Slashdot Mirror
Trustworthy Computing
Anonymous Coward writes "This is a first: the Internet Storm Center is recommending trustworthy computing. They want you to trust that the unofficial patch for the Windows Metafile Volunerability that is currently being exploited by an IM worm. No patch from Microsoft at this time, and the exploit is arranged in such a manner that it cannot be detected by most intrusion detection systems (the snort rule will peg the CPU on your router) nor filtered by packet-inspecting firewalls (it spans two or more ethernet frames). Not really a whole lot of choice about this one."
As it says in the article, some people in the corporate world won't do it if the patch didn't come from MS. It's sad, really. If I had an exploitable machine around, I would trust their patch.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
It'd be nice to have a computer that I can use the patch on.. Maybe I can Wine it?
Any grammatical or spelling errors above are for comic effect, and do not signify imperfection in the writer.
Sometimes, I really start to think that security is so poor in commercial operating systems, because they want to use protection from all these exploits as the bait to get us into the "trusted computing" cage.
Trusted computing is a farce, because the one thing that *isn't* trusted, is the user.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
FTA:
You cannot wait for the official MS patch, you cannot block this one at the border, and you cannot leave your systems unprotected.
This has always been the case with Windows, if I'm not mistaken.
How many late nights, allnighters, and missed holidays have you experienced, thanks to things like ILOVEYOU and Slammer? How many times have you had to clean up the mess created by Microsoft's shitty, unsecure software?
Clearly Microsoft wasn't interested in calling people in over the holidays to whip up a patch for this critical vulnerability-- something that you could go in a couple hours early tomorrow and roll out to the PCs in your organization. They're going to let you suffer. And why should they care? They've already got the money of the company you work for. People are going to return from their holiday vacations tomorrow, load the wrong web page in IE, and get pwned. And you'll be left to clean up the mess. Again. Better pack an extra sandwich with your lunch tomorrow, because you probably won't be getting out at 5.
Windows have produced a datatype that allows people to place executable code into image files? How can they call themselves programmers. Seriously whoever engineered the WMF format should be ashamed.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
Today was supposed to be my fifth vacation day this christmas.
I've had two; and decided to come in to the office today to make sure we were patched up against the exploit.
Yes, I took the plunge.
The patch is now deployed in our small office (30 windows PCs atm); and so far so good.
Would I have felt safer if the sourcecode was released? Perhaps.
That said, I'd rather take the ISC's word on the fix than have a guaranteed hell within a couple of days.
The dedication of the people involved with ISC, as well as that of Mr. Guilfanov brightened my start of the new year.
Kudos, people.
No flamebait intended, but that's a typical sensationalist misleading Slashdot headline. Noone's advocating "trusted computing" or similar initiatives here; all they do is saying "here's an unofficial fix, and we'd like to recommend even though it *is* unofficial, considering the seriousness of the vulnerability and also considering it was written by a reputable windows expert, namely Ilfak Guilfanov (author of IDA Pro)".
And for that matter, there's no mention of "the Snort rules will hog your router's CPU", either - that's total rubbish, probably made up by the article submitter. And it slipped, too, since the Slashdot "editors" never care to actually edit stories before they publish them.
Shame on you, Hemos!
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Of course they don't know what a DLL is. Windows has been marketed as a consumer OS, it was designed to be used by people without a clue. By default you can't even see the DLLs. People shouldn't need to have IT qualifications to use a computer, it should be secure enough for them to use it. What you are suggesting (to use a car metaphor and probably get flamed for it) is that people should need to strip and reassemble an engine to get a drivers liscence.
99 bottles of beer in 175 characte
FTFA
.WMF images?
* Should I just block all
This may help, but it is not sufficient. WMF files are recognized by a special header and the extension is not needed. The files could arrive using any extension, or embeded in Word or other documents.
I believe this is because _any_ image is vulnerable to infection. Because Microsoft checks the header for every image file and treats it as WMF if the header matches, all jpegs, gifs, and pngs are potential vectors for the disease. A router that has to inspect _every_ image that is surfed by users behind it will immediately turn into a bottleneck.
A couple of the other comments here seem to miss this very important point:
It's not just files with ".wmf" at the end. Any image file will get unwrapped by Microsoft code and the callback will get executed. Woof.
They want you to trust that the unofficial patch for the Windows Metafile Volunerability that is currently being exploited by an IM worm.
:|.
OK, tell me how that sentence is supposed to make sense. Come on
Arrrrrrr
..that if we all were running "trustworthy" computers, this problem would be much, much worse than it is now. Imagine that now instead of having a patch that's already been made by someone else while we sit and wait for Microsoft to get off their asses, we now have to wait on Microsoft, who still hasn't shown up.
Instead of having *some* machines patched, we'd have none. This late after the exploit has been released, and a zero-day attack has happened, we'd see no respite.
If you try to argue that Trustworthy computers wouldn't allow this to be exploited, what if the trustworthy compontent itself was exploited? As the Xbox and soon the Xbox 360 have shown, the more complex the hardware, the more complicated the bugs are. Microsoft's betting that the hardware complexity can outgrow the programmer's abilities to crack it, but if there's any truth in the world, it's that if it can be engineered, it can be destroyed. So imagine if this virus was actually signed by Microsoft through the exploit. How would this look for their company? How can you save face from a disaster like that?
No, trusted computers aren't the answer, just more secure computers, with better code. And the fact of the matter is, the more eyes that are on the code, the better it is, and that's why Open Source will always succeed. No amount of cryptography will help you if there's a hole in your crypto system.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
So we have to explain the joke again:
The title comes from the original note in the Handler's Diary. You see, it creates a mental tension between "Trustworth Computing", the lack of an official patch and ISC's "Please, trust us". It makes some readers smile.
Think users are bad in the corporate sector? Wait until everyone gets back to the college dorms after winter break with their completely unpatched computers. And all the people who have new computers that they got over the holidays. It wouldn't matter if Microsoft had patched it last week, I guarantee that the student users who need it won't have it.
Speaking as a poor sap who has to fix these computers, I have one thing to say: "Thanks for the easy money". And a heads up to all you dorm technicians, get ready to start burning virus CDs.
From http://www.viruslist.com/en/weblog?discuss=1768925 30&return=1:
"... Going back to the wmf vulnerability itself, we see number of sites mention that shimgvw.dll is the vulnerable file. This doesn't seem correct as it's possible to exploit a system on which shimgvw.dll has been unregistered and deleted. The vulnerability seems to be in gdi32.dll... "
I don't know who's more of an idiot -- the submitter or the "editor" who accepted this turd of an article summary.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
It's probably a hard problem to patch. From what I've gathered, this is a feature of WMFs, not a bug. They were designed before people even knew what the Internet was. WMFs, apparently, have the ability to specify code to be run on a failure to render. So the bad guys give you a bad WMF file, cleverly renamed as JPG, and stick it in an ad banner. You browse a site (with any browser), Windows fails to render the WMF (which it will recognize even if the filename says JPG), runs the specified failure code, and you're hacked. That fast.
Changing code that's this deeply buried in Windows is risky. The interpreter for WMF is one of the remnants of code left over from single-user computers, and they'll have to test changes very thoroughly. They're GOING to break things with this patch, because they're removing a designed-in feature. They're probably working feverishly to figure out how to minimize the damage, but some damage is inevitable. And the problem could be far worse than it appears; that DLL could be riddled with problems. It may not have been audited in many years.
This is yet another example of how you can't retrofit security; the first Windows versions were designed when security wasn't even an issue, when the Internet was barely a twinkle in Al Gore's eye. There's a mountain of code that was written just to work, not to worry about being handed malicious data. If a user passed bad values to a system call and it crashed, oh well. It was their fault for doing it. It's not like they had anything to gain from it, after all. They owned the computer. Why on earth would the computer need to protect itself from its owner?
With the advent of the Net, Microsoft decided to both stay backward-compatible and extend what they had onto the Internet. And their focus for many years was on new features, not security. Essentially every security person at the time warned them -- stridently -- against the choices they were making. It was obviously going to be a trainwreck. This is just the latest in that ongoing collision between a single-user operating system and exposure to every computer in the world.
This particular exploit is BY FAR the worst one yet...even very competent administrators, doing everything exactly as they should, can get nailed by this one. As bad as this is, though, it's not like they're going to stop here.
Trying to retrofit security onto the Win3.1/Win95 model is like trying to use scotch tape to make cheesecloth waterproof. No matter how much tape you use, even if it's a lot more tape than cloth, it will ALWAYS leak. It might hold water for a bit, but leaks will constantly spring up. They've added tremendous functionality in the NT/2k/XP kernels which can limit what users can do and limit the possible scope of compromises, but many many programs (especially games) require administrator privs just to run. So most people run as Administrator even though they shouldn't. And that makes hacks like this one very easy and *extremely* damaging.
Hopefully Microsoft will get a patch out fast.... they certainly must understand how overwhelmingly bad this problem is. The fact that they're reacting slowly is likely an indication that it's hard to fix.
With stuff like this in their closet, one surely can understand at least to some extent why they advocate closed source. The feature in question is likely well documented, and thus reasonably "open", but the idea of what might happen if crackers get access to all the non-safe zombie code that dates from their pre-history truly must horrify them.
Linux user since early January 1992.
In some DRM scenarios, the TPM chip is also used to prove to your software that the OS has not been modified. Unless you have the skills to hack that software, your bought and paid for TPM programs may refuse to work any longer.
;)
A much tougher case would be the "rely on others" programs where you have to prove to an external instance that your system has not been hacked. Take the "death to game cheaters" implementations as an example:
Want to fix your vulnerable Windows with a non-official patch?
World Of Warcraft II won't let you play anymore
I also don't believe this is temporary. Except in the sense that TPM might be (hopefully!) a colossal failure in the market. And considering the current vulnerability, this looks like more than a slight theoretical risk to me.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The fix can be applied in the automatic mode using the following command line:
/VERYSILENT /SUPPRESSMSGBOXES
/LOG="file" switch can be added to the command line to create a log file.
wmffix_hexblog13.exe
These switches do not suppress dialog boxes about installation errors.
The
[from http://www.hexblog.com/2005/12/wmf_vuln.html ]
There's a MSI version in the works as well.
I work for a very small company, probably typical of thousands of other very small companies. Our company is too small to afford a full-time IT staff; I'm the entire IT department, and it's a very small part of my job. I'm the IT guru because I'm the only one there who knows a DLL from a dungheap.
I have formal training in computers, but so long ago that the field was still called EDP and time-sharing was a big deal. I've spent years learning what I know about Windows and Windows networks, in my spare time. It would take me years more to reach a similar level of expertise with a brand-new OS. And until I reached that level, we'd be more vulnerable than with Windows.
My company has about a dozen computers, including a single domain server with no backup server. We have about $60,000 invested in software (other than OS's) that will only run under Windows. We have no hardware to set up a test server, no money (or time) to spend on unsuccessful experiments.
The only person in our company who has ever used Linux is our 21-year-old secretary. We have one Unix machine, which I despise, because its desktop GUI is primitive and its command interface makes MS-DOS look well-designed and intuitive.
I rarely get to spend more than two or three hours a week on network maintenance, security monitoring, and research combined. If I hadn't automated them I wouldn't have time to do file backups some weeks. I have no time to spend trying to research the seventeen hundred different distros of Linux available, or whether Wine will support our COM+-dependent network applications--or whether the WMF exploit still applies if we run Windows applications on Linux.
We can't afford to have a regular support contract with a local computer-specialist firm. That's assuming we could even find someone in town we can trust--the overpriced morons who did our last batch of installations gave us a two-NIC server with only one NIC enabled (so no firewall), and set up user workstations with the Administrator password left blank!
I loathe Microsoft, and have since I first saw Windows 3.11. But what possible reason do I have for trusting the claims of Red Hat or Debian more? What research I can do is hardly reassuring. Remember Saturday's story here: researchers found 812 flaws in the Windows operating system, 2,328 problems in various versions of the Unix/Linux operating systems (Mac included)?
I didn't choose Windows; I inherited it and have no resources to replace it. My company didn't really choose Windows; it was forced on us by the marketplace. Be realistic! My wife just bought an Apple, and the first thing she installed on it was the OS-X version of MS Office, necessary for compatibility with her company.
Maybe in another ten years Linux will be enough of a force that applications will be written for cross-compatibility, but little companies like mine can't wait that long. We have to use what we can, right now.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread regarding these two terms. It isn't that surprising, since they are both purposely misleading, but still.
// oskar
"Trustworthy computing" is Microsoft's bullshit name for their so-called initiative to start taking security seriously. It was under this banner that Bill sent all his coders to secure coding seminars so they could learn what a buffer overflow is. The article is ironic in its title: that Microsoft have failed to find such a glaring issue as a native image format that purposely allows images to execute arbitrary code, and that they have not offered a patch even now when exploits are in the wild since almost a week, shows how trustworthy they really are.
"Trusted computing", on the other hand, is the bullshit name for a nefarious scheme involving hardware and software whereby control over PCs should be taken out of the hands of their owners, and given to the software and hardware vendors. This is sometimes claimed to be about security, but is actually motivated by DRM and DRM only (the name is short for "Trusted Client Computing" and comes from the ability of DRM vendors to trust that your computer, the client, will obey their directions).
The people pushing "trusted computing" are actually not so much Microsoft as Intel and IBM: Microsoft completely support the concept of trying to put the freely programmable computer back in the bottle, but they have had their own ideas about implementation (their version was first called "Palladium", but when they realized that it is bad to have a recognizable name for something customers actually don't want it was renamed "Next Generation Secure Computing Base" and after that it was renamed to nothing at all so they can be snuck into the coming versions of Windows without people noticing.)
The WMF file is really a list of Windows drawing functions to call, along with their parameters.
Guess what else uses this.
There are in-memory and on-disk WMF files. Some are used by apps for repainting the screen. Some are used by apps for printing; Windows printing is based on the WMF. You want error handling with printing, right?
Now, I'm not saying how to fix this unless Microsoft shares some cold hard cash with me, but there are reasonable solutions. It's just not as simple as patching out the feature.
F-Secure has more on it: http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/#00000761
Windows Metafiles are a file representation of drawing commands. They are more flexible than bitmaps and get used quite a lot in things like for caching images of every OLE object embedded inside a MS word or powerpoint document. There just happens to be one operation to set a callback when a printing aborts which can be saved to a WMF file, which, when followed by something to abort the rendering, lets you jump to the nominated location.
This back door is built into windows from version 3.0 onwards. Any app that displays WMF images from untrusted sources (lotus notes, maybe msword, even google desktop search) is vulnerable. This is potentially code red for the desktop.
I have the patch on all my systems, the author works for IDA, the debugger tool, and is well respected. I dont care whether IT central will push it out or not; I think they ought to before the back to work/school event causes major worm attacks using it. It will be pretty embarrassing for microsoft though -a third-party emergency fix for windows, in the same year that Vista, "Windows Secured" is due to ship.
I'm the author of the hotfix and one could expect me to say 'yes, please go ahead and install it on your corporate network with thousands of machines'.
But I won't say that.
First of all deploying any software on a large network is a serious task. It should be carefully planned and performed with the correct (read: responsible) approach.
The hotfix must be tested on as many machines as possible. Possible negative consequences must be determined and decided upon if they are acceptable or not.
In short, more rigorous testing is required.
-------
Ilfak Guilfanov, the author of the hotfix
As to your contention that microsoft gets a pass because nobody thought of security back "then", I'll take "then" to be the 10 years immediately prior to the release of Windows 3.0. Multi-user PCs were a well-known concept to every student who's done work in the general-population 'computer lab'. Remember Banyan, Appletalk, Netware (you mentioned it)? They may not have been Microsoft products, but they were ubiquitous. Unix workstations (Apollo, Sun, Microvax, etc.) were in very common use among engineers and product designers, and they all were networked. (of course, most unixes and VMS versions were very hackable, but that was part of the fun)
What's more, there were thousands of anti-mal-ware software products for MS-DOS, some samples here. The virus vector was BBS downloads and floppy disks rather than open port attacks or browser overruns, but the concept of attacking PCs was already well known. So, no, Microsoft does not "get a pass" for a security problem that nobody could have predicted (sarcasm). They made conscious choices to de-emphasize and ignore security in order to maintain market share at all costs. The economics proved them correct, so far, but they still should carry the blame for those choices.
Remain calm! All is well!