No Backdoor in Vista

Right. by Fantastic+Lad · 2006-03-04 00:48 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

Re:Right. by hey! · 2006-03-04 01:32 · Score: 5, Insightful

I'd be disappointed if NSA ever resorted to anything so crude. NSA is an agency of savants not a mob of freebooting bucaneers. Assasination is so CIA.

NSA surely is well aware of the way that trust can, unintentionally, propagate. Everybody trusts something; if somebody doesn't want to cooperate, you obtain his unwitting cooperating by coopting something he trusts. Does he personally supervise the building of every release and patch? Certainly not. He trusts the release process to carry out his intentions. Even if the individuals involved are not cooptable, they trust their compilers to generate object code that is perfectly isomorphic to their source code. Those who do not trust compilers trust their debuggers, disassemblers and operating system utilities.

Those who do not trust their operating system utilities, and live-boot from randomly chosen operating systems or remove their hard disks and examine them using a hand coded manchine language program on a custom built computer lacking a bios or operating system to be subverted, still trust the network to transfer their object code to the mastering facility, or their optical disk burning software to burn the image accurately. Or they trust the facility to read that data correctly, and to press it as they intended to the distribution media.

Those who trusted none of this and checked the hard disks by hand coded machine code on a hand wired computer without BIOS or operating system probably deserve assasination, but even so this is hardly necessary, since everyone gets patches over the Internet. A simple black bag job to retrieve the signing keys, and nobody can trust anything anymore.

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Re:Right. by Zeinfeld · 2006-03-04 01:51 · Score: 5, Insightful

I think it's much easier for MS to sack him and then change the code.
I know Niels, he certainly would not have any difficulty getting another job. He was pretty well known before he went to Microsoft. He was the cryptographer who worked on Two-Fish with Bruce Schneier. Microsoft has been hiring pretty much all the top security talent they can over the past five years.
Cryptography and data security is pretty much a guild craft. If Niels made such a categoric statement and it turned out to be untrue his personal reputation would be severely damaged. Microsoft can't force him to lie for them and since he works in the Netherlands trying to would be most inadvisable.

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Re:Right. by stinky+wizzleteats · 2006-03-04 04:07 · Score: 3, Insightful

Microsoft can't force him to lie for them and since he works in the Netherlands trying to would be most inadvisable.

Microsoft is large enough and the codebase complicated enough that such a back door could be added without Niels being aware of it.

Why do you think the Netherlands are going to affect Microsoft's behavior? They're convicted criminals in the most powerful nation on Earth. I very much doubt that the Netherlands are going to make them clean up their act. Most of the news I see about European software patents seems to support the idea that MS is operating "business as usual" in Europe.
Re:Right. by hey! · 2006-03-04 04:58 · Score: 2, Insightful

You just need a separate computer

What you left out is you need a separate computer that you trust. But how do you know you can trust it?

Until we evolve to be able to read magnetic domains directly off the platter, everything boils down to believing what your software tells you to be so.

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What else would he say? by mangus_angus · 2006-03-04 00:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

"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.

Re:Prove it. by Loconut1389 · 2006-03-04 00:53 · Score: 3, Insightful

ability to view the supposed source and ability to put said source to use are required. If you can't verify that the source you're looking at is the source used in the binaries you're using, there's zero point. Chances of MS releasing enough source to be able to rebuild aspects of windows- most likely a few steps shy of zero, at least for now.

"Trust me," he said by replicant108 · 2006-03-04 00:54 · Score: 5, Insightful

'Over my dead body,' he wrote

The problem with closed software is that we have to take his word for it.

Re:"Trust me," he said by ezzzD55J · 2006-03-04 00:58 · Score: 2, Insightful

Also, how are we (not that I'd use this stuff) to know he would know if it were (going to be) the case?

Re:Prove it. by ROOK*CA · 2006-03-04 00:59 · Score: 4, Insightful

We have no reason to believe this claim -- doubly so given that Microsoft has lied repeatedly in the past.

I'd be willing to bet that even Microsoft would not be willing to go so far as to create intentional "backdoors" in their encryption to facilitate government (Law Enforcement) access. First off I don't think the government (at least those in the UK and the US) have the power to legally force them into doing it, and secondly if they did it voluntarily one would think the public outcry would be deafening and severly damaging to Microsoft (and it seems that "keeping it quiet" would be nearly impossible).

I generally don't trust the government as far as I can throw them, and I don't trust Microsoft much farther than that, but I think the suggestion that they are colluding in something as nefarious as this is a bit in the Tin Foil Hat realm.

Besides how would they "prove" they aren't doing it? release the source? as if ..... :)

AHA! by der_joachim · 2006-03-04 01:01 · Score: 5, Insightful

So it's a secret backdoor. :-)

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Re:Famous last words by PhxBlue · 2006-03-04 01:23 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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Re:The Unofficial Back Doors into Vista by bheer · 2006-03-04 01:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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Go somewhere random

Would they admit it? by nxsty · 2006-03-04 01:41 · Score: 3, Insightful

If there actually where a backdoor in vista, would MS admit it? Probably not.

... that he knows of. by dprovine · 2006-03-04 01:49 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

Re:You're right! by replicant108 · 2006-03-04 02:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

Re:You're right! by DogDude · 2006-03-04 02:38 · Score: 2, Insightful

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?

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Re:However by cortana · 2006-03-04 02:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

there are heaps of people with access to the source code (ok, maybe not full), such as academic institutions, and infamous examples such as MainSoft, who could prove 'em wrong.

How do they know that the code they are provided with matches the code that we all run?

But then we'd have to take the word of some un1337 student haxer at some institution, who just locked down access to their precious copied jewels because some un1337 student haxer at some instituion proved some M$ guy wrong.

I can't parse this. But if someone did discover a back door in the code that MS provided them with then surely others would be able to reproduce the flaw?

Anyway, aren't there multiple reports of backdoors in PGP from various stages of its life?

Cite please.

Re:Prove it. by sqlrob · 2006-03-04 03:07 · Score: 3, Insightful

First off I don't think the government (at least those in the UK and the US) have the power to legally force them into doing it

Nice government contract you have there. Shame if anything were to happen to it.

Re:You're right! by iminplaya · 2006-03-04 03:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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What?

Main problem still remains,the lack of transpareny by chris_7d0h · 2006-03-04 04:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié

Re:You're right! by timeOday · 2006-03-04 07:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

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?

1) the point isn't for every user to check the code, just for a few people or companies to do it and distribute the checksums. It's not that the open source world trusts anybody in particular, but it's impossible to keep a secret once several people with different interests know it.

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.

The backdoor may be in the hardware by Animats · 2006-03-04 08:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

Intel, HP, Dell, and Toshiba are including the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) in many of their machines. IPMI is a "remote administration" tool embedded in the LAN hardware. It looks at UDP packets (on ports 663 and 664) and performs various commands on the target machine, completely independently of the operating system. Here's the IPMI 2.0 rev 1 specification, a rather long PDF.

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:

Power up the system. Power it down. Force a hard reset. Force a power cycle. Force a phony overtemperature condition (in hopes of getting a clean OS shutdown.).
Disable front panel controls (power off, reset, and standby buttons.) Yes, that's really in the protocol. See section 28.6 of the specification. Remote control can also lock out the keyboard and blank the screen.
Set system boot options Or, what OS do we want to run today? These include useful tools like "bypass user password".

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.

Re:The backdoor may be in the hardware by vogon+jeltz · 2006-03-05 02:19 · Score: 2, Insightful

What a bummer! I've got a tale to tell. We've got a small network of aboout 15 PCs, booting via PXE into diskless workstations. Three of them are Dell Dimensions. For the best part of the last 9 months I've been experiencing strange outages of the ENTIRE network, taking the switches (two Telesyns, qualtiy stuff) to a grinding halt. So someday I moved my butt into the cellar when this happened and started to pull the cat5 cables out of the switch, one by one. I had a laptop attached to the switch and pinged the server. When I pulled the cable of one of the Dells, the network was reanimated! The Dell PC in question was turned OFF!
Stunned, I called Telesyn, they told me to flash the system (which I actually did, well knowing it wouldn't better the situation). I then proceeded to call Dell, which was, of course, a waste of time. They told me to upgrade the Bios from the actual version to the same version. Which I did (I feel like an idiot now). They then told me if I didn't use a Dell switch along with their PCs there'd be no support, guarantee, etc., yadda, yadda.
You may have opened my eyes, thanks ....

Vista will ALWAYS have a backdoor. by Simonetta · 2006-03-04 10:05 · Score: 2, Insightful

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.

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