MS Exec: 'Our products just aren't engineered for security'

Various Microsoft news tidbits contributed by numerous readers: Phoebus0 notes that Microsoft's Vice-President in charge of Windows development states flat out that Microsoft products aren't engineered for security, absolutely guaranteeing he'll have tomorrow's Ditherati quote. Many readers submitted this Knowledge Base article stating that Microsoft is mystified by a wave of successful hacks on assorted versions of Windows (there's also a news report on this). Microsoft has another security bulletin out on the digital certificate spoofing bug that has caused them so many problems recently.

Comments

Re:Experience?

[sphealey]

Microsoft products are just as well architected as any other product on the market - but for goodness sakes they are bigger than most applications on the market.

I think part of the problem with Microsoft is that the people who work there have never actually used competing products in the real world (which would be consistent with Bill Gates' statement in 1998 or thereabouts that he only hires people younger than 25).

Consider the above statement. Then go back to 1994 and set up three corporate LANs: one with Microsoft Lan Manager 2.x, one with Novell 3.11, and one with Vines. Use them intensively in a large, multi-site corporate environment for 6 months. Then tell me again that Microsoft's products are "just as well architected" as others on the market???

The point being that the LAN problem (to take one example) had already been solved by 199x. Microsoft ignored everything that had already been done and created its own "standard", which was decidedly inferior to the competition.

sPh

Re:I hate to say it but...

[HiThere]

Isn't that the point though. Unix learned that it needed to be secure. And it changed and adapted to suit itself to the multi-user environment (where a lot of the users were college kids, just exploring what they could do with a computer).

Linux came along after Unix had learned to be secure, and was designed from the gound up with that model in mind.

OTOH, DOS was a single user operating system, and didn't need to be secure. When viruses started showing up, they were fixed in DOS not by improving intrinsic security, but by adding on a virus-proofing package. Windows descended from that. (And there doesn't seem to have been a fresh rewrite at any point, MS PR to the contrary.)

So Linux was designed from the start with security as a consideration. Not always a major consideration, but at leas a present one. It's been through many cycles of change and improvement, and at each step along the way, security has been considered.

Windows, OTOH, has always addressed security via add-on programs. (Well, NT made some attempt at security, e.g., it created users that it could be difficult to get into. And admin priviledges. I admit I don't know what they were...)

Still, in Linux security was built in from the beginning, and user interfaces was an add-on. In Windows, user interfaces were built-in from the beginning, and security was an add-on. In both cases the add-ons have gotten a lot better than they were.

I feel that the Linux windowing environment is now on a par with Windows, or perhaps better, but that it still falls short of the Mac. I feel, based solely on news reports, that the Windows security, while improved, is still lacking.

And to me, this is largely irrelevant. The MS licenses are so bad, that I wouldn't recommend them even if I thought that they were the best contender in all other aspects. I intend to file for retirement the day my company installs a system with Windows XP, as I don't want to be associated with any company that is either that suicidal or that unethical. (They've got to be either one or the other. Agreeing to a contract without understanding it is suicidal. Agreeing to that contract [I've only seen pieces, but that's enough] is suicidal even if you *do* understand it. The alternative is that they understand it, and intend to ignore it. [I'm not sure this is possible, but they might think that it is.] And that's too unethical for me.)