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Vista Hacking Challenge Answered
debiansid writes "Microsoft's most secure Operating System yet
has been compromised at the Black Hat hacker conference. We all know that Andrew Cushman, Microsoft's director of security outreach invited the Black Hats over to touch and feel Vista in order to showcase the superiority of this OS. Joanna Rutkowska, from Coseinc, a Singapore-based security firm, obliged and showed how it is possible to bypass security measures in Vista that prevents unsigned code from running with the help of a little software she calls the 'Blue Pill.'" To be fair, the hack was possible only when the target is in administrator mode rather than a limited user account.
So if you're a black hat and you've found a new, as yet undiscovered hole in Vista, would you really go running to MS to tell them all about it so they can patch it?
Or would you keep it to yourself in hopes that the final release will still contain the hole so you can pwn millions of new adoptors?
show me the average home user who doesn't runs XP as administrator. Do they think that anything is going to change for Vista?
This article is a little slanted towards, "MS said you can't get into their OP, and black hats said, 'bitch please!'". But really, MS probably expected this, and was hoping that they could learn something from watching a collection of hackers test their system. The more problems that are caught now, the less when it is released.
Microsoft doesn't care about impressing Linux users, they care about releasing something that A LOT of normal users can install and forget about. Every iteration they get more stuff right, and their operating system becomes better (except ME, that sucked dick).
You take it, I don't want it...
The real question is: will elevating oneself to administrator become common practice or not? If admin land stay reserved for the likes of Slashdot, then problems like this will probably be greatly reduced. But that assumes that the difficulty in setting up an admin account isn't worth it for most people.
Haiku for you!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
By default, the true administrator account is hidden and disabled by default. Most people won't even know it's there, and you have to go through a rigmarole to enable it if you really want it (these a how-to guide at http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com [computerworld.com] mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9001970). The "administrator" account that Vista creates by default is actually a standard user that can temporarily elevate to admin privelages on a task-by-task basis. It pops up a dialogue box like http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/winvis ta_ff_uac_13.jpg, letting you press a big button that says 'allow' if you know it's something you initiated (e.g. you're trying to install something). You don't need to logout and relogin.
What's purple and commutes? An Abelian grape.
This is the way it works:
You can either be a limited user or an "administrator". By default in the current beta you're an "administrator".
What this means is that everytime an action is undertaken that actually requires administrative rights, Vista will pop up a dialogue (a la security warnings in Internet Explorer) and make sure you really wanted to do that. If you think this would be annoying (and would just train users to click yes) let me tell you that it was actually worse in Beta1.
There it popped up ALL the time and even if a background task does something that requires it, the entire system would stop and pop up the dialogue. At least now it'll just block and wait for you to notice the new task button and deal with it.
If you're on a limited account, you'll have to run whatever it was you were trying to run with the context menu "Run as admin" item. Then you'll have to type the admin password. Then when the program does something that actually requires the rights, it may or may not pop up the UAC dialogue.
At least MS is putting hoops for us to jump through.
That's because they have to run as a member of the Administrators group in order to do fairly mundane tasks like install software or make use of otherwise-mundane consumer hardware.
;) Perhaps Vista will be another step in the right direction. Or maybe it will be another case of dialog overkill that does nothing for true security. Who knows?
Bingo.
I've tried, I've tried so hard to get my family to run using user-level accounts. It doesn't work. I don't live with them, so at least one needs an account with Admin rights. The others get the password (usually by asking), and then reelevate themselves. They aren't doing it to spite me. When some games won't run without admin, they can't burn CDs, so forth, they will find a way to make it work. Security? What's that? They don't care. If they can't play games, or burn CDs, they don't care about security.
I know it is nice and easy to blame developers. True, they should do better. Heck, the first two release versions of my software didn't run properly as a user under Windows either (be gentle, I didn't have XP then). But if you want developers to behave, it has to cost them if they don't. The admin-by-default situation in Windows is ludicrous. They took a step in the right direction with user accounts in XP, but with the default installation forcing the first user account to be admin, and then not letting you de-admin the account, makes the step almost pointless.
When default users run as an ordinary user with a pretty graphical sudo, and the OS blocks running apps as administrator without some sort of painful confirmation process (eg. whitelist), and developers have access to decent commandline or API sudo and security equivalents, then developers will behave and make damn sure their app runs as an ordinary user.
Legacy apps will break unless some sort of layer is put in to make it look like the app does have arbitrary permissions to do fun stuff like write into its installation directory or the top level of a drive. I've heard Vista does some of this funky stuff (I'd check if the a__holes at Microsoft actually let me get their beta version of Vista- another story), which I hope is true.
Microsoft got themselves into this mess and they have nobody to blame but themselves (despite the way they love to blame third parties for their sloppy OS). They can dig their way out if they choose. It won't be easy, but give them a decade and they'll be where Unix was a decade ago.
Personally I'm not too stressed one way or the other. I don't use Windows unless I absolutely must, and whilst it is a worm-ridden crash-prone security nightmare it does mean there will be work available to clean up the mess. The target market of my software mostly runs on Windows though, so I do have to keep aware of what is going on. It would be nice if they cleaned up their act, as it makes my work easier.
This is about x64 driver signing. In Vista 64, drivers *cannot* run if they are not signed by a corporation who has paid the "VeriSign Tax" *. Even if the administrator requests it, they will not run. This is retarded "security", and it will keep being broken until Microsoft either gives up or forces everyone to have TPM bootup (more likely the latter).
/dev/hda) and overwrite the MBR, then call NtShutdownSystem to reboot. If you take away raw disk access to user mode, then you get more esoteric. Detect when a blank CD or DVD has been inserted. When the user requests to burn it, intercept the write request and burn something else instead. Act like a system crash and reboot after it's done. Most computers are configured by default to boot from CD first.
It infuriates developers, yet doesn't do anything for preventing rootkits, as Joanna has demonstrated. As long as user-mode programs have raw disk access, they will be able to attack whatever they want.
I have a feeling that Microsoft's response to this will be to lock out raw disk access to user mode regardless of privilege. Keep in mind that even SELinux does not do this. All disk utilities would have to be written as signed drivers. The problem here is that developers won't stand for it, and will make signed drivers that grant access again. Then the rootkits can just copy these signed drivers then use them to do the same thing.
Even if Microsoft encrypts the page file or removes the ability for the kernel to page itself out, raw disk access is still an issue. You can always open \Device\Harddisk0\Partition0 (NT's
The real reason for driver signing appears to be DRM. The easiest way to "crack" song DRM is to install a fake audio driver that logs to disk. With the DMCA, it's illegal to make such a driver, and with driver signing, it's impossible to do it anonymously. If you temporarily disable driver signing - which is possible if you press F8 each boot - Vista's Windows Media Player refuses to play protected songs. Gee I wonder why.
By the way, I thought of the same pagefile hack as Joanna on my own and posted it on my weblog in early June. I'm sure Joanna figured it out long before me though.
* There are other root certificate companies that are countersigned, but this is a well-known phrase.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager