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Microsoft Security Whitepaper
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft last week published a document on its Web site that describes how the company manages security on its own 300,000 node corporate network. The document is basically a dry discussion of IT risk management strategy, with lots of references to 'asset classes' and 'stakeholders,' and about five, nearly identical 'cycle of life' type diagrams showing how one risk management strategy leads to the next and so on, in a never-ending process. However, the document does open a window on how the biggest, richest software company in the world does security: from the deployment of 65,000 smart cards (let's see, at $50 a piece, that comes to....?), to MS's admission that 'there is a medium to high probability that within the next year, a successful attack will occur that could compromise the High Value and/or Highest Value data class.' According to the document, that includes things such as source code or human resources data."
Perhaps you forgot about the compromise of kernel development servers and the Debian website?
Microsoft's concerns regarding source code are likely less about preventing someone from SEEING it (you can pay them money to look at code) and more about modifiying it.
Open Source is a wonderful thing -- but it isn't a silver bullet. Sophisticated programmers with access to any source repository, open or closed can create all sorts of havoc.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
To make a long story short, this document is an "Emperor's New Clothes"-style piece of PHB-speak/business-speak/market-speak/PR-speak that nobody really understands, but every business IT strategist that reads it will pretend that its meaning is very profound, like the emperor pretends to see his nonexistant clothes, to avoid appearing stupid to colleagues.
Microsoft. Where do you want to go today?
This is the same company that said, under oath, that reveling the windows source code would harm the National Security of the United States, then they gave the source code to China.
Isn't that perjury?
Did any of the idiots commenting on this story with sophmoric (hehe, M$ security sUx045!) even start to read the Whitepaper?
If they did, they would probaly notice that the paper describes a methodology of security management, including dealing with operating system & application security issues.
Information security is more reliant on process than using x product or y product. If you have established methods to classify what needs protection, identify vulnerabilities & intrusions and rectify the situation, you have a secure IT shop.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
from the deployment of 65,000 smart cards (let's see, at $50 a piece, that comes to....?)
;)
Either way, the implicit statement's invalid (that buying 65,000 x $n is wasteful).
Microsoft has, what, $40 billion in cash floating around? I work for a company that is lucky to have $40 million in cash floating around - does that make 65 smart cards wasteful? If your company has $4m, are 6.5 smart cards wasteful? If you have under a half a million in readily available assets, should you not use smart cards at all?
It's a simple scale thing. Microsoft is stupidly large when compared to most other companies. 65,000 of anything sounds like a big number, and it is. Still, relative to the size of their business, it's bordering on frugal, not wasteful.
See, I have so much Karma I can even occasionally support Microsoft on something.
The whitepaper simply presents the dirty little secret that highly technical IT people have always known -- there is no such thing as a totally "secure" system.
Sophisticated hackers identify exploits before they get mentioned on bugtraq and before a fix or patch is even looked at. Those people are a big threat to a company like Microsoft.
Instead of being horrified at Microsoft, you should be pleased. They are taking a remarkably straightforward tack by highlighting the industry's dirty little secret. That is an about face from typical Microsoft FUD.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
It amazes me that most of you really can't be constructive at all any time 'security' and 'microsoft' are uttered together.
What's more, the moderators encourage this lack of constructive talk by modding up things purely because they decry microsoft. How many days in a row are we going to hear the same old tired MS jokes?
Just because you run linux/bsd doesn't mean you're safe. Hell, by being connected to the internet at all you're at risk. Anyone with enough time, education and willingness to exploit you is going to eventually find a way in.
Anyone running any operating system can be attacked and comprimized. Security is only as good as the people who maintain the machines. You people sometimes seem to forget that despite MS's faults, they do employ some of the best and brightest in the world. I imagine some of you may not believe that, but I do.
Personally, I think that if linux were a home desktop platform that had enough popularity to be a significant enough player in that market you'd be seeing a whole lot more hackers focusing specificly on linux. Realisticly, what is the point of trying to exploit linux? Why exploit the little guy when you can go after the big fish? Especially when the majority of people running the big fish's stuff couldn't secure _any_ box to begin with, regardless of what it was running.
Same thing with the mac. I love it when macos users say "I never get viruses/worms!" well, who would write a virus/worm for such a miniscule percentage of computer users? The whole point of a virus/worm is to propigate, and if you don't have the userbase for it to propigate well, what's the point?
I apologise if I've offended people here, but I really felt this needed to be said. This persistant catscrap between linux and windows users doesn't help anything, or anyone.
Linux/BSD ARE good operating system
MacOS/OSX ARE good operating systems
Windows IS a good operating system
and they ALL have faults.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Where does the $50 figure come from?
I can't answer that, but I can tell you what smart cards cost.
The costs depend heavily on both volume and capabilities. At the low end, there are cards available in large volumes for substantially less than $1. At the high end, programmable cards with both contact and RF capability, lots of fancy printing, etc., plus some loaded and personalized applications can be up to $10, in large volumes, and over $50 each in developer quantities.
So, in general, $50 each for 65,000 cards is ludicrous.
However, in this case the figure may actually be accurate. The numbers I mention apply to "stock" cards, where the R&D investment is spread over hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of cards.
Microsoft, however, may very well have used Windows for Smart Cards cards, from their brief flirtation with the smart card business. These cards are based on a 32-bit processor from Atmel, which is itself significantly more expensive than many of the more common cores. In addition, the cards run a custom smart card operating system developed by Microsoft. They're high-end programmable cards that interpret (what else?) Visual Basic bytecodes (eeeeewww).
So the cost of these specialized, low-volume chips, plus the cost of developing a smart card operating system, building tools to construct, load and manage applications, implementing the card applications, implementing the workstation and server software, implementing the key management systems, issuance systems, etc... Yeah, $3.25M is not only believable, it's impossibly low.
I suspect that the $50 per card figure is accurate, but that it includes more than just the cost of the cards.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
And don't you forget that. Microsoft DOES have people with considerable technical skill and knowledge. I'm guessing that the probability of a security breach was calculated by the people who know what they're doing.
The problem is that you don't get to be the biggest software company in the world without selling products. (And Microsoft is arguably the most important software company - although I think overall Linux is more important in it's potential as an equalizer - there is no one single Linux company).
Selling products implies marketing. This is where it goes wrong. The second that product development is driven by marketing telling customers what features they want - things explode. I mean, really - half the crap in Windows and Office was never wanted by customers in the first place.
I'd still prefer to be using BeOS (I loved 5.0, but lack of support for new hardware meant I had to move on), so Windows 2000 is a pretty good compromise for my needs.
Nobody uses Microsoft technology like Microsoft. Unfortuately, nobody uses Microsoft technology like Microsoft.
The reason? Only Microsoft has the source code and "really understands" Windows. Everybody elses corporate networks running Windows are dogshit -- but Microsoft really does just use the crap the way they tell you to use it, and it works wonderfully. Unfortunately, they are the *only* example of such a user on the planet!