages, that the users automatically say yes, once again, reducing all of their efforts to ashes.
When a program ask the user to "confirm" (without even authentification) for each byte it receives from the network (without much clue about the signification of that byte), you can't say the user is reducing their security efforts to ashes. Asking the user to be the IP stack is not the solution.
I'm exagerating of course, but I hope you get the point, asking an uneducated user is not a security measure.
And you still can't run IE under a separate user account.
I think you're wrong on that point, there's no reason runas wouldn't work.
Re:STILL the Laughing Stock! (Score:5, Funny)
You are considering becoming complacent and answering yes to all security pop-ups. Accept or Deny?
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Re:my opinion of MS security (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone at M$: "XP with IE is full of 'critical' security holes."
Someone's manager: "Let's write a firewall and we can get away with calling those security holes 'important' and not fix them."
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