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Microsoft Opens Its Security Research Cookbooks

Posted by Soulskill on Thu Dec 27, 2007 09:31 PM
from the now-cook-me-up-some-pie dept.
Security IT
greg65535 writes "Today Microsoft launched a blog about the internals of their IT security research and patch development process. There are already some posts that you will not find in the official security bulletins or KB articles. One of the posts says, 'We periodically identify workarounds or mitigations like this that we can't use for official guidance because they're either too nuanced or have some exception cases. When we discover something potentially useful but are uncomfortable listing it in the bulletin, we'll do our best to describe it here in this blog.' It looks like Microsoft is making an effort to become more 'open' in the area of security research and communication."
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Submission: Microsoft Opens Its Cookbooks of Security Research by greg65535 (1209048)
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  • Microsoft Security Protocols (Score:5, Funny)

    by andy314159pi (787550) on Thursday December 27 2007, @09:37PM (#21836134) Journal

    Microsoft Opens Its Security Research Cookbooks

    Chapter 1.

    If someone knocks on the door, use the little peep hole.
    • in cases where there is no peep hole, get the tower shield provided to you during the orientation...
    • Chapter 2!

      An unidentified program wants to use your little peep hole.

      The source and purpose of this little peep hole is unknown. Don't use the peep hole unless you have used it before or know where it's from.

      CANCEL/ALLOW?
      • I don't know about your company, but here security = Barney-costumed QA's...

        "Heyyy.. Is thaatt a bug?? Give me a hug..."

      • Re:Microsoft Security Protocols (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 27 2007, @11:16PM (#21836626)
        No, you're not. This comment reads like a total troll for "big-ups".

        Security is about the best tool for the job and it's not always the Open Source tool, with the "street cred". When you say you're an IT professional, do you by chance mean you work for a small business, supporting other small businesses, (with pirated copies of Windows)?

        No one avenue is the correct choice for security. You should chose the complete set of tools from a variety of vendors, who offer total support. Good luck getting official support with tripwire on Debian.

        Cisco are a proprietary vendor - are you telling me they have no quality solutions? I suppose you don't use Symantec or another vendors AV, on your client desktops? Microsoft ISA actually offers a very robust and powerful firewalling system, for exampling, allowing you to internally spoof/proxy SSL certificates to domain members so you can even inspect encrypted packets on the network. Maybe not a polite thing to do but clearly useful in some organisations.

        And while we're on it, Domains... Active Directory is a security tool in itself. Locking down desktops and client machines is a key security method and AD offers about the best way to do this on the market - I suppose you use Samba and about 500 perl scripts, instead, do you?

        What utter garbage...
        • Good luck getting official support with tripwire on Debian.

          Luck has nothing to do with it. Reading the extensive list of consultants [debian.org] categorised by country on the Debian site has everything to do with it.

        • Microsoft ISA actually offers a very robust and powerful firewalling system, for exampling, allowing you to internally spoof/proxy SSL certificates to domain members so you can even inspect encrypted packets on the network.


          Quoted for hilarity. Up to that point I thought your post was actually serious. Haven't seen a punchline that good in ages.

            • Microsoft ISA is bloated and not easy to configure without careful reading, but it does do the job it is intended for poorly
              Fixed that for ya... There are good SSL proxies out there. ISA is not one of them.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          You're an idiot. What you're advocating is not security so much as covering your own arse - "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM^WMicrosoft^WCisco", basically.

          The giveaway is, of course, the fact that you talk about "official" support for tripwire on Debian. Who cares whether support is official or not? What really matters is whether it's useful, and "official" is neither a necessary nor a sufficient precondition for that. But to answer my earlier question, there *are* people who cares: middle managers, th

  • yeah but (Score:4, Funny)

    by User 956 (568564) on Thursday December 27 2007, @09:41PM (#21836162) Homepage
    It looks like Microsoft is making an effort to become more 'open' in the area of security research and communication.

    That's just because they haven't found a way to launch chairs at people through the internet.

  • Microsoft Security Research: Do you know what kind of a bomb it was?
    Clouseau: The exploding kind.
  • Don't give out new ideas.

  • Can we revisit the tag thing? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why is it that people feel the need to put in 35 character long tags? Isn't that defeating the purpose of it all?

  • A question for Mahatma Ghandi (Score:5, Funny)

    by knorthern knight (513660) on Thursday December 27 2007, @10:06PM (#21836308)
    Question: Mr. Ghandi, what do you think of Microsoft security?

    Answer: I think it would be a good idea.

  • It looks like Microsoft is making an effort to become more 'open' in the area of security research and communication.

    It does not just look like...it definitely is the case that Microsoft *is* making an effort...not just looking like.

    Question is: Who is being sensational here?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by robo_mojo (997193)

      t does not just look like...it definitely is the case that Microsoft *is* making an effort...not just looking like.
      That depends on what your definition of "is" is.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ozmanjusri (601766)
      it definitely is the case that Microsoft *is* making an effort...not just looking like.

      A statement of intent and two example postings is "making an effort"?

      You're being very generous to a company with a long history of abandoned promises and vapourware.

      How about we wait and see how they perform for a few months instead of offering immediate praise?

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by willyhill (965620)
        Except that creative spelling and the ever-dreadful "convert now or fall forever" attitude will never yield anything meaningful.
  • It looks like Microsoft is making an effort to become more 'open' in the area of security research and communication.

    That depends on what the meaning of is is.
  • ...in exchange for all of the help that they get? Probably not. Seeing that most developers want their free labor to at least result in open source code, I can't imagine that this effort is going to be all that popular with the best developers.

    Microsoft likes to throw around the word "open" a lot these days, but most smart people in the industry remain skeptical. Take, for example, what open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver has to say about Microsoft's supposed open OOXML format [fanaticattack.com]:

    The legacy binary formats remain closed. If a file is one which was converted from an older format of Microsoft Office by DIS29500 and allowed to wrap the old file in xml, it remains unreadable for everyone else. OOXML is still a closed spec tied into to many proprietary formats.
    So how open is open? Unless the code is considered open under OSI standards or Free under FSF guidelines, it's really still just a pig with lipstick and a dress.

    • Re:But will they release source code... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by El Royo (907295) on Thursday December 27 2007, @10:39PM (#21836474) Homepage
      There are different types of open. Your point is hardly at all related to the article. Just revealing some of their process will no doubt be very useful to developers who also develop code that needs to be secured. Also, providing more details on vulnerabilities might be useful to people who are protecting corporate networks. Obviously, what you meant is that this effort won't be popular with the best developers with a chip on their shoulders.

    • it's really still just a pig with lipstick and a dress
      That's a funny way to spell Steve Ballmer...

    • Re:But will they release source code... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nrgy (835451) on Thursday December 27 2007, @10:51PM (#21836520)
      Ugh I hate to defend Microsoft but I have to be one to disagree with you.

      When I provide code for people, projects, or even companies who's software I use, I could really give a rats behind if its open source or not. Sure it would be NICE but hardly REQUIRED by me at least.

      If you don't like what will be done with your free labour then don't provide it, no one is forcing you to. I like people who contribute and provide there free time, but I don't like it when those same people feel that since its so called FREE LABOUR that they can start imposing what can and should be done with there FREE LABOUR. It just doesn't work that way

      Yes you are providing a service, yes it is welcome by the recipient and community, NO you shouldn't have a say in what way your contributions are disseminated because it was your choice to provide the service and no one else's.

      I don't know about you but I provide my code because I want a better end product, not because I want it to be free in the open. If the code I provide will make my life easier then do with it as you will. Just because its not OPEN SOURCE like you say doesn't mean that it doesn't perform any good for the community of users for software X. Besides you wrote the stuff, unless you signed a legal waver to your code then nothing is stopping YOU from releasing it OPEN SOURCE style.
    • We're not all developers out here.

      Personally, I'd love access to the source code so I can better determine how systems are interacting when something goes wrong with something we paid for, but it's not necessary.

      Feedback like this can help open up other avenues for troubleshooting and understanding, and working with our TAM, I've had more than one instance where something we've seen has turned into a note in one of these KBs, or has caused part of a KB to not go public.

  • There is actually another mitigating factor present here that we didn't include in the bulletin because we could not authoritatively say that it was true in every case. The vulnerable code path only executes if your machine has a primary DNS suffix. Most of the time, only domain-joined machines have a primary DNS suffix. So it would have been great to say in the bulletin: "Machines not joined to a domain are safe" but that is not 100% accurate so we did not include that. Technically, an administrator could manually set a primary DNS suffix on a non-domain-joined machine.
    Okay...

    We periodically identify workarounds or mitigations like this that we can't use for official guidance because they're either too nuanced.
    How, exactly, is this 'too nuanced'? Why not just say "if your machine doesn't have a primary DNS suffix, you are not vulnerable"?

    I'll tell you why...because they assume that Windows administrators are idiots. Now, I've known some stupid Windows administrators in my day, but I wouldn't go so far as to think that most of them are idiots.

    • I can kinda understand it though... I've had to fight off more than my share of "We should do this because Microsoft says so" from the technical management (who don't have the time to take a nuanced understanding of the issue at hand)

      If they say it, thousands of customers will implement it without understanding the things that might break by removing that setting.
      Then they call Microsoft for help fixing it. (Oddly enough, you'd think that would actually drive them to do this, since it would guarantee more

      • you'd think that would actually drive them to do this, since it would guarantee more partner hours to burn off
        You're assuming they aren't already churning out as many partner hours as they have the manpower to handle.
    • because they assume that Windows administrators are idiots

      Well, they should know. They've been selling them those MSC* classes, so they know what quality they can expect...
    • It is a fair assumption, most of them aren't very smart (and why should they need to be?) and are usually ignorant.

      For as long as most people are stupid and ignorant it makes sense to target the largest market ;). Works for politicians, works for Microsoft.

      So you have thousands of windows administrators that can only admin say 5-10% of a single machine (they can't figure out the rest).

      Whereas a skilled admin should be able to admin hundred or so windows/linux desktops, or thousands of Linux/BSD servers.

    • Most of the time, only domain-joined machines have a primary DNS suffix

      I tend to set a primary DNS suffix on all my machines, windows as well as linux, seem to me that the only domains that count at Microsoft is Windows-domains. I am not surprised that they tend to break all kind of things.
  • Let me guess, the blog only gets updated on the second tuesday of every month [wikipedia.org]?
    • Let me guess, the blog only gets updated on the second tuesday of every month?, Hahahahhahahaa. Not.

      Let ME guess. You didn't actually RTFA? Did you?

      We expect to post every "patch Tuesday" with technical information about the vulnerabilities being fixed. .

  • Microsoft isn't the only one researching vulnerabilities in their products, and in fact, if it wasn't for the effort of a lot of third-party researchers uncovering vulnerabilities, Microsoft probably wouldn't make the effort that they are just now showing us and exposing to public scrutiny.

    The real problem is twofold... first, denial; for so long Microsoft (as well as many other mainstream software companies) refused to admit that there was a problem and didn't spend any time or money on the problem. This

  • Wireshark (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cibyr (898667) on Thursday December 27 2007, @11:05PM (#21836586) Journal
    Anyone else find it interesting that they had screenshots from Wireshark (previously known as Ethereal) on the page?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by daveb (4522)
      It's actually a network monitor screenshot (netmon) not wireshark. They look similar but they aren't the same thing. I prefer wireshark myself, but I know a couple of people who have converted to netmon for sniffing wireless on vista
        • You must have a very limited set of contacts. Most people I know who have purchased a PC in the last year are NOT geeks. I don't know of a single person who has gone out of their way to install XP on their PC, and I would be totally blown away if any of these people installed Linux. Not a single one of them is a "fanboy" - they are your average Mum & Dad and small business who use whatever is on their PC, pretty much treating it as an appliance. THESE are the people who form the majority of computer us
    • I'd be wary of EZ-Bake ovens that work akin to "push a few buttons and sometimes it just randomly blows up". Outside of KOL, that is.
  • It makes me so glad that anyone can read the source code for the OS I use. I don't know how I would get by if one company was the only trusted agent to decide whether some issue was too "nuanced" for me to know about. I don't know how people get through the day running that stuff.
  • Marketing.
    MS can fool you into spending your free time on its blogs.
    Microsoft Security Research: the first book is free.

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