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No Backdoor in Vista
mytrip wrote to mention a C|Net article stating that Vista will not have a security backdoor after all. From the article: "'The suggestion is that we are working with governments to create a back door so that they can always access BitLocker-encrypted data,' Niels Ferguson, a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft, wrote Thursday on a corporate blog. 'Over my dead body,' he wrote in his post titled Back-door nonsense."
I suspect the NSA, (who I seem to recall left a few stray tags lying around in a previous version of Windows' code), would look at you dead-pan and agree.
-FL
We have no reason to believe this claim -- doubly
so given that Microsoft has lied repeatedly in the past.
So back it up. Prove it. PUBLISH THE SOURCE.
Failure to publish the source will be considered
an explicit admission by Microsoft that this claim
is exactly what it appears to be: just another lie.
"The suggestion is that we are working with governments to create a back door so that they can always access BitLocker-encrypted data,' Niels Ferguson, a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft, wrote Thursday on a corporate blog. 'Over my dead body,' he wrote in his post titled Back-door nonsense."
I think we would be reading about his dead body if he came out and admitted that there were backdoors being put into Vista.
'Over my dead body,' he wrote
The problem with closed software is that we have to take his word for it.
So it's a secret backdoor. :-)
Geek runner, motorcyclist and professional know-it-all
He's crazy if thinks big corporations would even think twice of doing something over the dead body of one of their workers.
Corporations might think twice, but governments wouldn't.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
I'd even be willing to bet that the new RSS feed being built into the OS at a low level will provide lots of ways into the Bitlocker.
*rolls on the floor, laughing and scaring the cat*
Jeez, thanks for a good laugh on a Saturday morning. This really ought to be nominated for a Slashdot stupidity hall of fame award.
Go somewhere random
If there actually where a backdoor in vista, would MS admit it? Probably not.
Aside from the obvious "what about buffer overruns?" questions, aimed at the usually poor competence Microsoft shows in writing code, there's also "what about cryptographic strength?" question -- maybe the NSA already has a simple and fast way to break whatever encryption BitLocker will end up using.
And, of course, there may well be several people working at Microsoft who actually work for the NSA or MI-6 or the FSB. (I'd be astonished if there weren't at least a few such people on the Microsoft payroll.) Those people may well do things as described in Reflections on Trusting Trust, without letting their superiors know.
At least with OSS... oh wait... I still have to take a developer's word for it.
Are you trolling?
Obviously, if you had the necessary skills you could audit the code yourself.
Alternatively you could pay someone to audit it for you; or just wait for someone else to blow the whistle.
The point is that it is much harder to hide malicious code when the source is available.
The point is that it is much harder to hide malicious code when the source is available.
My point is that it's beyond unrealistic to think that an average person has any way of auditing code, whether it's going through millions of lines themselves, or hiring an extremely expensive hacker to do the same thing. The end result is the same: it's impossible to know what's in either closed or open source code for 99.999% of the population. So, it comes down to a question of who do you trust: college kids who have nothing at stake, or companies that have everything at stake?
I don't respond to AC's.
But with OSS it's legal to check...for those who care.
So, it comes down to a question of who do you trust: college kids who have nothing at stake, or companies that have everything at stake?
I find those with nothing at stake to be a little less biased and easier to trust. The company with everything at stake will do what it takes to protect their interests.
What?
True, but you are wrongfully assuming that _everybody_ has to audit their code so they can trust it. It only takes one backdoor to be found by one paranoid security expert to scare people away. So more to the point, you are weighing these two:
1)microsoft risking its 'good reputation in security' that accounts for a big percentage in why people buy microsoft (lol).
2)Open source risking its reputation but at the same time showing everybody through source code exactly how the system works. Even letting them alter the code if it does not work the way they want it to.
IMHO even if some asshat put a backdoor in OOS:
1)someone knowledgable enough would find it.
2)this same person could distribute a patch or a seperate version without the intended security risk so people can carry on without further drawbacks
3)a fork of the orginal project will take place and new 'trustworthy' developments would 'take over'/continue where the previous ones left off. And the previous developers would be stigmatized for life.
While OSS isn't a silver bullet (you can find the backdoor relatively quick, but the damage would still be done short term), I'm guessing OSS is more 'trustworthy' than closed source. You would have a point though if we where talking about a closed source company without the marketing power of microsoft though... But even then...
The problem is transparency.
Would you stake your business or for that matter, you life (as is the case in some regions of the world) on this assumption? Since there is no transparency in Microsoft products, you simply have to take their word for it.
I thought the golden rule of security was that any viable security mechanism should tolerate public scrutiny. Knowing how the software works should not work against the devised scheme itself.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
2) You're wrong to state that open source is just about college students and not companies. There are many many companies with an interest in Linux being secure.
3) Why do you assume a company would be trustworthy? Having something to lose makes them vulnerable to government pressure. Look how fast all the search engines caved in to China.
IPMI is very powerful. An IPMI session starts with a Presence ping Any machine with IPMI hardware should answer a "presence ping" on UDP port 663. This identifies an IPMI-capable machine, and returns some vendor info. Anyone can send this. This should work even if the machine is "turned off", as long as it has standby power and is on a LAN.
Then, there's a challenge-response authentication sequence. More on this later.
Once you're in, here are some of the things you can do:
There's more. Much more. Basically, you can remotely take over the machine, turn it on, inventory the hardware, load an operating system, boot it up, and talk to it.
IPMI's back channel can do more than this. With some help from the operating system (and yes, it's supported in Windows) you can do more remote administration functions. This is great for administering your data center remotely. But it has darker implications.
Supposedly, most machines are shipped with IPMI mostly turned off, unavailable until a program is run on the machine to load in the keys that enable it. Supposedly.
Thus, all it takes for IPMI to be a "backdoor" is for a set of secret challenge/response keys to be preloaded into the IPMI chip. There's no way to read those keys. Short of taking the chip apart, gate by gate, there's no way to tell if there's a backdoor in there. Or a set of keys might be loaded by the system integrator before shipping the system. You can't tell. So that's where to put a backdoor, where no one can find it.
There's an open source, OpenIPMI, for sending IPMI commands on Sourceforge. Send "Presence pings" to the machines you have and see if they answer.
Vista will ALWAYS have a backdoor. This the showcase product of the richest man in the world. His and his companie's continued prosperity depends on the good graces of governments. And the governments will always demand a back door to spy on their people.
This is the way that the world works. MS will always deny that there is a backdoor. But it will always be there. If you don't believe it, go to China or any other crypto-fascist dictatorship with advanced technology. Start sending e-mails to foreign websites about subjects like democracy and freedom in general. Request information about local massacres of protesters in freedom demonstrations. Be sure to use encoded with Microsoft's bundled encryption. See how long it takes for the local secret police to arrest you. A week, a month?
Don't gamble your life and freedom on a sucker's bet. Microsoft will always cooperate with local authorities to ensure that Vista will not shield political dissidents. The only people who can be assured that their correspondence actually is private will be Microsoft employees. This is a trade-off that giant monopolistic global corporations always make with the totaltarian governments in the countries that they operate. Regardless of how much they deny it, Microsoft will act no differently.
Count on it.