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IEEE to Standardize OS Security Components
aster_ken writes "The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers has started work on a standard for securing operating systems, as a recognition that software security is 'limited by the operating systems that underpin them', the organization said yesterday. The standard, dubbed IEEE P2200, will address external threats and intrinsic flaws arising from software design and engineering practices."
Microsoft creates own standards beaurou
Deems Windows perfect, others not
That's just great, codify the security aspects of OSes into a $100 document that can't be freely redistributed. That's a really good idea...
Awesome. Operating System design is one of the most underdeveloped fields of the industry and I believe that this is a step in the right direction towards the development of a mature, secure operating system for general use!
The other is that at some point a system that adheres to the standard will be compomised and will raise questions as to the usefulness of this standars.
I don't question the need for standards , but not all things can be standardized. Standards stand for a commonnly accepted way of doing something. Security is still too volatile.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
Never mind a secure OS, I think these electronic engineers sound like very useful devices. Is there a review of one anywhere? How much do they cost? Do they run Linux?
It'll take a lot of work to make windows secure!!
No operating syatem is completely secure anyway, there are always some 'undocumented features'
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So, did anyone else read the linked article and think "Looks like someone bought the IEEE's support of TCPA / Palladium"?
I hope not, but it certainly sounds that way. Basically, it makes the point that we cannot trust people not to run programs that break their own (or others) computers, so the task of limiting what (possibly malicious) code can run falls to the OS.
Sad. If I didn't have complete confidence that any DRM scheme will eventually prove itself flawed, I might actually worry. Though, I certainly do not look forward to the general inconvenience it would cause, regardless...
Only education (and not running Outlook) will help reduce the modern plague of worms, virii, spam, and other ways to generally make a computer and the internet grind to a crawl. Not legislation, and not crippled hardware. People simple need to learn how to secure their own damn machines.
IEEE P2200 will build on NIST and ISO Common Criteria documents, but will be an independent standard.
Anyways the IEEE has a track record of working on security-related standards includnig the popular P1363 (Standard Specifications for Public Key Cryptography) standard. P1363 defines standard implementations of public key crypto ciphers based on Integer Factorization, Discrete Log, Elliptic Curve, and Lattice algorithms.
Ill be waiting to see this P2200 come arround.
It's true that some flaws in the OS are inherently design-based. However, even if we make certain design requirements to be incorporated in the OS, it still doesn't guarantee that the OS is secure. I would think that it even can't minimize the number of OS breaches. It would even hamper the OS development in order to comply with their standards.
About the quote regarding the "minimum expectations of consumers for security and general reliability by establishing a floor for these characteristics". I don't think it would be possible the goal of "the least restrictive requirement while not relenting the control" is vague. Unless it provides rigid post- or pre-conditions of each method (in first order logic if necessary) and provide each formal specifications unambiguously, I would still see some leaks here and there. And, guess what? They put the requirement like UML standards: Way to vague. Congratulations.
For those of you who are curious, click here for the draft.
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Error 500: Internal sig error
I think it's time for all OS's to accept standards to help people interact with eachother effectively and securely. As everyone know MicroSoft has shunned many attempts at standards in order to control their market share by keeping their users pinned into MicroSoft sanctioned data. This has the effect of forcing businesses to support the MicroSoft users first and everyone second if at all.
.Net applications thus forcing the same cycle of users/companies designing to MS standards again thus shutting out the rest of us from secure systems.
I think a security standard should be enforced by a world body to help prevent MicroSoft from once again taking the standard and corrupting it to work only with Windows and
Some would say standards hurt computing that's not exactly the case. You can design products around standards and still compete with other standard compliant products. It allows everyone to remain compatible and at the same time darwinism will take effect with bad products going away and good products evolving to better suit their users.
Did you Read The Fucking Post? It's littered with trash. Fucking idiot.
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
if IEEE just redirected their new site here
Not really condeming of anyone in particluar, but I doubt the big player of the PC world will take orders from anyone. They didn't for any of their software, why would they take standards for the core OS of everything? Microsoft seems to be it's own standard, which is too bad.
SAILING MISHAP
One, the final standard spec will be loose enough that Windows will already be compliant, so it won't mean anything.
Two, the final standard spec will be Microsoft's Window-centric implementation of a secure system (existing windows systems may not be compliant, but future ones would be). No non-Windows system would be able to meet the standard without extensive licensing fees being paid to Microsoft to license the technologies needed.
Three, the final standard spec will be sensible, and Microsoft will ignore it. With the mainstream desktop environment paying no regard to the specification, the spec fails to acquire the widespread adoption necessary to become a real standard.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It has no network adapter (modem or otherwise) and no input devices (as in all the ports ps/2 com et cetra have been melted shut or broken off) It has no hard drive, just rom, and It's in a chest rigged to explode somewhere at the bottom of the north atlantic! I extend an invite to all the hackers/crackers to try to by pass it!
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
I used to work tech support for a large software company that develops OSes (who could that be?) and I learned customers are VERY concerned about security. They often asked questions like 'Should I be installing security updates? / Can someone get into my computer? / etc.' This same company had 1000 tech support calls queued the day MSBlaster hit. If one product is sporting a Certification sticker and another is not, the one sporting the sticker will have a bit more weight with the consumer.
This is even more true if they are one of the many thousands who had to call tech support to find out what the hell was wrong with their system.
This is typical of so many kiddies these days: "I want everything for free, even if it's something I will never need/use/understand".
Many products that are the result of the work of many people - like cars, toasters, and yes, even documents - cost money to produce. Learn to recognize which items are worth the amount on the price tag, and purchase accordingly.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
All you need is an ARM, firmware in FLASH (so it can be upgraded when it is inevitably cracked), a PCI interface and the 10/100 guts - not substantially more than is already on a NIC, although admittedly much more than is on your $4 8139 based card. That would all fit into a chip (a small, low power chip at that), which means it could be incorporated into a laptop.
Why isn't there a more sophistacted watchdog in the motherboard chipset itself? With all those transistors there's no reason they couldn't dedicate an entire ARM or even a 386 core to the task. It doesn't have to prevent intrusions it just has to detect them and then activate some "doomsday" mechanism - like locking out the network port (which can also be on the motherboard chip, as it already is in many) or even just activating a hard reset. Through an on-board NIC it could do statefull packet analysis and it could keep a DENY list right in on-board FLASH.
I set a watchdog to monitor my connection through my firewall. If the outgoing data rate goes over a certain threshold (which would indicate an intrusion and someone mining data from my PC) then it simply hangs up the phone and rotates the autodialer to a different number. This capability requires a custom applet on my desktop and an external router.
Why? As cheap as silicon is these days this capability should be trivial to add right on the motherboard. It's not glamorous and it's not going to work in every case, but it's absolutely going to work in many of the most common cases - including substantially slowing the spread of virii, as an infected machine would instantly become trapped in a boot cycle or just knocked off the network. Yeah, that means every virus infection becomes a DDOS attack - but better for a few hundred machines to get knocked down than a few hundred thousand allowed to roam free for days or even months, eating up gigabytes of bandwidth with useless PING packets.
I wish more in the linux community didn't consider most of this technology such a flashpoint, because this is one area where the Open community has a real opportunity to make a substantial contribution and potentially drive platform design. If an open sourced core could be added to a motherboard chipset and would add only a couple of dollars, and that core would add substantial security to the platform, you have a feature that mom and dad understand and are willing to pay for.
Othrwise we just let Microsoft and AOL do it, and all it adds to the platform is a few bullets about the kneecaps.
I beg to differ. IEEE won't take them down, but it will bug them a bit. It is somewhat like MS being a rampaging bear, Linux being a horde of bunny-rabbits, and IEEE being a bunch of thorny trees.
Linux hits the trees less, but it irritates the bear and prevents it from rears up. Eventually, after the Linux bunnies all mate like crazy, one bunny rabbit is born that is somewhat like the bunny in Monty Python's The Search for the Holy Grail. The point here is to mate Linux distros with each other until the perfect bunny emerges.
This is a software, not hardware issue. The ACM would be a more appropriate oversight group for this.
Um, yes, perhaps.
... and laugh or weep to taste. (I have this phone which works in 199 countries of the world and doesn't work in one, which is ... guess which? Likewise there's just one county in the world which uses strange paper sizes ... just one country which is so wedded to Imperial units that it crashes spacecraft in preference to following international standards ... and so on and so on ...)
Remember the reaction of the average American to an international standard is to denounce it as a communist plot, particularly if one of the European standards bodies takes an interest (or even ISO, which most Americans regard as European and therefore communist).
If you want an example of how well Americans make good use of international standards you just have to look at their mobile phone system
Now, if most operating system manufacturers were European and Japanese this would be a good idea, because they'd be likely to follow any new international standard. But it happens to be a fact of life that many operating systems are produced or contributed to by Americans, so any such idea is dead in the water before it gets off the ground.
As long as there are people creating software, there will always be security bugs in the operating system. You just can't go over millions of lines of code and spot every bug that can result in a security breach - especially if two portions of code combined are the reason for the breach (those two pieces of code can be hundreds of thousands of lines of code apart). I predict that they'll certify an operating system secure... and then the next day a security alert will be announced for it. Microsoft has come a long way from their old operating systems - Windows Server 2003 is much more secure, but no operating system will ever be 100% secure as long as there are hackers out there to test every possible vulnerability... and the fact that there are administrators out there that may not secure the OS down and make stupid configuration errors.
You just can't go over millions of lines of code and spot every bug that can result in a security breach
That's why really secure OSes don't have millions of lines of security-critical code.
Oh yeah... remember the RPC implementation that Microsoft chose for RPC? IEEE 666
IEEE is responsible for a LARGE number of the computer-related standards out there. They are not just "someone" that puts out a standard. IEEE is probably the largest organization of computer and electronic-related people anywhere.
Of course anybody can ignore a standard, but if the largest organization in the world in this industry goes one way, do you really want to go the other way?
Erioll
This is a slap in the face of Microsoft. But obviously Microsoft will be solicited for input.
Unfortunately, I see one (or both) of two things happening:
1) "This standard will enable mass production of a class of operating systems that meet
the minimum expectations of consumers for security and general reliability by establishing
a floor for these characteristics,"
MS will attempt to set the "floor" to be barely above its current standard for security and reliability.
2) Microsoft will drag the whole thing down some "Trusted Computing" DRM rathole.
Well, with lines like " just as they understand that homosexuality is fun," I believe it's the work of a bored fucktard and should therefore be modded down as either OffTopic or even Flamebait.
Any karma whore can make an AC request to "Mod Parent Up!". Idiots and non-article-reading morons should not be allowed to moderate.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
When this standard is in place and a company, say, microsoft, releases an operating system that they claim is secure but is not and does not follow the standard accepted for security by the rest of the industry, and its security fails as a result of this noncompliance, could microsoft then be sued for damages?
I can buy a linksys router with basic firewall functionality for $50. I can buy a NIC for $5. That's one helluva jump in price to get less functionality in a low profile case. So what if it says 3com on the box? My whole point is that this stuff doesn't need to be proprietary or expensive - it is only because there's no standard to commoditize the functionality.
That is a very good point, although my answer is the same: the best design approach is to separate applications into security-critical and non-security-critical parts, and minimize the size of the security-critical code. Luckily some people are already doing this.
I don't use a PC, so I've largely ignored Blaster and the other recent viruses/worms/&c, but aren't at least some of them down to Outlook and other insecure apps? If every OS suddenly became 100% secure (if such a thing existed) tomorrow, how many problems would remain?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
More time than I care to recall, a decision has had to be made between the right way and the fast way. The fast way almost always wins, even if it is fragile and error-prone.
Is the computing community willing to give more than lip service to security and reliability? Past history say no.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You have to trust something. That which is trusted has to operate in a way that if it were made to do the wrong things, it would do the wrong things. Trust is the belief that it is not going to the wrong things. That which is not trusted has to be operated in a way that restricts its ability to do wrong things. But you cannot operate everything in the restrictive way because you have to trust the very mechanisms of restriction itself. And that generally means the kernel of the operating system, and the most of the hardware, have to be trusted to do the right things.
But the biggest issue is how do you establish that trust? Are you going to personally inspect every line of source code, and understand what it does? Are you going to inspect the engineering of the CPU and associated hardware that can influence how the CPU operates? Because we generally cannot do this on things as complex as computers or software, we have to establish trust by some proxy. If we know someone, and trust them, who has done all that, then we might trust the system. But there really isn't likely to be very many people around who can do that, and perhaps none at all. So somehow we have aggregate that trust proxy, and conclude on the basis of some combination of information, that something is trustable. But this isn't genuine trust. We cannot be certain that something is truly trustworthy just because someone says it is, or that a combination of others say it is.
Ultimately, we have to accept, and learn to deal with, the fact that trust is imperfect. We have to trust not that something cannot do the wrong thing, but that it is highly unlikely to do the wrong thing, and have contingency plans to be able to deal with it doing the wrong thing, which includes knowing that it did the wrong thing (it might try to hide that fact from you). The level we have to use to establish that trust will thus depend on the real and potential costs of the contingency (such as cleaning up the mess it leaves behind, restoring data, etc).
In order to reduce your contingency costs, you have to establish a greater criteria of trust. But the trust has a cost as well (for example hiring several computer scientists to inspect and analyze the code, as well as performing background checks on them to make sure they have no other motives, and even this has costs). It's all a balancing act. And where the optimal balance is will depend on many factors. As your contingency costs increase (a military has very high contingency costs, as it could mean losing to an opponent), your level of trust establishment needs to increase as well.
A standard for security has to address the fact that trust is imperfect, and that different entities will have different contingency costs. So it has to be flexible over a wide range of optimal levels of trust. If it is too rigid, it cannot be universally adopted, and will end up not being in common use (though it might find a niche use in areas matching its trust metrics). Those who are developing such a standard will at the very least need to state up front what the goal is. Is this something they expect to be usable in both a military high command setting, and in a casual home user setting? Unfortunately, I see none of this in the base document at the BOSS working group site.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars