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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."
going to die soon? (nothing personal)
I believe that can be arranged...
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
"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.
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.
'Over my dead body,' he wrote
The problem with closed software is that we have to take his word for it.
- Get me Ferguson... tell him we're going hunting. Yes, hunting. With Cheney.
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
'Over my dead body,' he wrote
"Your terms are acceptable" reply the NSA.
So it's a secret backdoor. :-)
Geek runner, motorcyclist and professional know-it-all
... you won't be in the loop if/when it gets compromised.
A quick look at the "Crypto AG" fiasco makes it plain how very much governments want backdoors. "For decades, the US has routinely intercepted and deciphered top secret encrypted messages of 120 countries." Imagine the power some entity would have if it could peek into any Windows system at will - the temptation must be making their toes curl.
Whether or not there is a top-level agreement with top-level spooks it is still unlikely that local lawmen will be allowed to know about it. So what exactly IS Microsoft planning to do when they inevitably get a request to "help" with an encrypted drive?
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Here's what he actually wrote:
Let the government wait a week for someone to find a backdoor, just like the rest of us....
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
strangely silent on the topic of Internet Hearts.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
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.
Dw.
Ad *) Or manually
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.
microsoft operating systems begining with windows 95 have never really needed a backdoor, especially since the front door is left wide open.
But they left out the rest of his quote.
I was told that I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven...
Developers: We can use your help.
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.
... as it is common Microsoft lore that Balmer can be deadly with furniture.
Mind the frickin' laser...
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.