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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.
...has finally gotten through to them -- Security is something that starts from the ground up, not when you reach the top and back down.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Another excuse to let people believe that palladium is needed :/
The XFree86 team admits xfree86 is not engineered for speed and RMS admits that GNU is not engineered for user-friendlyness.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
the link above just goes to front of a tech section, here's a direct link to the story3 25075&REQSESS=HM5797&REQHOST=site1&REQAUTH=2313828 &2131REQEVENT=&CARTI=115571&CCAT=1&CCHAN=13&CFLAV= 1
http://www.cw360.com/bin/bladerunner?REQUNIQ=1031
This might be a stupid point, but of course microsoft products aren't engineered for security. The common man doesn't buy products for security, and even now the common man largely does not understand that they could even have their functionality in a secure environment (though arguably most salesguys cannot have the functionality they demand in a secure environment, but that's another debate.)
Brian Valentine, formally senior vice-president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, looking for VP/management job with software company.
I have to use this cause I can't afford a real sig...
While working at Sony, Microsoft closed down a UK R&D facility. A whole department of ex-MS software engineers came to work in my department. They were the some of the best engineers I have ever worked with, designing innovative and stable code years ahead of its time.
Stop picking on MS engineers for poor products, and level the blame at the correct place - marketing and management.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Is whether this will make the national news. Trust me, if CNN and MS/NBC and all the rest choose not to cover this, the general public won't know, and won't really make a decision based on this information.
Of course, this could just be a ploy to get M$'s most vile next O/S out, Palladium, that will let them 0\/\/|\| j00r s0ul (and credit card, and email, and music, and movies, and any personal items that may happen to be sitting on top of your computer...)
Step 1: Admit that current MS OS is insecure.
Step 2: Allege that problem is fundamental due to the nature of the hardware platform. Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.
Step 3: But wait! MS has the solution that will solve this crisis -- Palladium.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Anybody want some more coffee!? *puffs on a cigarette* I'm gonna get some more coffee... *shakes and walks around of the room*
Why bother.
What does 'PSS' stand for in that Microsoft Knowledgebase article? [P]lease [s]top [s]niffing? ([s]poofing? '[s]ploiting?)
Microsoft: "Our products aren't engineered for security"
.net developer conference in Seattle, USA.
Friday 6 September 2002
Brian Valentine, senior vice-president in charge of Microsoft's Windows development, has made a grim admission to the Microsoft Windows Server
click here
"I'm not proud," he told delegates yesterday (5 September). "We really haven't done everything we could to protect our customers. Our products just aren't engineered for security," admitted Valentine, who since 1998 has headed Microsoft's Windows division.
In August the company put out eight security bulletins. This month it has released two, so far, with the latest urging users to patch a flaw in its digital certificate technology that could allow attackers to steal a user's credit card details.
Microsoft's regular stream of security bulletins has continued despite Bill Gates company-wide Trustworthy Computing Initiative, announced earlier this year.
The Initiative was launched with a memo from Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, and saw the company halt production on new code in all of its products while employees scanned every line of existing code in search of vulnerabilities.
"We realised that we couldn't continue with the way we were building software and expect to deliver secure products," Valentine said.
But the company is dealing with a problem that is not easily resolved. Valentine told developers at the conference that as the company works to shore up its products the security dilemma will evolve as hackers become more sophisticated.
"It's impossible to solve the problem completely," Valentine said. "As we solve these problems there are hackers who are going to come up with new ones. There's no end to this."
Microsoft has also been employing new tools developed by Microsoft Research that are designed to detect errors in code during the development process, Valentine said.
According to Chandra Mugunda, a software consultant with Dell who attended Valentine's presentation, buggy software is "an industry-wide problem, not just a Microsoft problem. But they're the leaders, and they should take the lead to solve them," he said.
Saying they are "not engineered" is a statement of your naivity. Imagine designing and coding a huge prog. such as Windows or MS Office... Do you think they sit a big room and just piece code together like a puzzle? Please don't say that they are not engineered...
Hrm... sit in a big room and just piece together code like a puzzle? Yeah, that's exactly what it feels like, half the time. Counter-intuitive commands, shoddy execution, worse then useless help systems.... yup, yup, yup.
Now, was it done that way? Obviously not. But they definitely need some improvement between the design phase, the engineering phase, and the implementation phase.
And quite frankly, I don't want pretty. I want functional. I want an easy to use system, not one that sparkles and gleams. I don't want bells and whistles. I don't want little pop-up paperclip buddies (and how freaking long did it take to add that piece of feces?), and I don't want programs that think they know what I want to do and are wrong half the time.
I want a system that does what I tell it to, not what it thinks I want. I want something that is coded efficiently, smoothly, and takes up a minimum of space.
And I want it by Thursday.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Try changing the password.
My deviantArt site
You can't tell me that their is any linux distro that can match Windows ease of use. If their is, why arent the masses jumping on that bandwagon???
NOW who is being naive?
Have you not read the stories about M$'s strangle hold (or maybe a good Ric Flair style Figure-4?) on the OEM companies? Are you not aware that companines can not install ANY other OS in tandum with Win* on their machines? Remember the story about Dell putting FreeDOS on their machines just so they could beat the M$ policy?
So why aren't the masses jumping on it (Linux)? Because they are (almost) not allowed to buy a machine that doesn't run Win*.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I have not heard of any instances of marketeering guffbags and manglement ruining code, primarily because they don't code.
They ruin the code by ruining the requirements. In a firm that produces mass-market software, the marketing department generally writes each product's requirements document. If resistance to buffer overflow attacks isn't specified as a must-have in the requirements document, then it will surely get cut at the last minute in favor of other requirements such as ship date.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is a guy recognized as a genius in the Tobacco industry. I read that twenty odd years ago he told other Tobacco industry executives that, while they could afford to hire the shrewdest, meanest, most dishonest lawyers on planet Earth, they could only fight a rear-guard action.
Eventually, he told his colleagues, even the meanest lawyers couldn't hold off lawsuits over the lethal effects of their product. Once suits go to trial, everything will start to unravel. We have no real defense. So, we need to plan ahead.
His plan? Pretend to fight against mandatory warnings, but actually let them go ahead. Keep stalling on the trials -- so that when the trials happen we have a defense.
"But, your honour, we have had to have health warnings on our products for fifteen years. The claimant can't say they didn't know our products were dangerous."
Are Microsoft executives any more ethical than Tobacco executives?
Nah.
I believe that MS planned ahead too. I believe that MS has wanted to "own" the desktop, to own our computers, all along.
Anyone could have foreseen that embedding a macro language in their data files, that was automatically executed when the file was opened, was a sure guarantee of terrible security problems.
This was not an accident. This was a design decision. They did this on purpose. I don't believe it was a mistake. I believe they knew exactly what they were doing.
I believed that they looked ahead, and planned to distribute insecure products, so that the could harness the publics anger at vandals, interlopers and spam artists to justify draconian security measures that we never wuold have agreed to otherwise.
I'd like to see Gates, Ballmer and the whole filthy crew serve serious hard time.
95 isn't supported ( ok, I can understand that )
98 isn't supported ( getting a little too close for my comfort )
ME isn't supported ( didn't that just come out 2 years ago? )
2K isn't supported ( What about people running servers? )
Just another tactic to force people to upgrade
As someone who is actually subscribed to receive these bulletins from MSFT, I note that they sent a second revision out today. I quote:
"And like that
Microsoft's approach to operating systems and security has created an arms race between them and hackers(both malicious, and those legitimately testing the software).
The answer is not to make the OS more complex and create more special cases, but to streamline it, and offer a more consistent model for applications and users to interact with the operating system.
This is why pretty much everyone else these days uses some variant on Unix. More than anything else, the appeal of Unix is simplicity at a basic level.
Now, Microsoft doesn't have to ship a Unix-based or compatible OS by any means, but if they want to take security seriously, they need to take what they have now, and what they are planning on for five or ten years down the road, reduce it down to the most basic components that can still address all of those problems, and rethink how Windows is put together.
Also important is to get over their antipathy towards the open source "movement", and realize that it can be a tool. If they released a simplified, streamlined Windows kernel, they could let the world hack away at it, finding flaws, then take that work and put the components on top of it that would make it Windows. They've "borrowed" ideas from Apple and NeXT in the past, why not look at what OpenStep was, and what Darwin and Mac OS X have become and borrow that idea too?
In short, it takes more than saying to your developers, "ship bug fixes in a week rather than a month." They'll hae to really examine Windows, and where the flaws come in, and if there's some other way(and there always is) that those things could be done, then the old way has to go.
Here's a more accurate analogy:
Billy Boy has a large lemonade stand which sells lemonade for five dollars a glass. He makes a lot of money and has a lot of customers despite his competition, which includes:
Steve Jobs: Sells lemonade for fifty cents a glass, but in order to buy his lemonade, you also have to buy a glass and straw from him for nine fifty. The glasses are available in lots of trendy colors, but they're smaller and more inefficient than standard glasses, so Stevey doesn't have very many customers.
Tux: Doesn't have a stand, but he has a lemon tree, some sugar cane and and old-fashioned pump well. You can make your own lemonade if you'd like, and its free, but it takes a couple of hours to pick and squeeze lemons, pump water and extract sugar from the cane in order to make the lemonade, and you're not always guaranteed of its quality. There are thirty or forty lemon trees, and some taste good, while others do not. A few enthusiasts drink Tux's lemonade and rave about how great it is, but most mainstream customers are willing to just pay the five bucks.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
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
You mean fixed the same day it was announced by Microsoft. This bug has been discussed on Bugtraq for a month now.
You have drives that contain \Winnt? That's a problem too: install to a different directory.
How many people create a restricted user for IIS, rather than running it as LocalService?
I suspect the problem lies more with the components installed on the system, than on Windows & IIS themselves. For example, our Linux server was being exploited for spam recently. They shut down sendmail as a daemon, but the spam still flowed. It turns out that somebody had installed an old version and buggy version of Formmail. Grrr.
Simple, brand name. Try to explain to a non tach savy person (yes they still exist, and in millions at a time) that they should buy a product that isn't Microsoft. They've probably never heard of the other company, and if it isn't microsoft "I won't work right with my computer because my computer had microsoft on it already". Believe me I've heard that hundreds of times. Now imagine that same attitude on a corporate scale, and you've got one hell of a succesful business nomattr what crap you feed these people.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
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.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Simple, brand name
r t
This is correct. Microsoft's genius lies in the marketing. Not that their products are all terrible, and thrive ONLY because of marketing, but marketing got them and keeps them where they are today.
Microsoft's corporate sales pitch deliberately glosses over the technical side of things. The corporate execs aren't technical people anyway, so why try to explain the benefits of a product in technical terms that only a select few understand? No, Microsoft invented the term "TCO" (Total Cost of Ownership) and sold the concept that Microsoft was the less costly way to go. Execs understand the concept of money very well. Everyone responds to emotional sales pitches (unless they are Noam Chomsky or something). Through a combination of $$$ claims about lower TCO and carefully placed FUD, they have established a dominant position on the LANs they were merely clients on ten years ago.
Another thing Microsoft realized is that computers would be everywhere, and they wouldn't always be under the control of UNIX admins with pocket protectors and advanced CS degrees. There just aren't enough uber-geeks to go around for all the offices in the world. Billiant foresight. It might be the CFO who suddenly finds the company has grown and now they need to bring the network back under control. Microsoft has hands down the slickest sales materials I've seen in the computer field.
Microsoft sells a culture, a lifestyle, in which you don't have to worry about computer problems because there are teeming millions of MCSEs and phone support and etc. to hold your hand through whatever problems may arise. And in fact this is true. Microsoft will smile and nod and politely empty your wallet.
A few months ago, there was a story on Slashdot about MS sending the BSA after school districts in the Northwest. After the admins got into a tizzy and threated to install Linux everywhere, Microsoft had the Come to Jesus meeting. "The themes for today are friendly and flexible," the sales lady said. It's the classic good cop/bad cop routine, a pure psychology play, and Microsoft knows their shit in this regard. Geeks, being socially stunted and sexually frustrated, are putty in Microsoft's hands, especially when the nice woman in the business suit shows up to put down the rebellion.
That is how Microsoft has achieved their monopoly. Unlike the other computer companies, they don't try to sell the technology itself. Instead they sell the REWARDS of implementing a Microsoft solution, they sell a warm fuzzy bundle of love, a pre-made community of smiling, personable non-geeks who are there to ease your assimilation into the Collective.
Microsoft was the first to bring big-time Madison Avenue marketing psychology to an exponentially growing computer market, that's why they're on top now.
This T-shirt I saw said it best:
Political <---------- You are here
Presentation
Session
Application
Transpo
Network
Data link
Physical
Unfortunately, don't neglect the fact that just up the street are dozens of vendors selling other attractive goodies (let's call them cookies and cake, I guess) that many people depend on, but that don't work unless you have a glass of Bill's lemonade in hand.
In the antitrust case, this was called the "application barrier to entry" and was one of the main reasons that MS was declared a monopolist.