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Vista's TCP/IP Promises and Perils
boyko.at.netqos tips us to a new writeup on Vista's TCP/IP stack, which is called Compound TCP/IP (CTCP). From the article: "...security policy will come from a centralized source. When you get your DHCP lease, your computer will report to the stack what OS you're using, what version level, what patches, what anti-virus software that's active — all that kind of stuff. It will have the ability to restrict your network access if you have a down-level machine... We could see a lot of our customers with much higher WAN network utilization because of this new TCP/IP stack... CTCP can be enabled/disabled from the command prompt but there has been no mention of tuning parameters which leads us to ask the question: How are you supposed to configure this setting in Vista?... What worries us... is that Microsoft is basing this on packet round trip time. The round-trip time from the client-side will have the server processing time in it; but the clients aren't likely going to be the running the CTCP at first. If you have a server-to-server backup running, for example, CTCP may think its part of the round-trip time and it'll throw the delay window through the roof..."
So my trojan will be reporting values honored by the DHCP servers. This system is still relying on the information sent by the (possibly infected) machine, so it is not secure in any way.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Article summary:
We haven't used Vista.
We haven't tested the features we're talking about.
We think they're actually probably very good.
We don't know (and nor does anyone) because we haven't tested them.
They could be bad.
They could do nasty stuff to your networks.
But we don't know because we haven't tested anything.
Sounds good in theory though.
And all the MS guys that have ever wrote about it say it works.
We don't think it'll work perfectly first time.
But we don't know because we haven't tested anything at all in any way.
We advise others to test before they make any decision.
Good article. (That was sarcasm. At least I think it was but I haven't tested it myself yet).
But, alas, falls short of implementing the "Evil Bit."
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
apart from providing some "security" measures, is to lock Linux out of the corporate network. As soon as a Longhorn server goes into a network, then Linux boxes will have all sorts of problems. And there won't be any way to legally get around it as Microsoft will have all the required patents to wave in the faces of anyone who attempts to do so.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I don't get it. If you're just going to be querying the OS for information about its configuration (antivirus, patch state, version level, etc.) why don't you just implement it at a higher level? I don't see any reason to bury this sort of stuff down in the network stack. It could just as easily run as an application-level service rather than being built in down on the transport level. (And in fact I know of systems which do this sort of thing running as userspace tools.)
The goal here seems to just be a way to allow corporate networks like WANs to restrict access based on the version of Windows that's running and the security software being implemented on the client. Setting aside how a rootkit would just fake the responses (and I don't believe for a second that there won't be rootkits for Vista once it gets mainstream), why does this have to be in the network stack? It could be easily implemented as part of the higher-level networking services like WINS or Active Directory, as a requirement before the user is allowed access to particular network resources.
This whole concept seems rather flawed, unless there's some large part of it that I'm missing, and it just seems like it's going to require other OSes to rewrite their perfectly good TCP/IP stacks in order to inter-operate with Windows networks. Maybe that's the whole point?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
How are you going to ask the client, when said DHCP client is one of those nifty routers we all own?
/., or even most in the world, directly connect their machines to a network connection anymore. All the broadband connections all go through some sort of router these days, provided by the ISPs themselves.
I don't think anyone on
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I haven't read TFA, but based on blurb it will be horrible.
Compound TCP is not a TCP/IP stack! It's congestion avoidance/recovery algorithm for TCP streams. It's one of many (Vega, Reno, BIC, CUBIC etc. etc.). It's also available for Linux (but was removed from standard kernel some time ago).
Other things mentioned are parts of Network Access Control, which is already deployed in many companies. There are many software and hardware solutions available, Vista isn't special. It becoming must-have in corporate environment, praising Vista for having it is like claiming that DHCP client in OS is innovation.
:wq
"It will have the ability to restrict your network access if you have a down-level machine."
Ehm... and who decides what is a down-level machine?
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
"It will have the ability to restrict your network access if you have a down-level machine..."
Translation: "You WILL upgrade all of your machines to Vista, or Microsoft will artificially degrade their performance." It's called "market development."
Those M$ asshats are actually going to try to sell this as a NAC feature, when it's nothing but another license fee grab. Piss on them: I'm still running several totally stable, bullet-proof web servers on NT4 with 128Mb (albeit behind a good firewall), and I have neither the need nor the intention to "upgrade" them anytime soon (or ever, for that matter).
About the word "if": If bullfrogs had wings, they wouldn't bounce around on their little green butts.
Specifically, something to tell the CTCP stack that you're running the very latest version of everything, so that you don't get penalized by other nodes.
Of course, that would be bad news for everyone else on the network, if in fact your old, unpatched OS (which you are reporting as new and patched to avoid having to upgrade to Vista 2.5.9.396) _is_ infected. But then, that's part of the problem with including features that work AGAINST the person buying/using them.
To sum up: malicious/hijacked computers will report that everything's OK. Computers controlled by savvy users who don't want hassle will report that everything's OK. Computers that really have nothing interesting about them will report that everything's OK. There'll be a thin band of computers that really do have old OS versions but that nobody cares about enough to doctor -- these will report that everything's not OK, until they become an issue and are considered a painful extra cost of MS-based networks. The remaining 90% of all computers will have this feature disabled, thus saving all the bother at a very very low cost in security.
It's not that this feature is evil, it just comes from the wrong mindset. I think MS's misconception that it's good to start from the question 'how can we restrict or coerce customers', rather than 'how can we empower and help customers', is likely to prove permanent.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
People keep saying that your trojan'd box could report false information, but what about a rooted DHCP server (like in a coffee shop, or any area with free WIFI)? You computer would be telling an unknown system its exact patch level. Screw brute force attacks, it would know exactly where you're vulnerable. didn't microsoft learn anything about offering too much information?
By making these changes in the stack you can improve the windowswindows performance while reducing the windowsother performance. It creates an environment which in which it is strongly beneficial to have a windows only network.
Deleted
Microsoft is famous for its "Embrace and Extend" philosophy of locking people into their products by corrupting open standards. This looks to be the same thing once again.
I have to admit, it's been a while since I've read the TCP/IP protocol specs, but I don't remember there being any provisions for communicating things like OS type, version, or patch lists over the TCP/IP headers.
This brings up a major compatibility question as to how this is going to work with routers, linux servers, printers, and other devices on a network who either don't know about CTCP or don't give a shit about CTCP. This scheme also seems to be extremely vunerable to spoofing.
If M$ would spend half as much effort in securing their OS as they do coming up with these hare-brained schemes, then we wouldn't need such contrived solutions to security.
When all else fails, run.
The network admins. Won't apply patches? You don't get network access. Won't run AV software? You don't get network access. Infected with known malware? You lose network access until it's cleaned up.
Or you could go with the paranoid conspiracy theory and assume that MS will shoot themselves in the foot by trying to close out competing OSes at the network level; that would be the slashdot way, after all.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I discover NAC/NAP. Network Admission Control and Network Access Protection. While the idea is noble, its going to be costly (for customers) to implement in mixed networks. They also don't discuss non PC network clients (Printers, Scanners, hand held etc). Even worse (see below), your going to have to pay for a 3rd party network stack for Windows 2000.
f 717-d752-4fa2-a77a-ab29f0b29266/NAC-NAP_Whitepaper .pdf
t rans/network/06_0914_tn_network.mspx
White paper here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/d/0/8/d08d
Interesting chat transcript here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/chats/
From the transcript:
Q: NAP seems to fulfill the pre-admission health/integrity check very well. Can customers use the same NAP infrastructure to support post-admission NAC? e.g. with NAP today I can check a desktop PC is healthy when it joins, but what about 24 hours later?
A: Post-admission enforcement depends on the enforcement mechanism you're using. For instance, health will be re-evaluated when a client attempts to renew their IP address when using DHCP as the enforcement mechanism. For IPSec, it will happen when health certs expire. For 802.1x, it will happen when re-authentication occurs. For VPN, it will happen when clients reconnect. Any health change on the client will trigger re-evaluation of the health state, too.
Q: What is the likelihood of a NAP agent for Windows 2000 clients in the network?
A: We are not planning to implement a Windows 2000 NAP client. However, we are licensing our protocols to 3rd party companies so that they can offer NAP clients on Windows 2000 (and other OS's like Mac, Linux, etc.)
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
The extra effort this entails for BIG deployments of windows will be a temporary headache for a small group of sysadmins until of course they upgrade to the Microsoft server designed to handle this....
The bigger picture is locking everything out.
1. Reaching into the networking peripherals market to extract a tax for the privilege of connecting to a Vista PC. Give Microsoft a few cents for every device sold and no consumer will care. Microsoft can then tighten the DRM noose and increase revenue simultaneously.
2. Making mixed computing environments harder to deploy.
3. Each Vista PC will obviously send a unique id/signature so DRM and law enforcement knows what you are doing online all of the time. Has it happened? No. Will it happen? Yes. How do I know? Historic evidence of what other monopolies have done makes it a sure bet. Economists also have one of their very exciting graphs illustrating this as well.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Allowing sysadmins to keep unpatched Windows boxes off their networks is obviously nothing but pure evil. It's Microsoft, so it must be evil, right?
Keeping windows boxes off a network would be nice, but it would be better to simply cut off machines that misbehave. Every machine on the botnet is going to know exactly what to tell the silly C(luster fuck)DHCP server for maximum access. Brands of OS M$ does not like will not. DHCP is already slow, adding this overhead won't rid your network of infections, it will just make it slower.
Yes, Microsoft is evil and commits both technical and social vandalism. They break competitor's products and do things behind their sysadmin's backs. Don't you remember how their resolve configuration had M$ IP addresses hard coded, overriding your hosts files? Think this DHCP thing will be any easier to override? The social aspects of discouraging sharing and suing public schools beggar debate. So there you have it, evil from propaganda to implementation and enforcement. You still trust those people?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Some MS patches are made to add hard DRM (WMP10) or police liscenses (GenuineAdvantage) and maybe there are some other tinfoil-needy reasons.
MS and the next-gen DVD consortium for that matter treat the customer as a potential criminal and require the ability to disable functionality in whole or in part. In other words, "security" to these people, including Microsoft, means keeping things secured against the user.
As a real security scheme it looks quite weak and vulnerable. But engineering a way to get user's machines to spy on them and report not only compliance with security policies but also use of arbitrary applications seems quite useful both for pushing OS upgrades and conversions to Windows down people's throats and for providing ammo to content liscensing organizations. Vista will be able to tell centralized servers who you are, whether you comply with some policy, and whether you can withstand an arbitrary network attack. Doesn't sound too secure to me. Wonder how SuSE will "interoperate" with this.
It's just more vendor-specific fields in the DHCP request and response, plus some ioctl() hooks into the network stack. Basically a CTCP client brings up a normal unrestricted TCP stack and sends it's info in fields in the DHCP request. The DHCP server sees the fields, analyzes them and sends back configuration info in the DHCP response. The client then interprets the configuration info and uses the CTCP API to tell the network stack to impose the rules the server sent.
Of course, you can see several gaping holes in this scheme already. As is only to be expected from Yet Another Harebrained Scheme Out Of Redmond.
So then no worries, right? The first virus I get will surely disable CTCP for me, no sweat...
The buzzword "quarantine network" has been tossed around for at least the last six months. The theory behind the technology is that a client that fails to meet the policy requirements will be directed to a completely seperate subnet (think DMZ) where it will have access to a server that will push down the necessary patches and AV upgrades to bring the client into compliance. In otherwords, if your network is on 10.1.1.x then the quarantine network might be 10.2.1.x and any client that fails to meet the policy will get a DHCP lease for the 10.2.1.x netowrk. Of course dedicated attackers will be able to eventually circumvent the technology, but fundementally it is pretty sound. It will definitely address the problem of Joe Blow bringing in his laptop from home full of virii. It should also help mitigate the issue of "rogue" laptops that aren't members of the domain. The first time a Linux box receives a query that it doesn't know how to respond to, it will be quarantined. Of course there are probably ways around that (maybe you could configure Samba to respond to the requests?), but it will take a dedicated attacker with thorough knowledge of the network and local access to it.
A better way to handle the whole problem is to put machines into a quarantined VLAN and then dynamically change their port's VLAN after authorization has been established via any number of criteria.
You might want to take a look at what Cisco is up to. They are the company that is really driving the whole quarantine network ideal and making it a reality.
There's a specific difference. Residential ISPs are more likely to require something that is available as part of the Windows base install than something that requires proprietary software from Cisco. In addition, something from Microsoft is more likely to be used to deny Linux users the ability to connect or to require them to move up to the next tier of service at twice the monthly rate.
Things are likely to drastically change.
It would be great if ISPs started holding computer users accountable for not spreading malicious code or attaching infected machines to the network, but the fact of that matter is that day might very well never come.Unless the only high-speed ISP in town is "with MSN Premium". Or unless ISP A makes ISP B's implementation of "trusted" TCP a condition of peering arrangements (otherwise prepare to pay extra for transit to ISP A's customers and/or have packets deprioritized) or e-mail delivery arrangements (otherwise prepare to have e-mail from ISP B routed to ISP A customers' junk mail folders).
AC: Which items of Paul Rogers' laundry list did twitter's comment violate? If the M$ one was the most significant, consider that M$ is a valid name for a string variable in (at least early dialects of) BASIC; a lot of people thus use M$ to imply that the world might have been a better place had Microsoft kept making languages and office software instead of branching off into operating systems.