Security Isn't Just Avoiding Microsoft

Jay Singala noted a story which points out "It's time for all the people who have entertained this fantasy to stop deluding themselves. How would life without Microsoft be different? It wouldn't be in any meaningful way for those in charge of network security; there would just be a different vendor peddling the dominant operating system."

Comments

BULLSHIT. MS is a special case, stop apologizing.

[gig]

Microsoft can fuck their users over in outrageous ways which simply couldn't happen if the company was responsible to them financially.

For example, they do not equip even their Windows Vista Ultimate with a basic 1970's user account. In the 1970's you were on a small network managed by a guy wearing suspenders who had taken the vows yet you had a more secure environment than a 21st century Microsoft PC which connects to a global Internet with bot nets and who knows what.

Even the whole idea of shipping PC's with the head and body separate, it is ridiculous, done for financial reasons, not technical. When you look at what comes pre-installed on a Mac and imagine the "commodity" version of that, in your mind's eye you see a PC builder such as Dell should also be one of the main Linux distributions. The Mac software install is like a greatest hits of non-Microsoft computing, and includes software from thousands of Apple engineers, and thousands of community engineers also. In addition to maintaining the "Mac" part of Mac OS X, Apple-the-PC-builder maintains its own Unix distribution because every user needs that due to the Internet and also it is free software, it is like a Unix decoder ring for every Mac user so that they can interact on the network with every other user of every other platform. On a Microsoft PC it is all Microsoft-generated clones of the software that SHOULD be on your Dell or HP PC, and the quality is low, the compatibility is low. The idea that you buy a $499 PC and it doesn't have Apache on there it is actually a kind of sin. But it is even worse that you can buy a PC at all that doesn't set you up with a proper user account, that is like selling people cardboard helmets painted to look steel.

Maybe a few years ago this kind of apologizing for MS was more excusable. The Internet took MS by surprise in the mid-90's so much so that Windows 95 did not have a Web browser included, and Bill Gates 1995 book "The Road Ahead" mentioned the Internet once while dedicating a chapter to CD-ROM. So by Windows 2000 everybody is going, OK, they are getting their shit together now, but they have stumbled around like a drunk since then.

Also, even if you are an ignorant bastard and don't know about all the Unix software that is missing from every Dell or HP PC, you can see the same thing going on with the Mac. Apache and PHP are wonderful Photoshop accessories but also great accessories for business or whatever you are doing because it probably involves the Internet due to the century we are living in.

In short, you have to be an illegal monopoly to ship non-Internet-capable computers in 2007 when Unix itself is free. Nobody else but an illegal monopoly could get away with it.

The guy is projecting. This is M$ FUD.

[twitter]

I agree with what you say and have these explanations for your and my own observations. These differences are telling:

• GNU/Linux has many distributions - there will be no dominant vendor.
• Different distributions, while data and GUI compatible, have package and compile choice - they are completely different binary beasts.
• All of the distributions come with a much better security model, architecture and defaults than Widoze will ever know - No auto execute, no mixed data/executable, ports that only listen when you turn on a service, extensive documentation, real users and privilege separation, this list goes on and on.
• Every install can be the newest available because changes rarely break anything.
• Security updates come from one location, within days or hours of a problem, and are easy to push through any organization.
• Binary disaster recovery without obnoxious licensing, registry settings and all of that, is trivial. Applications all install squeaky clean and at the latest stable revision.
• Strict separation of user data from binary and system settings makes backing up and restoring user data easy. The user gets back everthing they had.

The net result of these differences is that it's much harder to screw over a GNU/Linux system, where it's hard to avoid the same for Windows. There are no successful auto-propagating worms for GNU/Linux in the wild. It takes a dedicated attack to penetrate a GNU/Linux system and an organization that uses it and recovery is much easier. Oh, it happens and operators have to be on their toes, but it will never, ever be as bad as the M$ monopoly or even their replacement with two or three other non free vendors.

The final and usual problem with the "popularity argument" so loosly thrown around the Wintel press is one of perspective. FUD is never for decision making - you always have to choose what works best right now. Choosing what does not work best because you think someting else may never be better only gives you something that's second rate and may never be any better. In this case the difference between the two on security is so enormous that FUD, based on projecting their own poor performance, is all the M$ camp has to offer.

Free Software can do that.

[twitter]

What would life on the Internet be without scriptable office documents/spreadsheets, email, web sites, and be like? A whole lot safer, regardless of the Operating System.

Mixing executable code and data is a bad idea but it can and has been done with sandboxes on real OS with real users and privilege separation.

There are many other significant differences between free and non free software that have an operational impact. Some of the more obvious ones are:

• GNU/Linux has many distributions - there will be no dominant vendor.
• Different distributions, while data and GUI compatible, have package and compile choice - they are completely different binary beasts.
• All of the distributions come with a much better security model, architecture and defaults than Widoze will ever know - No auto execute, no mixed data/executable, ports that only listen when you turn on a service, extensive documentation, real users and privilege separation, this list goes on and on.
• Every install can be the newest available because changes rarely break anything.
• Security updates come from one location, within days or hours of a problem, and are easy to push through any organization.
• Binary disaster recovery without obnoxious licensing, registry settings and all of that, is trivial. Applications all install squeaky clean and at the latest stable revision.
• Strict separation of user data from binary and system settings makes backing up and restoring user data easy. The user gets back everthing they had.

Re:The problem is Window's insecure architecture.

[Foolhardy]

You did say that the reason that "[Attacks on Windows] succeed so frequently because the security architecture of Windows is so poor." The only technical detail mentioned in the post was "A simple application like the IE web browser is tightly integrated into the operating system..." being a dumb idea. A link between them seemed to be implied.

If not that, then what exactly is so insecure about Windows's security architecture? I submit that the security design is more than adequate for a multi-user OS.
Just to get them out of the way, Windows certainly has a bad default of making the initial user an Administrator by default, and it's had its share of implementation flaws (same as most software). But these things aren't architectural flaws.