Security Flaws May Be Microsoft's Undoing

tarpitt writes: "According to this article in the LA Times, repeated software flaws in Microsoft products has begun to raise concerns that they 'threaten the stability of a major piece of the world economy and to raise questions about Microsoft's future.' Flawed security is seen as a stumbling block to accepting Microsoft sponsored on-line services. It is also driving discussion about making software manufacturers liable for damages caused by flawed products." This piece in eWeek on troubles with XP's automatic updates is an interesting companion; releasing often doesn't seem to be enough. Update: 01/15 15:00 GMT by J : Bruce Schneier's January Crypto-Gram came out this morning, and is also topical: "Microsoft treats security vulnerabilities as public relations problems. Until that changes, expect more of this kind of nonsense..."

Comments

Re:Product liability

[sheldon]

Such a move will further entrench software development into the hands of a few large companies.

Is it good? I don't know, I guess it depends on what your priorities are. If what you really want is rock solid quality software, then yes it's good.

If you want rapid innovation, then probably not.

It'd definately kill off free software because you'd need to be trained, licensed and bonded in order to write software. Just like engineers who design bridges, etc.

Perhaps it is the natural progression of the market. If you look at other industries, over time they concentrated their power into the hands of a few large companies. Oil, Automobiles, Televisions, Radio, etc.

That's why it's always important to see both sides of an issue. The title of this article as posted to /. is pretty anti-Microsoft. But ask yourself, out of all the companies developing software which one has the intelligence and the financial resources to react to such a change?

The only one I can think of is Microsoft. This wouldn't be their undoing, it'd only make them stronger.

Microsoft isn't going anywhere, time to get used to that.

Patches not enough

[smoon]

I recently had to rebuild a web server after a machine crashed, and getting NT4, IIS Option pack, etc. up and running with all patches was a _very_ long task.

It's not enough that Microsoft patches their products -- they are still shipping CDs of NT4 and win2k with the original 'release' of the product, so installing it means the original install plus a dozen or more service packs, hotfixes, etc. This makes it very tempting for internal corporate PC usage to just skip most of the patches to save time, and makes the process of securing Microsoft software that much more difficult.

They should just release new 'point' versions of the OS with every service pack, and stop selling the out of date CDs! Maybe this would cut down on the useless churn of moving from NT4 to 2K to XP to whatever -- and that would have to be good.

Re:Liability.

[MisterBlister]

Software liability also has has consequences for Open Source that must be explored. If Microsoft is liable for bad software, that would also open up Open Source and Free Software programmers to the same liability -- just because you give something away for free doesn't limit your liability if commercial vendors are also held liable. And what OSS/FS companies/vendors/developers can afford to worry about being hit with a liability suit, especially when they are unlikely to derive anywhere near Microsoft-scale profits on their work in the first place?

Those who yell and scream that Microsoft should be held liable should be careful what they wish for...liability laws would kill off most all of OSS/FS faster than they would kill Microsoft.

Who do you trust, Who do you trust...

[squaretorus]

That a majority of people do not trust MS is not surprising. I don't trust my government, my bankers, my customers, hell... I doubt the guy at the supermarket.

I maybe trust my mum and dad, and aunt jemima for her tasty pancakes - but a software company???

People are cynical enough that they just bumble through life looking over their shoulder bitching about stuff.

I just bought a new laptop - it came with XP pro - already I'm having problems with it. But I bitch about it over coffee and just get on with things. I had to register the software - something I bitched about. IIS won't work properly - bitch bitch bitch. Norton seems to be checking every file every 2 minutes making the thing unusable for the first hour in a day - bitch bitch bitch.

Would I buy another the same - probably.

The trust issue won't hurt MS as much as we'd like to think. And it won't help the alternatives much either.

The movie industry sucks - but a good percentage of you reading this will run out and give them 30 dollars for Tron someday soon.

The Nightmare

[Convergence]

The nightmare scenario.. Three hours from when a widespread bug (like the recent XP one) and having millions of windows machines trashing everything they touch.

That is the future, and it will happen someday.

• Here's how:

Use the warhol worm spreading technique. Read it and be frightened. He claims 8 MINUTES from first infection to millions of infections.

I'm not quite as confident as he is in that number. But I'll definitely agree that 2 hours is more than enough time. (1 million vulnerable hosts, 5 scans/sec. Start with 1000 hosts, each second, 5000 probes, finding one vulnerable host. Thus, after 15 minutes, 2000 hosts, and doubling every 15 minutes.)

And, the more vulnerable hosts, the faster it spreads.

Now imagine a truly destructive payload. One which does not delete files, but corrupts them, starting with the fileservers. It restores datestamps to make it impossible to identify what files are corrupted.

Three hours from exploit to millions of computers corrupting thousands of files. Antivirus won't keep up, hell, warninsgs won't even reach most people until after its demolished their fileserver. With obfuscation techniques, the worm could survive 3 hours without being reverse-engineered.

It spreads so fast, there's no defense. It spreads so fast, you won't be aware its trashing all files until its already started. The only reason we've survived this long is that nobody really competent has worked on a worm.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. The only question is when it will occur, and whether you will be running Windows when the time comes. I hope you keep good backups.

Losing the press?

[banky]

In the "Great OSS Boom of '99" the press was all awash with Linux this, Linux that. MS stayed true to its course, kept on with the updates, and got XP out the door.

Now it seems things have changed: more and more, I am seeing articles that are negative of MS. "XP isn't stable", "too many updates", "XP isn't secure", "W2k was fine, why did they change it?" is what I see more and more of. Red Hat gets decent nods, and now even Apple of all people is selling a Unix operating system, albeit one that is packaged in a lamp.

Is MS at risk of losing the press?

Articles like this must drive them absolutely BONKERS. Forget the /. bias, we're nothing. An article a week like this, even as a back-page editorial, is enough to cost them how many customers?

How many of the system integrators like the guy in the article will just give up and stop dealing with XP, or worse yet, call Big Blue?

If MS loses the appeal of the popular press - promoting every new release as stable and secure - then they're screwed, even without the class action suits and liability claims. Any more FBI warnings will serve as months of fodder for the rags to hammer on them.

Re:Liability.

[Restil]

First of all, its not IMPOSSIBLE to get software right. No more difficult than it is to build a car or a housse correctly, and while on occasion they break down, generally speaking they function as they're supposed to with minimal failures.

You've heard the joke about the first woodpecker destroying civilization if buildings were built the way that software was written. There's a fundamental truth here. Coders, for the most part, are sloppy. Why? Because they CAN be. However, there are examples of cases where software was done correctly the first time. It takes careful planning and controls and peer review, and in most cases the end result is clean code in less time than it would have taken to do it sloppy and spend lots of time cleaning up bugs.

There SHOULD be accountability here. But people don't hold Microsoft accountable. And I don't blame the monopoly factor either. People have just been brainwashed to believe that its NORMAL that computers crash. Its NORMAL that there are viruses. These things are just a part of life, and there can't be anything done about it. And as long as they believe that, they will keep buying into Microsoft.

These things generally don't bother the individual. They bother a large corporation as a whole that has to deal with the cleanup after one of the messier outlook viruses goes around. But, the corporation, run by people, simply look past the problem. The sys admins might be screaming bloody murder about it, but everyone else just considers it to be the status quo and goes on with their lives as best they can while the servers are being reloaded.

In my opinion, Sircam was the first windows virus/worm that had the potential to have a real effect on how people looked at Microsoft. If the virus was somewhat more malicious and made the data that was being sent out easily readable (as well as passing along a virus) and a few big corps had a lot of confidential internal memos sent all over the world.... THEN maybe people would start to reconsider the value of Microsoft
brand products, as soon as it is made clear to them, that its Microsoft and their software that made all this possible.

-Restil

Re:Liability.

[Goonie]

First of all, its not IMPOSSIBLE to get software right. No more difficult than it is to build a car or a housse correctly, and while on occasion they break down, generally speaking they function as they're supposed to with minimal failures.

Hmmm, we've been building permanent dwellings for thousands of years. We've been building software for fifty, and doing so on a large scale for about thirty.

Not to mention that the complexity and novelty of the average piece of software dwarfs that of all but the most unique and large-scale building projects.

You've heard the joke about the first woodpecker destroying civilization if buildings were built the way that software was written. There's a fundamental truth here. Coders, for the most part, are sloppy. Why? Because they CAN be. However, there are examples of cases where software was done correctly the first time. It takes careful planning and controls and peer review, and in most cases the end result is clean code in less time than it would have taken to do it sloppy and spend lots of time cleaning up bugs.

And you think that planning, control, and peer review comes free, and without a lot of pain getting it wrong first?

Software is still relatively new, and the most complex design task humanity undertakes. It's no wonder we haven't perfected the engineering of it.

Unix, Windows, and the Secure Tao

[_Sprocket_]

Yes, Microsoft products have security faults, whose doesn't? Microsoft's get more notice because of the insane amount of marketshare they have, also Microsoft's software is less mature than the UNIX offerings people often compare it to in terms of tight security.

...

I remember back in the late 80s and early 90s how much of a joke UNIX security in general was.

...

Unix security is better now, but that's in large part due to maturity...Microsoft software will improve as well..Look at how much they've improved stability already when compared to Win95...It will happen...slowly, perhaps.

In a previous comment on another article, I noted that Unix has spent its time "in the trenches". Infosec history is full of Unix and its exploits... and its eventual improvement. But it is too easy to look at this history and learn the wrong lesson.

Unix's history of security flaws is less about Unix and more about infosec awareness. Unix changed as the understanding of infosec and security principles changed. While time has allowed more of these flaws to be discovered and removed from the Unix code base, the process over the years has been more about knowing what to look for (or even to bother looking). And as this understanding of infosec principles, concepts, and procedures has increased entirely new chunks of unix code has materialized - sometimes to fill a void, but often to replace another project's functionality with a new design that has taken security issues in consideration during its inception.

In short, Unix does benefit from its maturity. But the greater lesson is the infosec mind set. The tao of security, if you will. And these are concepts that can be applied to any project / OS.

The claims that Microsoft will "get there" with maturity are misleading. Microsoft may indeed improve. But its not maturity of their code base that's at issue. The issue is whether Microsoft will begin to understand Security and design systems based on that understanding.

Microsoft has shown signs of improvement with a sudden handful of security tool offerings. But unfortunately, these are really superficial afterthoughts to an already flawed environment.

Microsoft's problem is not technical; its cultural. Microsoft is a technology company that excels at marketing. Articles by Microsoft coders talk about the push from Marketing to add additional features at the cost of bug-hunting and resolution.

This kind of environment clashes with two infosec concepts. The first is that vulnerabilities are bugs - something malfunctions in an unexpected way, leaving the system vulnerable to intentional manipulation of this bug. The second is that there is an inverse relationship between functionality and security. Increasing the number of features, and the ease of using these features, often threatens a system's security.

Marketing at Microsoft will first have to care about infosec issues (this may be happening as Microsoft gets more and more negative press). Then Microsoft will have to strive to design secure systems even at the cost of features (and possibly even abandoning or severely restructuring current systems).

It will take a maturity of a different kind.

implication of security

[f00zbll]

Having dealt with security issues and tried to fight for tighter security vs convienance, management always choose convienance. I'm sure others have seen the same problem, but I'll say it anyways.

To really implement tight security (the only kind that will prevent 95% of viruses) means a drastic change in microsoft's entire line of products. The fact is most people know better, but when they sit down at a computer their brains turn off and click everything. Only way microsoft can prevent all these email viruses isn't to turn off "launch attachment", because people will turn it on the first time they get an attachment. It's to require users save the file, scan the file and limit user account in windows. That means users have to login as the administrator to install programs and do updates. I'm sure people are saying, "just like unix."

Will people put up with less convienance after they've had it for 8 years? My guess is probably not. In the best case scenario, people will slowly get used it and take 25 years to replace all the old software. Short of giving away their software, microsoft will have a huge headache of replacing all the outdated version with hacker friendly features.

Re:Liability.

[bockman]

Software should be sold with a label indicating its quality level, as certified by well-defined and verifiable standards:

• level-0 is the software provided as-it-is or whith disclaimers that nullify any liability (that is 99% of today commercial and free software)
• other levels could be defined for software which promises (and therefore is liable for) a well-specified level of accuracy/data integrity/security.

Companies would price their software accordingly with the quality level they warrant, and people and company could make their own cost/quality/risk trade-off analysis and freely use whathever they want.

Note that in theory an open-source redistributor could achieve quality level > 0 by submitting the products it distributes to rigorous qualification tests and patching the software accordingly. A problem could be that they should publish their patches, making easier for the competition to do the same. But this is nothing new, being the same dilemma that open-source distributors already face for the works which goes in packaging/integrating the free software.

You're not evil enough

[TFloore]

Destroying a computer is not the worst you can do.

Corrupting the data on the computer is MUCH worse.

Think of a database for an ecommerce server. A virus that understands the database format, and turns every 7 into a 3 in the database. Credit card numbers (I'm sorry, sir, your card has been declined), prices, product IDs, addresses, zip codes, telephone numbers (hope this doesn't happen to your phone company), social security numbers. Everything on that database.

Then it transmits itself to another host, and removes itself from that machine, attempting to cover its tracks.

Destroying the computer is *nice* compared to letting it run for the next month with incorrect data. You just corrupted the next 7 million transactions that system processes. And how much does it cost to correct that? Restoring a nuked server is cheap by comparison.

Which would be worse for a serious ecommerce business? Being down for a day? Or having to check every transaction that was processed for the last 30 days, and dealing with mischarged customers, fraud charges from CC#s billed incorrectly, incorrect products shipped, lost packages that were misaddressed...

Destroying a system is bad for a home user... corrupting it can be deadly for a business.