The Desktop Security Battle May Be Lost 389
Trailrunner7 writes in with a Threatpost.com article that begins: "For years, security experts, analysts and even users have been lamenting the state of desktop security. Viruses, spam, Trojans and rootkits have added up to create an ugly picture. But, the good news is that the desktop security battle may be over. The less-than-good news, however, is that we may have lost it. Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of WhiteHat Security, said Thursday that many organizations, particularly in the financial services industry, have gotten to the point of assuming that their customers' desktops are compromised. And moving forward from that assumption, things don't get much prettier." It goes on to speculate about home routers being targeted and infected.
Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:5, Funny)
The Desktop Security Battle May Be Lost
No, you must have hope! We just need to hold them off a little longer until Gandalf the White Hat shows up on Shadowfax Machine.
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FOR x64!!!
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*slap*
It's x86_64 or x86. There's no such thing as x64.
Re:Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The major problem we actually are suffering from is that the world depends way too much on a single environment. And that environment is a kludge.
I'm not saying that Linux is much better - just somewhat better since it isn't as integrated as Windows.
As for losing the battle - this is a battle you only lose when you give up. As long as you persist you won't lose. You may get some beating now and then, but that's not a big issue since you can come back.
Re:Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:5, Informative)
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"It goes on to speculate about home routers being targeted and infected."
^that looks to me more like wondering about a "what if?" hypothetical scenario, not something which actually takes the blame from Windows just yet...
Re:Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:5, Informative)
The article states "These are all reasonable assumptions based on real-world attacks that have been going on for some time now. Attackers have been targeting home networking equipment for a couple of years, using a combination of vulnerabilities in the firmware and hardware to get control of home users' outbound Internet traffic". Links within the original blog post discuss botnets that are already attacking Linux-based routers [computerworld.com]
There's nothing "hypothetical" about this threat.
Mod Parent Up. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mod Parent Up. (Score:5, Informative)
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what they are mostly the target is idiot users that leave them wide open and never update them.
Leaving them wide open has nothing to do with it. The exploits are based on hardware/firmware vulnerabilities. As far as updating them, yeah, that's great for you and me, but to most average router users the router is an appliance, like a clock radio, and they don't know they need to be updated. Not to mention how confidence wanes when they get one look at the the horrific warnings you get when you do try and upgrade the firmware on a router.
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But it won't matter if they control the network, if you build a secure encrypted network on top of it. You could root every machine between me and my bank. With the right protocols, you wouldn't be able to sniff or forge any traffic whatsoever. The worst you could do is a DOS.
Yes, and that's what we should advocate. Everyone build a secure encrypted network. Ready.....GO!
Demotivators (Score:2)
Quitters never win.
Winners never quit.
But those who never win and never quit
are idiots.
-- despair.com
Re:Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's true. And I've actuall recieved one of these attacks on Routers before, and it ain't pretty.
So I live with 2 room mates. One of them (we'll call him A) doesn't know a lot about computers besides they play awesome video games. The other (We'll call him B) one loves computers and how he can Torrent "1080p" movies before the blu ray even comes out. He knows enough about computers to set the basic stuff up himself, and I'm sure the average user would call him good with computers, but you or I would be able to tell right away that he's just above average.
So B downloads a movie. I believe it was Sherlock Holmes. Anyways, he moves it to this external Hard Drive we have laying around, then tries it on his desktop in the living room to see if it works. Video plays, but then he starts getting pop ups. "Dang" he tells himself, tries using the BitDefender online scanner as he leaves for work. A comes home from work a couple hours later, moves the External Hard Drive to the Xbox360, notices Holmes is on there, and tries playing it. It doesn't work. So he moves it over to his desktop in his room, tries it, Hey it plays! But now he's got pop ups as well.
So I come home, and I decide I want to put on a movie. I move the external hard drive back to the 360 because its got Office Space on it, and watching that movie after a hard days work makes me feel better about not stealing from my company. Anyways, I notice Sherlock Holmes is on it, but I mean we saw it in theatres like a couple months ago so no reason to watch it again just yet. I open up B's desktop to surf the net while watching the movie. Pop ups. Well we'll clean that later. Dealt with enough stuff at work, not in the mood. So I bring out my laptop. That's odd, somethings hijacking my browser. So I boot into safe mode and run a scan on it. Nothing. That annoys the hell out of me. So grab the screw driver, rip out the hard drive, slave it, scan it from my desk top, still nothing. Well what the frack? I put everything back to normal, boot it up, look at the settings. That doesn't look like the regular DNS... though its hard to tell. Same DNS on the desktop. Try browsing the desktop, also getting highjacked.
Okay, so I log into the gateway. Telus gave us this really crappy DSL/Wireless router. I never changed the admin password (admin/telus) on it, but I put a wireless password on it, my initial premise being that should Telus need to remote in for any other issue there wouldn't be an issue, and the only way someone would get into our network was either breaking PSA2/AES or by plugging in locally. In hindsight that was a bit of a mistake. Anyways, so I look at the router and it's DNS was changed from automatically retrieve to the bad DNS.
Alright. So I change the admin password and change the DNS back, and unplug everyone but me from the router. Don't want the infected machines pushing out the DNS again. I spend the rest of the evening slaving the 2 infected Desktops and cleaning them off, and even checking the 360 hard drive (cause you never know if they've somehow managed to write a virus for that, but luckily it didn't get infected). Then putting everything back to normal. A and B were a little pissed because they were without internet, and without their computers for a little while (which just made me upset because I didn't start the problem, but I had to fix it).
After everything was working and we were done yelling at each other, we all played a game Age of Empires 2, co-operatively against computers. It's like Make up sex for nerds. But to be honest, I still get a little tired of having to deal with that kind of stuff. We're all moving out in July.
Re:Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:5, Informative)
Telus gave us this really crappy DSL/Wireless router. I never changed the admin password (admin/telus) on it, but I put a wireless password on it.
To quote the Mythbusters, "Well there's your problem!"
Re:Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the world of IT, where people don't care about you until something breaks, then it's your fault until it's fixed.
Re:Though the Times They May Look Grim ... (Score:5, Insightful)
teach them not to click yes blindly to every pop-up box without reading it, teach them not to fall for every phishing attempt under the sun
You cannot teach them something they do not want to learn. Users don't want to think about the pop-up box they just want it out of the way. Unnecessary dialogs have trained them to just click Yes or OK and get on with what they were doing. Horridly lengthy and unreadable EULA's have trained them to just scroll down and click Accept. Installers with too many pages have trained them to just keep clicking next till it says it's installed (something those insidious toolbars that are checked on by default take full advantage of).
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Excellent (Score:3, Funny)
The most amazing part... (Score:3, Insightful)
of this alarmist drivel is that there are only 2 adds on the poster's page.
-Rick
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Re:Excellent (Score:4, Interesting)
if banks "know" that the customers are infected, why do they blithely sell online access and transactions as a benefit, without any cautions about security?
perhaps the banks have realized this could be a new way for them to make money: they could start making and selling some kind of secured, dedicated routers or something, for those customers that have to take care of their banking online. no router, no access.
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Wasn't there a recent Slashdot article where some banks are now providing bootable media for use when accessing the bank's website?
Won't work with an iPad though :)
[John]
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if banks "know" that the customers are infected, why do they blithely sell online access and transactions as a benefit, without any cautions about security?
Because it's cheaper to pay for the amount of fraud that occurs than to lose customers by blarthering about a security risk that, in all honesty, most folk never run into.
Online security will only ever be good enough to where sneaking into someone's house and planting a keylogger is a little bit easier.
Actually, it seems reasonable to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it seems like a reasonable assumption to me. Always code or design assuming the worst. Before you decide what hoops you make the user jump through to get his money online, assume that he's pwned in every imaginable way, that his firewall is mis-configured to be a digital goatse ;) and probably he's not even who he says he is. And he's probably trying to break your system too. Because sooner or later you'll have to deal with just that. Now what can you do to mitigate such a situation?
Basically you can divide people and design philosophies into a spectrum between:
- optimistic: they expect the best possible outcome. They just know it'll be all right. The world is nice, the users do exactly the click sequence they've been told to, and his functions only receive exactly the right input.
- pessimistic: they expect that Murphy's Law is actually a law of the universe, and if something could possibly go wrong without violating the laws of physics, it will. Actually the real serious pessimists don't even exclude the laws of physics going wrong. They tend to have the speed of light as a variable ;) They also tend to bring a sweater or two along when going to the beach in Florida in August. And they just know that some bastard out there will feed their program the wrong input, or will have his password stolen by a keylogger and then sue when he finds his account empty. They tend to rarely be disappointed in those expectations, actually.
Personally I like my programs and processes designed by the latter. And it seems to me like this is what those banks are doing. They're for a change starting from the worst possible scenario as an assumption. Nothing wrong with that.
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Banks are quite eager to accept that all of their customers are infected. That will enable them to throw the blame onto the customers when their accounts get hacked.
Why do you think they call it "identity theft"? My identity hasn't been stolen from me. A vendor's shitty security has given it away.
Don't worry! (Score:5, Funny)
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Too busy to read TFA... but how the hell are they infecting firmware? That seems like a huge oversight by Linksys, Netgear, etc.
It's like they're parking a tank in front of your house to defend you from the bad guys, and then leaving the keys to the tank in the ignition.
Wait, do tanks use keys?
Wait pt 2, did I just make a car analogy?
Re:Don't worry! (Score:4, Interesting)
Actual serious answer: they don't. Too many chances to lose them. You lock up a tank by locking all the hatches internally but one, then putting a exterior padlock on that.
Keanu: WHOA... (Score:3, Funny)
*picks up bic pen*
*walks toward nearest army base with M1 Abrams*
*Whistles to allay suspicion*
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That's okay, in another decade "The Year of Linux on the Router" will be just around the corner :P
In all seriousness, however, while there's nothing that can be done about the user making bad decisions, the OS can do a fair bit to mitigate the effect of those decisions.
Not running as a privileged user, having space, cpu and network caps in place, etc. are a start.
There always will be a trade-off between letting the user do something easily and not letting a program do something too easily. With decent UI de
They should never have trusted customer machines. (Score:5, Insightful)
> ...many organizations, particularly in the financial services industry,
> have gotten to the point of assuming that their customers' desktops are
> compromised.
They should have been assuming that all along. They should assume it even if only a tiny fraction of their customers' desktops are compromised.
What's a "Virus"? (Score:2)
emerge -s virus
Searching...
[ Results for search key : virus ]
[ Applications found : 0 ]
And what do condoms have to do with computer security, anyway?
(ducks for cover)
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You used to be able to sudo apt-get install keylogger under Debian. Even when it comes to being compromised, Linux makes it easier;)
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What's a "virus"? I can't find any reference to it in portage:
emerge -s virus Searching... [ Results for search key : virus ] [ Applications found : 0 ]
And what do condoms have to do with computer security, anyway?
(ducks for cover)
The utility "eix" is quite a bit faster than "emerge -s" particularly when you also want to search the package description. You just have to remember to update its index when you do "emerge --sync".
Assign responsibility to those who can do.... (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to assign responsibility to those who can do something about it.
Every day, my firewall emails me a list of port scans against it, sorted by IP address. Most days that list is just under 100 different IP addresses scanning me, some days it is in the thousands of IP addresses - from all over the Internet (i.e. not just local addresses). This is on a residential DSL connection that offers no services to the world, isn't linked to by any web sites, and does not respond to any unsolicited traffic.
It seems reasonable to assume that most if not all of those IP addresses represent infected machines. Were there some way to get them shut down, imagine how much cleaner the Internet would be. However, there IS no way to do so: the ISPs hosting those machines don't provide any meaningful or automated way to report them, there is no way to contact the owner of those machines, so they just keep on spewing and infecting the rest of the system.
Nor will ISPs ever provide an automated way of reporting such machines as things stand now: a reporting mechanism is an internalized cost, and there is no reason for an ISP to internalize that cost when they can externalize it to the rest of the Internet.
This is one of those rare cases where "there ought to be a law" is a reasonable response: were ISPs required by law to investigate abuse reports and disconnect infected clients until those clients are cleaned up, the number of infected machines on the Internet would be reduced, the profit margins of the bot-herders and spammers wiped out, and the system would clean itself up. However, such a law would be fought most vigorously by all ISPs precisely because it would be internalizing a currently externalized cost, and it would be worth vastly more to ISPs to prevent such a law than the cost of lobbying against it.
(NB: "repeatedly submitting false abuse reports" is itself abuse, and should also result in the source of the false reports being shut down).
"Trojan/Worm/Virus" credits, anyone?
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It seems reasonable to assume that most if not all of those IP addresses represent infected machines. Were there some way to get them shut down, imagine how much cleaner the Internet would be. However, there IS no way to do so: the ISPs hosting those machines don't provide any meaningful or automated way to report them, there is no way to contact the owner of those machines, so they just keep on spewing and infecting the rest of the system.
Nor will ISPs ever provide an automated way of reporting such machines as things stand now: a reporting mechanism is an internalized cost, and there is no reason for an ISP to internalize that cost when they can externalize it to the rest of the Internet.
On the contrary. Claim to be a representative of the movie or recording industry, and claim list those addresses as infringing your copyright. Tada. Instant automated disconnect (well, after the third time at least..) :P
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Spammers will buy 'spam credits' from clean secure users to stay spam-neutral. The overall effect will be a cleaner Internet.
I myself will be setting up the clearinghouse / broker for spam credits as a service to the community at large.
Sweeping Conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. Even working at a university, it completely depends on how you run your show. The department I'm part of has a border firewall, client firewalls, no one runs as administrator, antivirus, spyware, malware checkers are run on a regular basis. More important than any of those: we spend time to educate our users on security. They know what to avoid in terms of phishing scams, never to give out passwords to anyone, what to look for before you click on a link in an email (or even a website), etc.
To say the desktop war has been lost because the company you talked to has sucky IT and suckier IT clients...is just dumb.
Desktop, not workstation (Score:2)
Yes, any halfway competent organization can secure its workstations. It's not that hard to form and enforce reasonable policies that keep the receptionist's system clean.
But when she gets home, there's no organization backing her up. There is no policy or IT support beyond (maybe) some Indian call centre who's first priority is getting her off the line ASAP. It's fair to assume her desktop at home has been compromised by anyone with the inclination to do so.
Surely (Score:2)
Surely not (Score:2, Insightful)
The practice of using a single privileged account for everything - banking, reading slashdot, downloading porn - may be doomed, and about time too. But I still think there's hope for using a single piece of hardware and a single network. Even if it comes down to using not just separate accounts, but separate cores, for play and work. Last time I looked (a while back) some CPU manufacturers were adding features for process separation but the OS had not yet implemented support. End-to-end encryption should pr
The array('crime','war','famine') may be lost... (Score:2)
I know my windows systems are safe! (Score:3, Funny)
So the battle isn't winnable (Score:4, Insightful)
The battle isn't winnable, not without a significant world wide crackdown on rights and liberties.
Using that logic to say we shouldn't fight the battle at all is fundamentally flawed though. It's akin to saying that the battle against murder, rape and kiddie porn isn't winnable and should be given up. Human nature cannot be changed, we've spent countless thousands of years learning and relearning that lesson when we forget what history has taught us before.
Just because human nature cannot be changed does not mean that we give up on protecting ourselves. You don't play to win, you play because you can't afford to lose.
Assume Compromise (Score:2)
We should assume compromise when we are building security into networked systems.
Anything less would not be diligent in proactive security. And security is always best when it is proactive, and not reactive.
And while it is inconvenient and even possibly insulting to those of use who have decent control over our system(s), we shouldn't base what we do upon our own security, we should be looking towards the weakest link and assume that it does and will continue to exist, and that is a vector for attack.
No-Charge Solution (Score:5, Informative)
I think this is the article http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/03/25/2350236/Can-Ubuntu-Save-Online-Banking [slashdot.org]
The desktop battle is just getting interesting (Score:2)
Now that HP has open sourced it's Polaris [wikipedia.org] virus-safe computing project.
The bulletproof desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing I loved about the ThinkNIC I set up for my mom so many years ago was that it was impossible to break. It booted from read-only media (a CD) so I knew that mom could never screw up anything in her computer permanently. The worst possible crash could be fixed by just turning it off and back on.
With so many folks pushing "cloud-based" solutions for, well, everything - Why hasn't something like the ThinkNIC come back?
A little box with any sort of read-only memory could hold all the programs most users will ever want. Make that memory in the form of some sort of plug-in card, and the entire machine would be easy to upgrade. (ThinkNIC used to send out new CDs with the latest versions of their setup.) It would also be easy to fix if a security problem were found; just mail out a new SD card or whatever.
Banks could advertise "Real Security. Because we care." They could give away a small computer to customers with the promise that said little box would enable streamlined access to their accounts, all while doing nearly everything an adult could need from a computer.
There's a kernel of a good idea in there, somewhere. I'm not the entrepeneur to make it into a business but I'm wondering why I don't see anyone trying?
Baffled (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:And this is why... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental security model of Linux is no better than that of Windows. The main reason Windows gets nailed is that it's more profitable to write malware for Windows than for anything else. If Linux had the market share of Windows, it would have as much, or nearly as much, malware.
In either Linux or Windows, being able to run any code at all gives you essentially complete access to the user's data, plus almost unlimited access to system resources, plus the ability to talk to the network. Who cares if you're not running as root if everything interesting is owned by the user's account?
There are ways to make systems more secure, starting with strong containment. How strong? Strong enough that your program can't even express the desire to, say, open a file that the user hasn't given it a capability for. Strong enough that the user has to jump through hoops to give certain programs access to certain data. Especially programs with network access... which need to be only the programs that actually need it. Strong enough to subdivide lots of functions that people are used to putting together in the same process. Strong enough that you can forget about most of the APIs you're used to coding with. And, if you're going to run apps out on the network, that whole system has to extend out into the network as well.
On top of that, people ought to be using tools that make it a lot harder to express common security bugs, and that help you to notice when you've created others.
If this is to be fixed, users and programmers are going to have to change the ways they do things. I'm not super optimistic.
Linux helps not at all. Even OpenBSD wouldn't help much.
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you are quite a jokester, sir.
The differences in how to gain administrator access do affect up front security requirements.
It's not about profit, it's that windows gives people administrator by default (and you can still enable it in Windows 7).
iexplore.exe is asking for administrator access. grant forever/don't ask again? Way to go, giving viruses admin access. It happens all the time.
The rest of the security is no different in most scenarios whether windows or linux. However, on this front, UAC doesn't do
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> And on a side note, UAC is light years ahead of it's Linux equivalent, gksudo
Yes. It's so far ahead of Linux that people GENERALLY TURN IT OFF BECAUSE IT IS SO D*AMN ANNOYING.
Yes. You're right. UAC is light years ahead of the competition when it comes to being a nuissance.
UAC is a total joke. You're an idiot for even bringing it up.
Re:And this is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, suppose I'm the business end of a botnet.
What does administrator access give me?
Sure, I'll take if I can get it, because it might come in handy. But how important is it to me, really?
If I want to steal the user's credit card number, it's right there in a Quicken file. No admin access required.
If I want the user's contact list, it's in Outlook or whatever.
If I want to steal the user's passwords, no problem, I can still hook the keyboard one way or another, or just grab them from the browser's password store.
I may not be able to rewrite the browser, but I can debug the browser process and get the same effect.
If I want to run the webcam, no privileges are required.
If I want to send spam, I can make a TCP connection without administrator access.
OK, I may have trouble hiding myself as well as I'd like from privileged anti-malware programs, or make it monstrously hard for them to remove me. There are a few things I can't change on the local system. I probably can't hook file system or network access, and if I can it's probably for only one user. There are a few not-that-important services I can't talk to. I can't mess with the lower layers of the network very much. I can't create another user. It would be nice to be able to do those things. But it's not like I'm seriously handicapped without administrator access. And, since I also have access to run privileged programs or send requests to privileged services, I have a huge surface available to attack with 'sploits if I do want administrator access.
Same on Linux. Yeah, there are differences, but they're down in the noise; they aren't the sorts of qualitative things that would really matter in terms of making the desktop trustworthy.
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There's no security that can't be defeated by the end user. If they have the ability to access administrator at all then they have the power to negate everyone's hard work.
Re:And this is why... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're wrong in saying administrator access is the basic difference between Linux and Windows. The most basic difference is in default file permissions. Windows ties read and execute together by default. You put an executable on a Windows system and it's immediately executable by anyone. That is not true with Linux. Executables are only executable by default if a a system tool, such as apt-get, yum, etc... is used to install them. Otherwise, the user himself must add the execute permission to the file.
This is a huge barrier to malware spreading like many instances of Windows malware has spread. Remember all those instances of one person opening an infected email and everyone in the office being infected as a result? Can't happen on Linux due to file permissions. That executable can't execute unless/until the user gives it execute permission.
Test it for yourself. Write a script on a Linux machine and try to execute it without adding execute permissions. You can't do it. Try that on Windows and it works. No changes necessary. That's a huge difference in security.
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The main difference is cultural and longstanding.
Unixen are in the habit of granting the least amount of priveledge necessary and sandboxing regular users. This goes way back into the depths of time where the OS was intended to service more than one end user and tried to keep any single user from running amok and "bringing the entire network down".
The problem with Microsoft isn't so much that their OS is crap but that their single user Commodore 64 approach to the system means their apps are crap. They make
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Test it for yourself. Write a script on a Linux machine and try to execute it without adding execute permissions. You can't do it.
$echo 'whoami' > test.sh
$sh test.sh
themoof
$
Just sayin....
Re:And this is why... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's about profit. The flaw in the Windows/Linux/OSX security model isn't administrator access. Having a concept of some split personality user is a ridiculous hack that dates from a security architecture designed in the 70s. Nobody would use it if designing an OS from scratch today.
The flaw in these systems models is that developer tools and debuggers specifically are not built in to the system but rather are treated the same as any other application, which means any app can take control of any other app with only an "are you sure" screen in between at best.
You'll notice that mobile OS' don't have this. ChromeOS will likely have the standard Chrome developer tools which are "special" and cannot simply be swapped out for some other app. This means less innovation in debuggers but it gives the possibility of implementing real security because apps become much less slippery.
The desktop PC era is coming to a close. Nobody is quite sure what'll come next but I'm putting my cards on a combination of some much improved iPad OS, Android or (more likely) ChromeOS. Right now these are the only contenders for the "usefully more secure than windows" crown.
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In the case of Linux, "A" largely applies. A properly configured SELinux setup will give you most of what you are asking for; but those are enough of a pain to set up that very few people have them.
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I have SELinux on my desktop, although it's not as tightly configured as it could be. I'm typing this on it.. It's not what I want, and I don't think it can be made into what I want.
The problem with SELinux is that it falls into the classic "reference monitor" trap, where some outside piece of code tries to intuit the intent of something like a system call. It's a layered-on kludge, like a firewall.
I want something more like KeyKOS or EROS, perhaps with a layer of something like (but not identical to)
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You can have filenames; you just keep them in a namespace that's accessible only to the user (or the user's file manager or whatever). If you have a CLI, you type "program <filename>", and the CLI runs an instance of that program and gives it a capability to that file, rather than passing it the name. If you have a GUI, you probably do something like dragging the file onto the program, and the UI creates an instance of the program and passes it the capability.
You're correct that most programs woul
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HUH?
There is a fundamental difference where Windows fails and Unix works.
as a user you NEVER HAVE TO GIVE THEM ROOT ACCESS. Ever! I can as a user install software, make changes, Hell I can change Xorg settings and never touch /etc if I blow the hell out of things I only blow the hell out of it for me.
windows? I have to write to that abortion called the registry that is in the system folder., Oops install software? I need to write to system and system32. Look I got me a open door into the system...
Ho
Except you still miss the point (Score:5, Insightful)
I know that it's a sacred tradition to regurgitate fanboy oneliners without thinking, but in this case
1. it was even in the summary that by now even home routers are targeted by the asshats. I fail to see how a hardened Linux PC helps there.
2. Actually, it seems to me like most zombie PCs nowadays don't come from port overflow attacks any more, but because of users clicking on spam links, re-entering their bank password on some www.i-pwn-you.ru site (fictive address for example sake) because the email told them to, and installing crap.
I'm not sure how Linux would help there at all. You do know that you can download and install rootkits for Linux too, right? In fact even the term rootkit comes from the Unix world, not from Windows. What's to keep an asshat from making their rootkit masquerade as a cutesy Linux screensaver instead of a cutesy Windows screeensaver?
If user clue remains a constant, meet the Clueless family, a white suburban family whose only knowledge of computers is that the nice guy at the shop said they need the most expensive one: you'll still have Joe Clueless opening executables he received in spam mails. And his wife Jane Clueless confirming her Paypal and eBay password the fourth time this week alone, and none of them was on paypal.com or ebay.com. And downloading and installing some piece of spyware masquerading as some cutesy utility or casual game. And their son, Timmy Clueless installing what some dodgy site told him is some hack to see through walls in Counter-Strike. And of course it needs to be installed as root, in fact as a kernel module. So punkbuster (or equivalent) can't detect it, you know? *nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink* Know what I mean, eh?
Just as they're not deterred by Windows popping up a big fat windows asking them if they really want to install stuff, they won't be deterred by whatever hoops your favourite Linux distro makes them jump through either. If they have to su -, they'll su -.
End result: they're still pwned.
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A hardened Linux PC makes a fine router. Older hardware will do the job just fine too, so nothing expensive or exotic is required.
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The amusing thing here....is that most routers run Linux.
You have too much faith in users (Score:3, Insightful)
You have too much faith in the average user, if you think they'll configure and admin a whole PC instead of just buying a small appliance and forgetting that it's even there. And if you actually want them to configure and admin it _well_, now that's a whole other issue.
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What's to keep an asshat from making their rootkit masquerade as a cutesy Linux screensaver instead of a cutesy Windows screeensaver?
Mainly the fact that they need to get their cutesy screen-saver into a distribution repo to actually gain a significant level of deployment. At least most Linux users I know add very little software that isn't included in their main repo or one of very few specific extras. Anything beyond that gets treated with a certain level of suspicion.
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Most Linux users that you know have little in common with their computing habits than most Windows and Mac users that I know, I'd wager.
Because currently most Linux users are nerds (Score:5, Interesting)
Mainly because the current crop of Linux users are nerds. If the example Clueless family in my example exercised that level of caution, well, they wouldn't be clueless in the first place.
And if they were that cautious, they wouldn't get pwned in Windows either. I mean, it's not like that spyware crap was linked to from microsoft.com or anything.
The way they get pwned is more like:
Joe Clueless wakes up on a saturday morning, scratches his balls and goes to see if he has any email. Does he want herbal Viagra? Hmm, Jane has been faking too many headaches lately, maybe it couldn't hurt to at least look at the site. Just in case. Big fake UI popup tells him that he has 200 viruses on his system and needs to download and install the free Pwnage antivirus. Eeep, he doesn't want no nasty viruses on the computer he does his banking on, so let's hurry and do just that.
Next email tells him that the USPS couldn't deliver some package, and he has to run some attached executable to find out more details. Fuck, he wouldn't want to miss a package, so he dutifully does that.
Another emails tells him that the IRS wants something from him, so he does that again.
Next email tells him that hundreds of naked teenage babes are waiting for him at some .ru site. Well, Jane is out with the kid, maybe he has time to take a peek. Oh, he has to install this free dialer to see the pics. Well, sure, why not? He does that.
After clicking a bit around, another popup tells him that his computer has incriminating evidence against him and he needs to download and run this amazing browser history eraser. Teh oops. Jane might be pissed off if she sees porn sites in the browser history. Time to download and run this trojan too. He makes a mental note to complain about these browser devs who don't include that function already ;)
Meanwhile Jane comes back and wants to see which of her friends emailed her. That computer gets to add a cutesy minigame from an attachment, and another handy-dandy utility to remember her passwords, to its growing malware collection. While she's at it, she clicks on the www.i-pwn-u.ru link in another email to confirm her Paypal password again. She makes a mental note to whine about these idiots at Paypal who forget her password every other day and keep asking her to enter it again ;)
Little Timmy gets his computer time in the afternoon and gets his ass handed to him in multiplayer again. He googles for "counterstrike cheats" (or whatever game he's playing) and gets to some dodgy site where if you just download their keyboard and mouse driver, it can do a whole collection of FPS macros for you and make you play like a pro. (And also log the keypresses and send them back home, but they're not saying that.) Bweh-heh-heh, he'll show those guys in his clan who's teh uber-l337 FPS player.
Do you see any reason why in the same scenario they'd exercise caution about what they download in Linux, when they don't in Windows?
Re:Security is as futile as DRM. Of course we lost (Score:4, Insightful)
If it is a truism that DRM is futile because it will always be defeated, then it is also a truism that Security is futile because it will always be defeated.
What? No.
DRM can always be defeated because of its design. If I lend you the key to my apartment so you can go in and borrow some sugar or something, there's nothing I can do to stop you from cleaning out my apartment and skipping town. But to claim all locks are futile because of that is just retarded.
DRM can always be defeated because the "attacker" is exactly the same as the user, and you're already giving them everything they need. That is a system which is fundamentally flawed. Real security is where you don't give the attacker your keys, passwords, etc.
It is theoretically possible to build a completely secure system, from a technological standpoint. The vulnerabilities are either physical weaknesses (you could just run off with my laptop) or people. There are also vulnerabilities from sloppy coding, but these have very little effect against users with good security habits.
Sure, it may never happen, but if so, that's because we'll always make mistakes. A completely secure DRM scheme is actually a logical impossibility, even if no one makes any mistakes.
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t is theoretically possible to build a completely secure system, from a technological standpoint. The vulnerabilities are either physical weaknesses (you could just run off with my laptop) or people.
Err, that someone running of with your laptop is a "people". So is that someone who's writing malware.
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I don't think it's quite as you describe.
Your argument makes sense in a highly abstract, academic universe in which all people are perfectly skilled, knowledgeable and well resourced. This is too far removed from reality to be useful.
The first problem is that we know it's possible to build DRM that is extremely hard to crack. The PS3 is a working example of that. Games distributed via Xbox Live (versus dvd) are another example. These systems have been partially defeated a handful of times and then promptly
Not really the same thing.... (Score:2)
DRM is futile because customers need to have the 'secret' deciding key inside their machine to see the content. Combine this with a PC where you can look into the RAM and mess with it and you've got fail with a capital F.
Security isn't a product, it's a process. The problem isn't the security it's getting ordinary people to follow the process.
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there is little you can do against those who are determined to do bad things.
Or against those that are determined to do stupid things, regardless of warnings and education on the dangers.
I've always thought it would be a great idea for the state law enforcement agencies to look for e-mail addresses the same way spammers do. Then send fake phishing e-mails to those addresses. If a user responds favorably or goes to the phishing site, apply a court order requiring that the user is denied Internet access for six months. The justification is that their stupidity creates botnets and enables spam that harms many other people and reduces the overall quality of the entire network; therefore they
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http://hackerkey.com/
404
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Don't use Windows. Was that so hard?
I am not saying that all other operating systems are perfectly secure by default or that they are invulnerable, but windows is absolutely insecure. We have to face that truth.
Microsoft's security record is laughable. And I'm not even talking about particular exploits, bugs can be fixed, I am talking about design. Windows is designed to be insecure. Security was never really taken seriously at microsoft. There are countless techniques to escalate permissions on just about any win platform (Including windows vista and 7). And this are not obscure and complex vulnerabilities. This are simple 50 lines executables that allow you to escalate any process you want with a few clicks.
Just take a look at any of their products, either server or desktop, and their security record will be worse than any competitor. Exchange, SQL, IIS, Explorer, Windows, Office. They allow script execution in crazy places (like a simple text document or spreadsheet).
Windows is insecure for a very good reason: Because there is a huge industry that developed around fixing windows, that industry is so big that it has become the main tool of customer loyalty that microsoft has. Millions, from huge Antivirus companies, to overstuffed IT departments, to your average computer repairman base their economy on Windows flaws. Those guys love windows and all its flaws. I've actually had people telling me "Well, I know it's a piece of crap, but it's what keeps people coming to my shop again and again". Not to mention the computer retailers. Imagine the fall in Dell stock if people didn't have to buy a new computer every 2 years just to run the latest OS? A friend of mine has am iMac from 2001 running the latest OSX. And it runs amazingly well ... If people knew they can run a blazingly fast 3D desktop on an 80 dollar atom-based mother+processor combo, newegg would die.
So, no, we didn't loose the security battle, Microsoft won the marketing one.
Of course, OSX falls first every single year in the pwn2own competition, where the competitors use their best tricks against default OS installs. Vista and 7 have tied with Linux in how many restrictions need to be lifted before they go down. OSX has been proven very solidly to be the inherently most vulnerable major OS, but thanks to obscurity, people don't use these same simple exploits in the wild.
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A friend of mine has am iMac from 2001 running the latest OSX
The latest OS X only runs on Intel-based Macs, which came out in 2005. I last used a G4-based Mac Mini a couple of years ago (years ahead of a 2001 imac), with Tiger, and it was frustratingly slow. If your friend'a machine is running at all quickly I imagine it's still using OS 9 :-)
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He's running OSX 10.5.8. There is a patch to make it PowerPC compatible. And It's a G4, not a G3.
The only thing slow is Flash. He's a designer. The other day, he was editing video in it (With a modern version of Final cut).
Re:This again? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't use Windows. Was that so hard?
Actually yes, it really really was. I worked for a long time to get my windows games working under Linux, and the best I could do was get a mostly working WoW through newer versions of wine (older versions had graphical corruption). I could resort to virtualbox to run games like alpha centauri and civ2. I simply was unable to run newish games, period.
So I gave up. I dual boot now. Windows for games, Linux for everything else.
Not everybody uses Windows because they're lazy, ignorant to marketing, or even want to. Sometimes it's the only thing that actually works.
Blah-blah.. Microsoft evil.. blah-blah.. (Score:2)
Relevancy Check here.
We are interrupting the scheduled Windblows/M$ bashing documentary with the news and weather report from the land of TFA:
Botnets are starting to target and infect routers and DSL modems. Scary, and a possible trend. Think about what this could mean. Should this problem become pervasive, it won't matter if PCs are disinfected, swapped out, or replaced with iPads, the bad guys are still control because they own the network below. They'll own DNS, the routers in between, and so on. There is effectively little defensive countermeasures to protect home routers and DSL modems, which are not exactly secure to begin with, or detect if they've been compromised.
These are all reasonable assumptions based on real-world attacks that have been going on for some time now. Attackers have been targeting home networking equipment for a couple of years, using a combination of vulnerabilities in the firmware and hardware to get control of home users' outbound Internet traffic. It's an increasingly effective strategy for attackers looking to get control of large numbers of systems, without having to re-infect them regularly.
That was Relevancy Check with news and the weather.
Now we return you to your scheduled blind worshiping your favorite non-M$ OS and Windblows/M$ bashing documentary.
Re:This again? It's hopeless. (Score:2)
Don't use Windows. Was that so hard?
Heh. It's easy; I've done it myself. In fact, it's easier than using Windows, which has the most difficult UI in the industry, especially since it's constantly changing.
But that's all irrelevant, because computer security has absolutely nothing to do with sales. It's determined by ad budgets. Microsoft can spend (and has spent) over a billion US$ marketing a releases of Windows. The only other computer company that can come close to this is Apple, and they're more th
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I hate Apple. And I don't own a single Apple device. Not a computer, not an iphone, and I never will (I only use Free Software). But I was talking about a friend's computer. And what I said was absolutely true. The machine has a 1ghz processor and 1 gb of ram. Try running windows 7 there.
You are a poor troll. 3/10.
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He's running OSX 10.5.8. There is a patch to make it PowerPC compatible. And It's a G4, not a G3.
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Read my other post.
It's a matter of convenience (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hey, where do I put this USB key or Live CD in my iPad? :)
[John]
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Oh, you know where.
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