Security Community Reacts to Microsoft Announcement 471
A number of readers have collected stories concerning the change of focus by Bill Gates to security. Bruce Schneier and Adam Shostack have written a piece, while Crag Mundie of MSFT has also chimed in, along with some commentary from ZD folks. SecurityFocus has other words, as does InfoWarrior.
MSFT? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:MSFT? (Score:2, Funny)
It seems to me (Score:4, Insightful)
I have said it in the past, and I'll spew it backup now for those who missed it, MS do not make the best software - bu they do have the best marketing department and business sense.
One other reason (Score:3, Insightful)
The revenue stream has to stay flowing and this will force IT people to upgrade. If they don't and they get hit by some nasty bug/virus/worm the CEOs will have their heads.
But does this leave MS open to lawsuits...nah not likely what with their EULA
Oh well
Re:It seems to me (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, duh!
It's the timing that gets me. They made the announcement shortly after a major OS release. So whenever somebody points out a bug in existing software (XP or earlier), they can shrug and say "That was the old Microsoft, the new Microsoft no longer makes those mistakes."
And since it'll be sometime before they release another highly-vulnerable product, nobody will be able to contradict them.
I wonder though... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure the security gaps, shoddy Q/A (i.e. let the customer do this) and worms have made interesting press (including Gartner Groups suggestion business dump IIS, you may disagree with Gartner, but PHB's everywhere listen to them, not you) and is probably costing them a few bucks, but there's still an army of people out there who still buy M$ only, because "nobody ever got fired for choosing Microsoft."
I'm too jaded to accept this as a genuine effort by Microsoft, which has left the security worry squarely on the shoulders of the client, to clean up their own mess and stop making them. I think there's an ulterior motive which we'll see later, like waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Actually, it's a little more complex. (Score:2, Interesting)
MS may now be trying to move into to a different market, one that values security above point-and-click.
The BBC sums it up nicely [bbc.co.uk].
Re:It seems to me (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, to put it politely, complete bunk.
Microsoft's biggest problem is not buffer overflows. You don't need to sneak a virus through the basement window when you can drive it in through the front door, waving merrily as you go. Many of Microsoft's biggest security problems have been with viruses that simply take advantage of what they're explicitly allowed to do. Most Outlook viruses don't exploit low-level coding errors, they exploit the high-level error of allowing arbitrary foreign executables free access to the system. Ditto with Office macro viruses. I wouldn't call that solid coding. Solid coding means preparing for the eventuality that your users are naive and making it as hard as possible for them to shoot themselves (or their neighbours, in the case of Melissa, et. al.) in the foot.
I'm not saying that Sun or IBM are any better, but saying that Microsoft writes solid code is absolutely ludicrous.
Speedreader's summary of all 6 articles (Score:3, Informative)
It will be good if they succeed; we hope they try as hard as their PR says they will.
Have a nice day.
Re:Speedreader's summary of all 6 articles (Score:3, Funny)
Tackhead's One-Liner:
If they put 10% of today's PR budget into the next release's security budget, they might have a chance.
Security is everyone's problem (Score:4, Interesting)
True Names are important for a reason.
Gullibility (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that an alarmingly large number of people cannot distinguish between the following:
What has happened to the software industry in general is exactly what has happened to the American political process. If you make promises and then cash the check, it doesn't really matter if you deliver. The reason is that people are gullible.
So you think, "gosh, wouldn't it be great if they've finally decided to do it right." But they haven't done it; they've just said that they are going to do it. Any support for mere words on the hope that it might come to pass will remove any incentive for actually doing it.
Most people get off so much on the hope and the promises that they don't realize how they're encouraging integrity-challenged behavior with their actions. It takes a real cynical bastard not to get caught up in this, and then we get told, "Oh, you Microsoft Bad Religious Types."
Craig's article... (Score:5, Interesting)
But we're still in the early years of the computer revolution, and there are many technological, social and regulatory hurdles we must overcome before computers truly become a ubiquitous--and essential--technology.
The early years? No. When you've got one person on top who can't get their sh*t together...
I mean, we could be farther along in this 'revolution' he speaks of. Why aren't we? Because the Big Guys [read:Microsoft] are doing what they want to do. Why are they now only focusing on security?
Oh! Pick me! I know! --- Because they do what they want to do, and that's it. They don't give in to customer demand; most of their product is cooked up by visions that Bill and others have.
Re:Craig's article... (Score:5, Insightful)
If he's a Microsoft customer, yes.
Microsoft is very unusual in the sense that it doesn't follow the adage that the customer is always right. If any normal (read -- business that doesn't have a monopoly and can rest on the fact that >95% of the home users and >40% of businesses will buy their products because they see no alternative) business employed Microsoft's attitude, they'd soon be out of business.
Say you went down to your local grocery store to buy some Extra-Triple Fudge Fatty Ice Cream and they said "no, we're only going to let you buy plain Neopolitian -- and by the way, we're going to be changing the policy here, if you want ice cream, you'll take it whenever we want to sell it to you and we'll be instituting annual billing for 52 Gallons of ice cream a year. Oh, and if you want to give your kids some, you'll have to buy extra containers for them, only one user per container. Oh, and our profit margins are below what our shareholders are used to, so we'll be raising the price every few months and thinking of new ways to require that you only buy Microsoft Ice Cream."
How long would you remain a customer? In effect, this is what M$ is doing and as a customer you can't do a damn thing about it as long as you continue using Windows.
It isn't normal for the majority of a businesses customers to hate the product that make, but have to accept it anyway.
Security and stability are things that Microsoft's customers have been screaming for for years, so yes -- they should be doing it whether it's something that they want to do or not.
Unfortunately, the main focus of their development has been to add features that lock people into the Microsoft platform.
Security is only becoming a focus now because the biggest potential Microsoft lock-ins won't be adopted unless Microsoft can convince the public that they are secure. I don't think this is a genuine effort, except on the part of the PR department -- it's a sincere effort to convince everyone that they're going to be more secure, but I don't believe that it's going to happen -- well, they may become *more* secure, but that won't take much.
Re:Craig's article... (Score:3, Insightful)
They do? The corporate admins have been begging for more stability and security for quite some time. I don't recall ANYONE asking for
It may not be perfect, I'll give you that, but neither is your *nix.
It's a damn sight better than Windows, though. No OS is perfect -- very, very, very true. Microsoft, however (or at least various people at M$) have admitted that perfection isn't even a goal. In fact, it's contrary to their number one goal, which is ever-increasing profits.
If you are a Microsoft customer, you have to understand that the goals of M$ are totally contrary to the goals of any of their customers -- the goal of any IT department should be to implement solutions that are stable, secure and cost-effective while solving the problems that they're using computers for and doing so as cheaply as possible without compromising the other goals. Microsoft's goal is to continue to sell more and more and more and more -- which is directly contrary to the goals of IT.
I'd also rather spend money on personnel than software licenses any day. Anyone looking for dumbed-down solutions is either a wanna-be admin who doesn't have the chops to do *nix, or a PHB who wants to hire cheaper help.
And my favorite feature:
The fact that I don't have to compile source code when I download any upgrades/patches/software....
My least favorite feature:
The fact that I can't get source code for Microsoft systems.
Most of the world does, because we want to buy a ready solution, not something we need to put further effort into.
Which is exactly why someone like you should not be in charge of a corporation's computers. Ready-made solutions are great for simple problems, but they also dumb down things to the point where it's nearly impossible to do anything other than what the vendor (in this case, M$) thought you might want to do -- or should do. Very few companies are happy with the constraints that using Windows puts on them, which is why Linux has gone as far as it has.
If you're too stupid or lazy (or both) to compile software, get a job in marketing. I wouldn't let someone with your attitude near my computers.
Enterprise computing shouldn't be dumbed down. I'm not saying it should be needlessly complicated, but with so much riding on corporate computer systems the emphasis should be on being completely secure, stable, and well-documented. While I grant you that no OS is 100% there, no one is farther behind than Microsoft.
Re:Craig's article... (Score:2)
Simple. If I didn't I couldn't get a job, and I couldn't pass college.
I think everyone deserves a job, don't you?
Re:Craig's article... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's completely untrue. Only a minority of jobs, and of college programs, require you to buy Microsoft software. The vast majority of the time, you never even have to touch the stuff.
The truth of the matter is that you went to a stupid school (where they require you to use M$ products), entered a degree program (for which the aforementioned stupid school required the use of M$ products), and then took a job (again, one where you have to use M$ products.) Any of these could have been avoided, had you a desire to do so rather than whine about being 'forced' to use software you don't like. Even if you're dead-set on pursuing a CS degree or something where you're going to have to work with Microsoft software to some degree, you can use the school resources available. There's absolutely no excuse for paying good money for something you think is useless, unless you're just a glutton for punishment.
Cringely, too (Score:5, Informative)
How to secure Microsoft Windows: (Score:5, Funny)
Separate Data and Control Paths
Use Secure Default Configurations
Separate Protocols and Products
Choose for Security over Features
Make it Transparent and Auditable
Give advance notice of Protocols and Designs
Engage the community
All that stuff sounds great, but I can say the same thing in far fewer words:
Start from scratch. Do it right this time.
Re:How to secure Microsoft Windows: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I don't. But I don't think they'll succeed with this security initiative either.
It's easier to say than to do. We all know this already. But I'm not sure Microsoft does. It's not like the sudden Internet shift.
Security is about adding limitations and restrictions. This is converse to the entire corporate direction, which has been stripping those away while trying to apply band-aid solutions to address security issues. It's a fundamental problem.
And you are right. They can't really go back. They can't completely rewrite Windows, IIS, or Office. The new products would be released with glaring omissions from past functionality. It would be missing things Microsoft never should have added in the first place (UPnP, for instance).
Perhaps they'll try to do it right. In fact I believe they will. But when it finally comes down to scrapping products and features with insecure fundamentals, I can't see them carrying through.
It'll be back to band-aids and PR coverups. The temptation is just too great.
Re:How to secure Microsoft Windows: (Score:3, Insightful)
Starting from scratch is what bad programmers do when they don't have the intelligence or patience to figure out what has been done and what has been learned previously. Well, let me state that there are cases where starting from scratch makes sense, but there are the far more prevelant "It's all crap, I'm starting from scratch" mentality, which roughly translates to "It's easier for me to impose my will and start with what I know than to try to figure out what the prior person did and learned". Beware a programmer who ever claims that they need to rewrite something: 9 times out of 10 it's because they are lazy, or they're just not smart enough to figure it out.
BTW: Who you are talking about is Joel, i.e. http://joel.editthispage.com [editthispage.com]. HA! Just visited there and hilariously enough he has a co-rewriting story up. You're thinking of this [editthispage.com] article.
Really good or really bad. (Score:3, Interesting)
Either way, its going to take quite a while to tell.
Microsoft's First Security Policy (Score:5, Funny)
You say paranoia, I say FUD (Score:2, Insightful)
I mostly think it's advertising. XP didn't sell nearly as well as they had hoped, and a bunch of people flying around with Madonna playing in the background didn't seem to send their message. And I'd be willing to bet that security concerns were most of the reason-they WERE the reason with my employer.
The tech world is full of reviewers and publishers who will publish Gates' statements as thought they were spoken from the burning bush. God only knows, they shill for advertisers just as bad as gun magazines.
Windows needs a clean break (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess that's the problem when you are a huge software company trying to appeal to everyone. You end up supporting everything and it turns into a big mess.
mark
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:3, Interesting)
My box has a Linux partition and a Win2k partition. I keep Windows for games, and because in all honesty 2k isn't that bad. It's got all the stability and such of XP, but none of the Big Brother. 2k is also quite secure if you know what you're doing. And I like playing games. I have vowed to not update to XP however, as the whole embedded passport thing and such really scares me.
However, if say, 2 years from now Windows RG (Really Good edition) comes out and is NOT backwards compatible, now new games only come out for it. I'd presume that if anything this hypothetical WinRG will be worse then WinXP in terms of Big Brother-ness, ergo I'd be even more hesitant to upgrade. That and it'll be even more eye-candy and more dumbed-down and all that stuff. But if I want my games, I'll have to upgrade.
So that's why it's scaring me. I hope they keep their backwards compatibility, as I would personally like to just keep running 2k for as long as I can. Or at least if they do lose the backwards compatibility, wait until Linux gets enough market for games to be more available for it.
And yes I realize the irony in talking about Linux games in the wake of the death of Loki.
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:4, Insightful)
Three words: Removable drive racks.
As long as IDE exists (which should be good for another 2-3 years), if you must use Windows, keep an old '98, W2K, or Linux/FreeBSD install on separate a hard drive with your data and applications, and install Windows RG on another drive.
Wanna work? Use the main drive. Wanna play the l33t new game? Yank it out and boot RG. No Gatesian DRM tech or spyware will ever be capable of corrupting or leaking data stored on an unpowered hard drive that's been physically disconnected from your machine.
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:3, Funny)
You mean computers with lots of flashing lights and unlabeled buttons that people just seem to know what to push? We already have those in casinos.
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:2)
AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, if only I had mod points... give the man some +1 FUNNY!
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:3, Insightful)
If Windows isn't too backwards compatible, people will complain like hell and use another OS.
Having a huge marketshare certainly have its advantages but it sure have a lot of disavantages.
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:2)
Can you provide some specific instance that illustrates your point? It appears to me that the backwards-compatibility bits of Win2K and XP have provided a more secure Windows environment, rather than less. For instance, the Virtual Machine used to house 16 bit Windows applications provides a sandbox for ill-behaving applications.
Backwards-compatibility is at the core of none of the current security problems currently within Win platforms - at least none of those I can bring to mind. Please, prove me wrong.
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:2, Offtopic)
I'll give you a clue: it begins with the letter L.;)
But that's a big part of MS's assets (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple is a very different animal. They can sell anything. Just not to everybody.
In any case, "going back and rewriting everything" always sounds like a good idea, but seldom is.
"Going back and rewriting the worst stuff" is probably a much better idea.
Re:Windows needs a clean break (Score:3, Insightful)
Legacy is Windows most important feature. All other considerations are secondary. If you don't have a legacy, you have no reason to use Windows.
If they made a clean break, then they would be on a level playing field with competitors. Is improving their product, which people are buying anyway regardless of its flaws, worth losing customers?
Announcements.... (Score:5, Insightful)
And anyways, for those of us that are on some security mailing lists like NTbugtraq, we'll see how the people got their discovery handled by Microsoft, if they change for real, maybe we won't read as many "We notified microsoft 3 weeks ago about this matter and nothing was done, now it's time to bring it public" and then having the Microsoft PR and legal team on their back.
I think they are starting to feel the heat of people that are really not satisfied and claiming that buisness damage due to insecure OS should be fined to the creator of the OS, especially when they claim it's secure. Heh.. good thing.
Getting ready for the setlement (Score:5, Interesting)
The settlement with the DOJ specifically allows Microsoft to exclude documentation of APIs that relate to security. This new initiative makes damn near anything in some way relate to security. Gotta love it.
Security APIs (Score:2, Interesting)
Even despite the fact that security through obscurity is no security, how does closing the security API make the system more secure? Surely all this achieves is to allow Microsoft to put backdoors in Windows' security features.
If it affects the share price, MS will move fast (Score:5, Insightful)
I would look for MS to make at least two major acquisitions in order to shore up their security offerings - they have used acquisitions in the past to shore up problem areas.
Of course the caveat is that they are not so much concerned with security as an intrinsic value but in the selling of security, and there is an important distinction here. As with any growing software market, you can't underestiamte Microsoft's efforts, and I think it is largely naive for the readership here to snicker and write off MS in this regard.
Re:If it affects the share price, MS will move fas (Score:3, Insightful)
An acquisistion can't fix their problems. It's not like they can buy some 3rd party program, and then Word and Excel macros suddenly won't work any more. Buying a product won't fix Outlook's "click here to execute virus" user interface. The only way an acquisition could fix their problems is if they use acquired products to replace existing products. (e.g. buy a new word processor and sell it instead of Word.)
In Other News.... (Score:2, Funny)
Leaked memo! (Score:2, Funny)
Here's a memo leaked to me from Bill Gates himself:
Schnier co-writes a bad column! (Score:4, Flamebait)
SOAP isn't just a Microsoft protocol, for one, but the main problem with that paragraph is that SOAP was not designed to elude firewalls, any more than RPC was. SOAP is just an RPC mechanism that happens to flow over HTTP, mostly because Dave Winer only knows one protocol -- HTTP. Mr. Winer didn't try to evade protocols, he just couldn't conceive of creating a different protocol for this application -- an error of omission, not commission.
In terms of file and media distribution, the function of a HTTP server, FTP server and gopher server are very similar, so there's actually some sense in bundling the three together (and MS isn't the only group to do this). The security problems come when dynamic execution is added to the mix in HTTP. Mssrs. Schnier and Shostack desperately want to undo this, but they don't have the right answer -- the problem isn't stocking the three protocols together; it's that the Internet gave us three ways to do the same thing. To really address the security issue here, we should probably go back and redo the protocols so that dynamic content and media content flow over separate protocols, but there's no chance of this happening -- HTTP didn't kill FTP, and even gopher is making a mild comeback, so we're stuck with this mess for a long time.
There's some good advice regarding security in that article, but the authors' notions of product design are off-target, and contrary to the direction a lot of folks (even those beyond MS) are taking.
Re:Schnier co-writes a bad column! -- firewalls (Score:2, Insightful)
The idea is unfortunately short sighted, and will result in holes to be opened in what was previously a manageable service port. This was for expediency, not security. The SOAP spec team followed along as the adoption would be accelerated, but again, this was done without any real eye towards security.
I seriously hope MSFT takes these comments to heart and at least begins to adjust their practice and products to be more secure.
Re:Schnier co-writes a bad column! -- firewalls (Score:2)
Re:Schnier co-writes a bad column! -- firewalls (Score:2)
Re:Schnier co-writes a bad column! (Score:2, Insightful)
One of the principal architects of SOAP was Henrick Frystick Nielsen, who certainly knows about more protocols than just HTTP since he implemented them all in the CERN libwww code.
The point is that running SOAP over SMTP or NNTP does not make a lot of sense except to looney email junkies who need a strong does of reality. SOAP over FTP makes no sense because FTP is a fundamentaly bodged protocol, it is less efficient that HTTP in every circumstance, it is also designed as a human/machine interface and is actually fairly brittle when used as a machine/machine interface due to different incompatible implementations and interaction between the ftp daemon and the file system semantics. The number of special case code paths for FTP in the libwww code is quite large. Some folk are trying to combine FTP and SSL which is not a good plan because FTP is actually built on Telnet and there are good reasons not to use SSL with Telnet which is why SSH is no longer based on SSL.
Henryk certainly knows about designing new protocols as well, he was one of the principal architects on HTTP-NG which people refused to use because HTTP was good enough for them.
SOAP actually layers over several transport protocols but the only one most people have any interest in is HTTP. There is a small interest in BEEP, but BEEP is a fairly new protocol that is probably only simple because nobody has used it yet and so we don't know what it lacks.
I don't have much sympathy for folk complaining about the use of the 'firewall bypass protocol'. Firewalls are like chastity belts, they are mainly bought by people who intend others to wear them and suffer their inconveniences. They are also like chastity belts in that they tend to be less effective than the purchaser imagines.
SOAP traffic is actually quite easy to detect in HTTP, just examine the Content-Type field. It is strange that Bruce should get so excited about this and say nothing about Java that deliberately disguises itself as application/binary to prevent firewall filtering (and yes I did suggest Gosling chage this before they release Java, they refused).
Re:Schnier co-writes a bad column! (Score:2)
Err, when was SSH ever based on SSL?
Re:Schnier co-writes a bad column! (Score:3, Informative)
A free clue:
$ cat
No one is (seriously) suggesting running SOAP over FTP or NNTP. The point is that one of the fundamental features of the IP suite is that unique services should run over unique ports. This has a wide variety of benefits, one of which is that you can SHUT IT DOWN AT THE FIREWALL (or border router or whatever) when someone blurts their new exploit all over Bugtraq without bothering to inform the vendor. As it stands, when this scenario comes to pass (or the first
Incidentally when I said this here, a few months back, I got the most severe flaming I've ever had on Slashdot... nice to see that everyone's nodding sagely and saying "yes, of course, how true" now that Bruce Schneier says so, too. Apologies accepted =)
I have no idea what are you talking about here. ftp is "built on telnet"?
And FYI, SSH - OpenSSH at any rate - still had OpenSSL as a dependency
last time I compiled it (a couple of months back.)
How will MS do this? (Score:2)
when MS wanted to take advantadge of the Internet, they bullied their way in to the browser market. Now they are going to bully their way into the security market, in orde to provide an integrated solution?
Sounds good on paper, for them. another step towards a microsoft world, which things security by obscurity is the pattern, etc.
feh
the thought of microsoft salemen becoming the thought police sickens me.
New Levels (Score:5, Funny)
Bottom line is, words are easy. I'm going to wait to see the action.
Chris Beckenbach
We're all gonna DIE!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's smoke and drink and eat nothing but onion blossoms and have unprotected sex with gutter-crawlers. We're all gonna die anyway!
And we can't forget about Joe - ate well, exercised, etc., and he still got cancer and died at 24. Why bother?....
What will it take to kill this damn "all software has bugs" crap? Of course it's possible to write bug-free software - look up "formal methods" or "correctness proofs" on goggle. It's just very expensive and isn't used unless a bug will result in death.
But more practically, I've been at few shops (maybe one in almost 20 years) that couldn't eliminate the vast majority of their bugs with some simple changes. Things like TURNING ON COMPILER WARNINGS - you would be shocked how many times I've come into a site (as a troubleshooting consultant) with a flaky code base, turned on compiler warnings (which are inevitably disabled), made sure every variable was initialized and functions were called with the right types of arguments and the code was immediately described as "more reliable," "less fragile," etc. Yet this rarely takes more than a week to complete.
If I were security czar at Microsoft (and pigs could fly....) my first order would be that every developer drop everything else to turn on compiler warnings and eliminate these warnings. (Some warnings are acceptable, but not uninitialized variables, wrong number of arguments or wrong types of arguments.) Shouldn't take more than a week, even if function prototypes have to be defined from scratch, and the code will be a lot more solid.
Then there's the buffer overflow issue - "grep" is wonderful at locating sprintf(), strcpy(), strcat(), scanf(), and other problematic code. It's normally easy to convert them to the safer functions. "grep" can also find snprintf(), strncpy(), memcmp(), strncmp() etc with hardcoded array sizes - too easy for the size of a buffer and the function calls to get out of sync if you don't use a manifest constant or sizeof().
Overall, there's about a dozen simple steps you can do that will eliminate essentially all of your serious bugs. Some of these steps can be done quickly, others can be painful if a shop has been sloppy (e.g., 'programming by contract' and adding assertion checking to existing libraries.)
To be sure a nontrivial application will still have bugs, but they're much less likely to be ones that an attacker can exploit and there's no justification for a site not following these practices. Yet we keep hearing the fatalistic "all code has bugs, we're all gonna die anyway!" chants and nobody takes the simple first steps to fix bugs or eliminate the worst of their personal habits.
Re:We're all gonna DIE!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
By the way, correctness proofs only demonstrate that the code correctly implements the algorithm specified and still doesn't handle the problem of selecting or designing the correct algorithm. They therefore attack only one point in the development process where bugs can enter. (You already know this; just letting the others in on the fact that there's no silver bullet.) Full compiler warnings are a good thing; another thing I would insist upon is that a programmer use a debugger to step through every line of code affected by a change, and make sure that the program execution flow is what they had intended. It's amazing how many bugs I've caught this way.
Chris Beckenbach
Seems to me... (Score:2)
Business practices are related here too.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Denny's (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently, Denny's had intended to be a 24x365 operation, never closing its doors. Therefore, when they built the restaurants, they didn't bother putting locks on the doors.
One year, they decided to give their employees Christmas day off. In order to close the restaurants, they needed to be able to lock the doors. Therefore, they had locksmiths go out to all of the stores and install locks.
Now, instead of having spent about $10 per door when the store was built to have locks installed, they needed to send locksmiths to all of the stores and pay them for a couple of hours work resulting in a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars to give their employees a day off.
The moral: It's a lot easier to design security into a system in the first place than to try to add it on later.
Microsoft has their work cut out for them.
Re:Denny's (Score:2)
Regarding Microsoft; they REALLY have their work cut out for them. They can't hide this with press releases for very long and failures won't be excused as easily. Then again the public has accepted a daily ritual with Ctl-Alt-Del for over a decade.....
I'm pretty sure they, Microsoft, lost the server battle but by buying into the home entertainment maket( xbox ) and controlling the content they'll have another shot back at the server market in 5 years. A BLACK-EYE between now and then will seal their fate. IMHO.
LoB
Re:Denny's (Score:2)
While I can't be positive this statement is true, I seem to recall seeing it printed in local newspapers back when, so I think it is true. They way I heard it, it wasn't that they didn't bother, they made a specific deal of it, as a marketing trick. Think about it. You don't design locks in, you have to design them out. Doors without locks aren't the default, I'm sure you realize.
C//
facinating... (Score:3, Insightful)
I find it just facicinating that CNet had to go with Microsoft in order to find someone willing to write an article for the "pro" half of the article pair.
I agree with many points.. except removing SOAP (Score:2)
Now, I know one camp will say it's not necessary to wrap protocol within protocol, that it is a bad practice... but here's the thing.
To build really successful network apps for the mass market, you can no longer rely on network transparency.
What does that mean?
Back in the day, you could assume that every computer on the internet had an IP address, and could deal with unfiltered TCP/IP. That's how it was designed.
Nowadays.. we have NAT everywhere. Yes, NAT is a kludge to get more machines online.. but it's here to stay.
Example: I live in Costa Rica. The local cable company uses NAT. (yes, lame, I know).
My office also uses NAT.
Lots of home gateways use it.
And stuff like video, voice, remote desktops, VPN, etc will just plain not work over nat. Some things, I can hack up to work.. and I'm a real hacker type guy. What can my mom do? Nothing.
I'm all for MS paying more attention to security, separation of code and data, absolutely.
But bitching at them for SOAP, or for (not mentioned here) implementing raw sockets in XP is plain bunk... it's GOOD for them to support a full, flexible machine.
It's just the old Embrace and Extend tactic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Step 1: Embrace some technology.
Step 2: Extend it in proprietary ways, locking the users in to Microsoft.
How long before we hear,
How long before the security protocols used are known only to Microsoft (for security reasons, naturally)?Three months—at the most!
What? MS isn't secure? (Score:2)
OK in the same light, call it trolling if you want, let me say M$ isn't secure. Not by a long shot, please stop pretending that it is or will be soon. Thank you.
Bully their way into the security market! (Score:2)
Then all we have for security is what MS tells us and gives us!
MSFT will produce something secure (Score:2)
Just look at their history of innovative products:
Windows: Sure they were caught a bit off guard by that fruity company down south of Redmond, but Bill G. made a GUI the main priority and they invented FUD (or did they license it from IBM?) to confuse and delay the corporate world for the years it took to get up to Windows 3.1
Similarly, when the Internet torpedoed Bill's fledgling MSN, he made the internet the company priority. It took a few years, but just look at the market share of MS IE nowadays. Even AOL uses IE as their main browser (and they own Netscape - why don't they "eat their own dog food"?)
So I think that MSFT will be able to bring about this shift to secure their OS and applications. 40 billion dollars in actual cash on hand is only chump change for a first world government. It can finance one heck of a lot of spin doctoring (Just the interest off that would come to more than all the US Congress - House and Senate races plus what Bush and Gore spent combined in the 2000 election campaigns). And of course, however much various folks like to grumble, MSFT actually does spend some money on programming as well as marketing. Heck, they might just make their own version hyper secure version of BSD (given how much BSD code they have alrady borrowed) and call it MS Fortress 2005.
Rememberances... (Score:4, Funny)
the register (Score:3, Informative)
they have a good editorial on what it would cost to ms to implement this as well (like dropping
here is the link -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23791.ht
Security potential (Score:2, Insightful)
DRM! (Score:4, Interesting)
Billg says:
"Security: The data our software and services store on behalf of our customers should be protected from harm and used or modified only in appropriate ways...It should be easy for users to specify appropriate use of their information including controlling the use of email they send."
Of course, this new "secure" email won't work on those unamerican Linux computers.
Am I the only one nervous about that?
Trust Microsoft? Who are you kidding (Score:3, Interesting)
It doesn't matter what sort of clothes they wear or how pretty they smile, when the bully comes around the next day, the kids run and sream in terror. They know the bully only wants to get them backed into a corner; what makes us treat Microsoft any different?
The best part from our friend Mr. Craig Mundie: (Score:4, Insightful)
"...they've helped transport people to the moon and back safely, they manage critical aircraft systems for thousands of flights every day, they support business operations at companies of all sizes, and they move trillions of dollars around the world to keep the global economy"
It's a shame that none of these run Microsoft software. MS didn't exist in the 60's (moon landing), has nothing to do with aircraft systems (most still in use run on late 70's mainframes and mini's), and god help the bank/brokerage who runs their mission critical software on an Wintel platform. End flame.
Mundie does have one idea right though; make it ubiqutous (sp?). He indicates computers should have the same reliability that requires no thought. I agree whole-heartedly. However I don't believe MSFT can do it without rewriting the whole damn thing over. I cannot count the amount of times an NT server had to be manually power cycled because a service hung and wouldn't restart. This wasn't some oddball, third party service; this was IIS ("WWW Publishing Service" I believe) Until simple things like the separation between kernel and application (EVERY application, no exceptions for the ones you need to tweak for benchmarks) is complete, NT will have problems
Toodles
Re:Jesus H. Fucking Christ (Score:3, Interesting)
Except a lot of times (in NT 4 anyways) when you kill the web service with the 'kill' utility from the reskit, you are unable to restart the service. You go to the Services control panel applet and the "start" button is greyed out.
I'll never understand why 'end process' in the task manager won't work and the 'kill' utility which you have to get from another CD only sorta works. You'd think that the desingers of NT might have thought to include the ability to properly terminate a rogue process.
'nix community standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Being quite the 'nix afficionado myself, I understand some of the rather hateful sentiments expressed toward MS. I take issue with some of Mr. Schneier's (whom I greatly respect) comments, however, as being opposed to the mindset of progress.
For instance, Implementation of Microsoft SOAP, a protocol running over HTTP precisely so it could bypass firewalls, should be withdrawn.
strikes me as an ill-conceived statement. SOAP [w3.org], for the uninformed, is just an XML-based protocol carried through HTTP. It doesn't BYPASS the firewall, it passes through the port generally held open for the use of web servers. We're packaging an XML envelope that a SOAP implementation can open and use, not passing some magic packet that your web server can use to format its harddrives. Firewalls can be made to use SOAP information to block SOAP packets, and servers don't have to respond to ill-formed, ill-conceived, or ill-meanings SOAP calls. How the heck can removing SOAP all-together be considered a practical security measure, anymore than simply removing the web server from the net entirely? Sure, you might get your C-2 rating, but is it worthwhile?
MS has attempted to create a high-functionality server platform, one that installs with the purpose of usability as its default. This simplifies the installation process, creating a process that relies less on the intelligence and experience of the user and more on the good nature of MS itself (as the one who created the installation system). MS does not necessarily have YOUR interests in mind, but the interests of a non-specific "user" in mind - a user whose needs profile may or may not fit your own. Microsoft needs to expand their thinking to include the needs of secure-minded individuals, granted, but the needs of ALL users should still be taken into account, and documentation created that explains the differences.
I'll be the first to admit that Windows has security issues, however, I contend that the nature of networking imposes security problems on ALL operating systems. I doubt too many persons could implement a secure 'nix OR a secure Win box. Intelligence and experience are required in both.
The market can move mountains. (Score:2)
Take all the factors that normally influence major business decisions - especially IT decisions - and you start seeing really compelling cases against MS.
First, there's cost. We all know Linux wins that one hands-down, since it's hard to compete with free. Next, consider stability. We all know Win95/98/Me are horrible when it comes to this, but let's remember that most businesses are running at least NT - which is mostly stable - and many have now upgraded to Win 2k, which is very stable (IMHO). XP is as stable as Win 2k, but I don't think most businesses have an interest in upgrading to XP from 2k, so I'm mostly ignoring XP.
Then comes the big one: support. Many IT people that manage MS-centric offices and networks will tell you that they don't trust the availability or amount of support for Linux. Linux gurus, on the other hand, call MS support a joke. This one, IMHO, is more or less a draw since both sides see it differently.
But after all that, you can mention the factor that makes even the non-tech execs cringe: security. If the CEO - now matter how technologically uneducated said CEO is - reads in the Wall Street Journal that there's a major security hole in Windows version Blah and the hole is large enough to present danger to critical corporate systems, said CEO is going to make damned sure the IT people either get the hole patched or ditch Windows version Blah to avoid security problems. In the past, the IT people could shoot down such directives because going from MS to Linux could present too many problems. But now we have Lindows and Wine to help support any critical Win32 apps and KDE and Gnome to make the desktop transition easier.
Again, this could just be MS lip service. But with all the current pressures combined with the future potential of Windows replacements, it wouldn't be all that surprising to see MS start trying to produce a product that deserves the corporate mega-bucks.
My first assosiation (Score:2, Funny)
Contrast Between Mundie and Schneir/Shostack (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought that looking at these two articles provided an interesting comparison. Mundie's idea of "trustworthy computing" is a world in which people don't think about the technology that makes their computing devices work. This seems to me to be pretty much the same philosophy that Microsoft has followed for a while now, ie lowering the level of knowledge required to operate computers.
By constrast, in the Schneir article, the viewpoint expressed seems to me to advocate people getting involved in the operation of technology. More configurability, plus more modular components, more transparent auditing/logging of OS functions etc. In the author's view, users should be aware of what their computer is doing.
This is the fundamental problem with Microsoft's view of security. Their focus on making things transparent to the lowest common denominator is at the root of all the architectural problems from lack of logging to Outlook viruses arising from scriptable email. They need to change their view that people should just view their computers as mysterious black boxes before their security record will ever improve.
So does Robert X. (Score:2, Insightful)
New products and upgrades based on increased security have a certain appeal. After all, you can never have too much security, so users can be convinced to upgrade over and over almost forever (just look at Mcafee). But there is a downside, too, which is that security and security performance are now firmly on the table. If Microsoft says it is going to make its products trustworthy and they aren't, then customers can rightly be upset. To this point, remember, Microsoft has pretty much disclaimed security, saying that all operating systems and applications are vulnerable. "It's not our fault." Well in the age of Trustworthy Computing, it WILL be their fault, though the cost to us will probably be continual and expensive upgrades.
Am I one of the few optimists? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad security practices can be expensive - I know I've lost a few hours of work due to not having an up-to-date-and-scanning virus program. This has to have a definate impact on MS's operational budget, trying to figure out how to spin the latest virus while testing solutions against the entire MS suite. On top of that, there has to be some managers and employees that still believe the old lines, that customers pay for new features, not bug fixes, that interoperability and ease of use sell, not security.
Microsoft knows that it has won the Desktop OS wars, that it's closest competators are Apple's OSX (only runs on expensive hardware, so it will have a minimal impact on business sales) and Linux (still playing catch-up with MS). Now it needs to figure out how to sell upgrade units to existing customers, and has to think about the eventual multi-computer households with home servers, where it is currently losing to Linux. Most reviewers that tried XP loved it's stability, and I've even been tempted to upgrade my 98 desktop (which runs fine once you get all the programs working together).
Extra bells and whistles aren't doing it anymore - customers are tired of gaining ease of use at the cost of patches and bugs. Customers want an invisible operating system, which makes easy things easy, and they almost don't care about making hard things possible. This will require MS to transition from a company focused on beating competators by innovation (by whatever means) to beating competators by having a better product (more stable, less supprises, better cooked).
To make a change in basic philosophy requires a redirection of management. The Gates memo is the first step, and I think we can take it at face value. Sure, it's a strategy to further MS's competative edge, but I really don't think that there's anything underhanded going on here. I think Bill is giving the lowest guy on the totem pole a weapon to tell his boss - Here, I want to work this bug out before we release it; if you have a problem, take it up with Bill. That a Good Thing, and I'm planning to be suprised by what the folks at MS can do when they have the will to make a secure product.
SOAP and the MSFT way (Score:5, Informative)
SOAP is designed to use HTTP/HTTPS as the most common implementation of transport and protocol underneath. Schnier and Shostack touch on how poor a decision this is. I think this goes a lot further than many developers and companies are realizing.
You just removed your firewall.
The idea of SOAP is to allow IT services to be exposed as remotely addressable and usable procedures. Essentially with every web service or SOAP receiver, you have written a brand new server that parses XML protocol messages to decide on action. Thus every web service you create may have overrun, DoS and other exploits inherent in it, in your code, as you are executing paths based on a message from the outside. Just like a web server, ftp server or any other available server.
So now, everyone has to become better at security, to the point that the web services are safe. Ideally they should all run within a sandbox environment with restricted permissions, but considering SOAP authentication is based on HTTP authentication, the models may or may not match up properly.
Most importantly is that the SOAP specification team, including MSFT and the .NET portions pertaining to web services have basically increased the difficulty of every network administrator's job by stuffing all this over port 80.
Now if there is a vulnerability in a web service, the network admin has to take out port 80, probably taking down the web service, the web server, and who knows what else that's been tunnelled through there. They can't simply block a set port. UDDI could have advertised a port for the service as well, and stateful inspection could be implemented at some level on each service port to increase security and leverage off of the firewalls. Instead, a rat's nest of information is getting funnelled through http/https. The firewalls aren't designed for this, and the inspection task is only going to get more difficult as SOAP grows in popularity.
MSFT is always looking at first to market, and I can almost assure you that for that reason, SOAP was designed around port 80 and into the web server engines. I can also say with a fair bit of confidence that the first time MSFT gets beat to market due to a security review, that the security priority is going to get thrown right out the window of the executive windows at Microsoft if it causes the stock to slip.
Re:SOAP and the MSFT way (Score:3, Interesting)
FUD
What you, Adam and Bruce appear to miss is that firewalls are rarely configured to allow incomming HTTP requests. If they are the requests are typically handled by a server located in a DMZ between two firewalls.
The firewall bypass problem is for outgoing requests. There is not actually a whole lot of difference in the security implications of an HTTP client posting a form in URL encoding and posting an XML document.
Re:SOAP and the MSFT way (Score:2)
You might with to browse the powerpoint from Microsoft itself detailing .NET and Web Services at this location [vbxml.com] and then try to get a grip on how it works before decrying "FUD!". If you think Adam and Bruce are offbase on security, you obviously have no concept of the capabilities, experience or dedication of either individual. As for myself, say what you want. :-)
Re:SOAP and the MSFT way (Score:3, Interesting)
Any you would put a machine of that type providing an external service in your internal network???
You entirely miss the point, for every service there is also a client. The port 80 / firewall issue has nothing to do with the server end. It is when the client is behind a firewall that you have a problem.
There is no firewall bypass issue at the service end, a company that is providing a published dotnet service will modify its firewall configuration to deploy its product. The problem with firewalls comes when the IT dept refuses to modify the firewall configuration to allow use of services provided externally.
If you think Adam and Bruce are offbase on security, you obviously have no concept of the capabilities, experience or dedication of either individual.
I know Adam and Bruce very well, they know me very well. I don't think either of them would claim that they had greater expertise or experience than I do, and in particular not on this particular topic. Certainly neither would expect the automatic deference to their views you appear to think due.
On this point they happen to be mistaken. Bruce is very rarely 'wrong' about security, that is I do not recall an instance of him calling a system secure when it was not, he is however quite frequently mistaken in describing a system as insecure when it is in fact secure. If he could learn to discuss them in private with the relevant designers before launching public attacks his reputation inside the security industry might match that outside.
The point in question is a sngle sentence paragraph tacked onto the end of a section. I suspect that it was an afterthought that they had not thought through in great detail. If they want to call me up and discuss it I can go through the detailed analysis I have.
The usual press response... (Score:3, Interesting)
MS will do a barely useful job of improving security, and the press will proclaim that they invented it.
It will be just like multi-tasking in Windows 95 (i.e., "Users can now run two or more programs at the same time!!").
Vunerabilty? (Score:2, Funny)
Kerberos could be a first step (Score:2)
Or you could look at that act as proof that they want to own the security. Not necessarily create it.
How Linux could do this (Score:2)
Kerberos and MSFT -- a start (Score:2)
Doing that to the protocol was before Bill's memo, but it's indicative of at least a few people involved in security interoperability that really don't get it.
Schneier & Shostack are right (Score:2)
Microsoft will have to drop its spyware and its insane licensing policies before I will try Windows again. Microsoft will have to drop the Globally Unique Identifier before I will use Windows Media Player.
In short, this is a good move for MS, but for me it is too little, too late. I have switched to Mac OS X and will never go back to Windows.
Propaganda (Score:2, Insightful)
The question is, how badly do they want security? Their new focus on security may require them to make their new software and OS less backwards-compatible, or not quite as user-friendly. Microsoft may have trouble seeing their products' ease of use drop in the short run--they've put a lot of work into making Windows easy to use. So basically it comes down to this: are they willing to sacrifice some ease of use (and beef up their technical support) in order to produce more secure products? If so, great. If not, then it's all just propaganda.
My response to Microsoft (Score:3, Funny)
It saddens me to see Microsoft exiting the highway of consumer satisfaction into the dirt road of security.
As a long time fan and appreciator the Microsoft way, i feel i must stand up and ask:
Why?
Microsoft has done more than any other company to turn Desktop Computing into a thriling adventure. From the very moment i turn on my PC, i feel i'm entering a world of wonder and surprise, where new adventures can happen at any moment:
- Maybe Windows will not start-up and i end with a black screen.
- Maybe it will start in VGA mode
- Maybe clicking in the explorer toolbar wil result in a blue screen
- Maybe Word will crash when i'm editing an important document.
- Maybe installing the newest IE will make half my applications stop working.
- Maybe after installing the newest DirectX Windows will stop working.
- Maybe i'll open an e-mail an my PC starts acting funny.
- Maybe i'll get a phone call from my ISP saying a Denial of Service attack to the Whitehouse site has been detected from my machine.
- Maybe the mouse pointer will start moving by itself
- Maybe all my files are deleted.
Why? Why do you want to remove all the thrill and adventure from my life???
Everybody's getting too worked up. (Score:2, Funny)
*What* security problems?
Think about it, if the industry plays dumb the way that Microsoft has for the past 10 years, then they will have to enumerate their history and how they might address the problems. Speculation on my part, sure, but they sure don't deserve all of these free ideas.
I'm an MCSE, and while Microsoft's lameness has provided me with a nice career for the past several years, but I still have nerdy idealism governing my attitude. :) It's been many years that my standards of quality have been much higher than Microsoft's, and now we see that they want to "lead" into the future. Well, start by catching up.
Security Focus gets it right. I doubt M$ will (Score:5, Interesting)
As an example, we wrote a test app with a different foundation class library that was bug- and memory-leak free in all of the major WinXX OS's up through 98 and NT 4), and even compilable and bug free back into Win 3.XX. The whole app was a total of 123K: the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) [version 3.2, IIRC] test app as created by the wizard came in at just over 1 Meg, riddled with memory leaks, logical errors, etc. Our determination was that it wasn't just a bad wizard -- the MFC itself was causing many of the leaks and problems.
Now then, if you look at the Win API set now (Y2002), it is just that much more massive than when I last actively coded to it -- but the underlying code classes look much the same. [I haven't done a diff, so I can't prove it.]
So accurate or inaccurate, I don't think Microsoft has the corporate will to change from a company built on FUD (fear uncertainty doubt) to a company whose software is something I can trust because it doesn't even look to me like they have fixed all of their original problems in the foundational code classes from the early days of Windows 95.
Re:Security Focus gets it right. I doubt M$ will (Score:3, Insightful)
Realize that it will take them three or four tries to get this Security thing down though. It has with everything else:
- How many incarnations has MSN had?
- Do you even remember Windows 1 or 2 -- or even 3.0? (I'm sure someone will reply in the affirmative, but most of you haven't)
- those stupid e-book tablets (haven't won here yet) or palm computing (same here)
- What was the first version of IE that didn't completely suck? (You want to say that IE is different, but it isn't. They basically play all their games this way.)
And with $20b in the bank, they can afford to have an army of coders comb through existing libraries looking for defects. They can afford to have scores of UI designers and HCI evaluators to see exactly how much security people are willing to deal with. Better yet, they can afford to screw up two, three, maybe even four or five times before they finally get it right. And the world will just have to live with it.
They will screw up someday. It might be Security that does it. It might be something else that brings them down. But don't just dismiss the new Security focus as FUD. Pay attention.
knowingly entrust their lives... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Many people today are still reluctant to trust computers with their personal information, such as financial and medical records, and few people would knowingly entrust their lives to them"
Every time you fly on a plane your life is in the 'hands' of computers. Every time someone gets an x-ray or a CT scan or any one of many now normal medical procedures you are entrusting your life and health to computers. Most (if not all) medical and financial records are entrusted to computers.
We do it everyday and the reason we do it is because these devices are designed and built by companies that have earned our trust by building quality products to very strict specifications for safety. These companies have good track records of safety and if they have problems then they are reported.
What Mr. Mundie should have said is:
"Many people today are still reluctant to trust Microsoft with their personal information, such as financial and medical records, and few people would knowingly entrust their lives to Microsoft."
--
www.trustworthycomputing.com (Score:3, Funny)
Not security: trust - in "established" companies (Score:3, Troll)
Guess what competition will be easy for their marketing machine to paint as being lacking in the trustable big established multi-billion-dollar company department? Sure there's IBM, but experience suggests that Microsoft are fully up to the challenge of out-marketing IBM.
Some history (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be good if the people who spend so much time attacking Microsoft's security issues considered that UNIX generally and Linux in particular are not exactly fault free.
How can anyone who runs sendmail throw stones at Microsoft? sendmail is a textbook case in how to write software that can never be secure. The program breaks every single one of the rules Bruce and Adam set out. There are plenty of better alternatives, yet sendmail remains the default through sheer inertia (you might want to route some bang path UUCP or OSI mail sometime you know).
UNIX only became secure as a result of trial and error. There never was a security architecture worth a damn. For many years the main contribution to the security world from the UNIX security architecture folk was discouraging people from using shaddow password files.
The security model of all modern operating systems is based on the security model of MULTICS and comes from the age of the Multiple Access Computer. The security problem is defined in terms of a single machine that has multiple concurrent users. The addition of the network is an afterthought.
What this means is that very few of the security features in a modern O/S are actually of the slightest relevance to a machine running a Web server. In effect we end up with two parallel permissions structures, the one managed by the O/S and the one managed by the Web server.
Win2K and XP have Kerberos and PKI integrated into their core. The standard condfiguration supports IPSEC, S/MIME, SSL, Kerberos, Smartcard login, Encrypted File system. Measuring security in terms of cryptographic features Microsoft wins hands down (Microsoft are good on features).
Linux on the other hand is not in anywhere near such a good position. Security packages are available but it is left to the end user to integrate them. Linux also lacks anything that resembles the 'Security Administration Guide' mentioned in the rainbow series books.
Security is not a binary condition. The problem I see for Linux is complacency. There are too many weenies out there whose knowledge of security is actually minimal who tell people Linux is secure because that is what they have been told. None of the O/S on the market are particularly secure. Windows has a great security architecture that the crappy applications completely bypass. UNIX has a crappy architecture and some very well tested applications whose security bugs have been largely eliminated by trial and error.
People in the OSS community can go arround telling each other that Linux will always be more secure than Windows if they like, but that won't make it true. Gates has essentially served notice that Microsoft is going to be upping the ante here. That does not mean that they will win, but a lot of work is going to have to be done if Linux is going to keep up. Fotunately it is not necessary to integrate PKIX into Linux as Microsoft did with Windows, the OSS community could skip a PKI generation and move straight to using new technology such as XKMS and SAML.
Critique of your apologetic (Score:3, Insightful)
Citations, please? By most accounts, Unix had already penetrated far outside academia by the time the 1990's rolled around.
So what? Does one sin excuse the other? Is there any lack of focus on Unix and Linux security issues? If I run IIS do I give up the right to criticize Apache?
Never is a long time. What box-breaching flaws are in the latest release? Oh, you were referring to those older releases still installed all over the place. Like the old NT 4 boxen, and the unpatched IIS, and Win95's nukable TCP stack, and
My retort is the same as Microsoft's: UPGRADE
The program breaks every single one of the rules Bruce and Adam set out.
Bruce and Adam are not the only ones writing rules. Appealing to authority plays well to the unwashed masses who don't know any better. That's why it's a favorite of Microsoft spin doctors (and government spin doctors, and media spin doctors, and...)
UNIX only became secure as a result of trial and error.
This is partly why it has the level of trust that it does. We have experience with it, and know what to expect.
For many years the main contribution to the security world from the UNIX security architecture folk was discouraging people from using shaddow [sic]password files.
I think you meant "encouraging people to use shadow password files".
Win2K and XP have Kerberos and PKI integrated into their core.
What does that mean?
The standard condfiguration supports IPSEC, S/MIME, SSL, Kerberos, Smartcard login, Encrypted File system. Measuring security in terms of cryptographic features Microsoft wins hands down (Microsoft are good on features).
Microsoft is also good at winning irrelevant feature comparison contests. What is there to assure anyone that these features are any more secure than the other featureful crap that got Microsoft into trouble in the first place? How do we know these services do not harbor even bigger holes than the ones we know about already elsewhere in the OS? At least with IIS, we can have a clue that it ought not be left turned on except where it is required. Who is going to turn off security "features" as a matter of course, even if it's the right thing to do, as it is with IIS features? Today's features are tomorrow's embarrasing exploit. It matters not one bit whether the features are characterized as the "security" type of features. If they are written poorly, they can be exploited. If they are not needed, but are enabled anyway, they pose a needless risk. Needless risk is where Microsoft excels.
The problem I see for Linux is complacency. There are too many weenies out there whose knowledge of security is actually minimal who tell people Linux is secure because that is what they have been told.
That's pretty fucking funny. Complacency on the part of MCSE-types is why Microsoft software is such a problem. Nimda was not propagated by web servers running on Linux. It was propagated by IIS webservers running on Microsoft systems operated by complacent Microsoft admins.
But Linux users and distro preparers are learning. Newer distros come with everything turned off. Even after it was shown that unwitting NT and W2K users' PCs were propagating worms because the users had no idea a web server was even running, much less that it needed patching, XP still comes with everything turned on.
Wake me up when XP2 ships, and let me know if stuff is still on out of the box.
Windows has a great security architecture that the crappy applications completely bypass.
If it was a great architecture, the apps would not be able to bypass it.
Re:What about the potential implications for Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't crash as often, and is a vast improvement over 98, but it does crash. Of course, this is a bog-standard Professional install with Service Packs 1 and 2 and a few fixes from Windows update applied, used mostly to play games, so YMMV. (In fact, once every few boots, it boots to a black screen and sits there indefinitely (this defined as being "beyond the limit of my patience", ie significantly longer than on a successful boot.)
To say that it doesn't crash at all, however, is as inaccurate as saying that Linux never crashes.
Cheers,
Tim
Re:What about the potential implications for Linux (Score:2)
Huh, I must not be running Windows 2000 because my machine still crashes an average of once/week. My co worker has a brand new Dell with XP and it's definitely far more stable than 98, but it has still crashed at least twice that I know of in the past month.
Re:What about the potential implications for Linux (Score:2, Insightful)
Ahhh but we can always come up with new reasons for linux being better
And in addition to these reasons there are always the old standbys like "Microsoft is evil" and "I am 3733+3 cuz I use Linux."
The thing about being a zealot is that you can always find ways to justify your position. Although I think the Linux zealots are closer to the truth than the microsofties, I'm somewhere in between.