ATI Driver Flaw Exposes Vista Kernel to Attackers

Shack0ption writes "An unpatched flaw in an ATI driver was at the center of the mysterious Purple Pill proof-of-concept tool that exposed a way to maliciously tamper with the Windows Vista kernel. The utility, released by Alex Ionescu and yanked an hour later after the kernel developer realized that the ATI driver flaw was not yet patched, provided an easy way to load unsigned drivers onto Vista — effectively defeating the new anti-rootkit/anti-DRM mechanism built into Microsoft's newest operating system. Ionescu confirmed his tool was exploiting a vulnerability in an ATI driver — atidsmxx.sys, version 3.0.502.0 — to patch the kernel to turn off certain checks for signed drivers. This meant that a malicious rootkit author could essentially piggyback on ATI's legitimately signed driver to tamper with the Vista kernel."

Comments

Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

How long before the usual MS bashing starts on a clearly ATi problem??

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[dAzED1]

hi troll.

See, MS said this wouldn't be an issue. Specifically this. Regardless whether ATI has an issue, the Vista kernel shouldn't sign something that can be modified, without the signature changing.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Magada]

It starts here, with me. Microsoft is making driver devs jump through hoops with the whole signed-drivers thing when all it takes (as has been shown in this case) is ONE signed driver with ONE exploitable flaw to break the whole scheme.

What are Microsoft going to do now? Revoke the key they used to sign drivers with? How many copies of Vista wich verify drivers with the now-revoked pubkey have already been sold? How many devices were sold in retail with drivers which will no longer JustWork(tm)? Will Microsoft and the OEMs have the resources to re-certify each of those, or will they sign blindly?

Each of those probably stands a 50-50 chance of being either rooted or patched with the new key the first time it's connected to the 'net. How's that for convenience?

Oh, did I mention that finding another bug in another driver signed with the new key will mean the whole process must be repeated?

Oh and did I mention that if someone finds such a bug and sits on it, they have root to any Vista system in existence, until the bug is found and fixed (which may be never)?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you have any idea what you are talking about. Do you actually know what code-signing is and what it is used for?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm interested in how you came to the conclusion that a machine hooked to the net has a 50-50 chance of being rooted by a local exploit. It seems extremely unlikely that 50% of the people who hook up to the net on an x64 box (tend to be technical folks on x64) are going to be all visiting malicious sites, and be tricked into running malicious code that they have to choose to run. Oh, wait - you just pulled those numbers out of... air? or something else with three letters?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[bl8n8r]

Very quickly.

You must be new here, so I'll try and enlighten you.

You see, Microsoft is a lot like the smelly kid in 3rd grade that
used to drop a load in his shorts and not say anything while
everyone wandered around trying to figure out what died, where.

After a few of these episodes, whenever there was a strange smell,
it would come to pass that the smelly kid dropped another load.

Now, to make matters worse for the smelly kid, imagine him running
around telling everyone that he has solved the problem*. People are
relieved for a while until, guess what? The smelly kid drops another
load. How can this happen, isn't this supposed to be fixed?

This insane cycle of disappointment/re-assurance causes people to
get cynical very quickly and as a result, causes people to start complaining
very quickly.

[*] - http://news.com.com/Allchin+Buy+Vista+for+the+secu rity/2100-1012_3-6032344.html

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[drawfour]

You do realize that the kernel does not do any signing, that's Verisign's job, right? The kernel only verifies that the signature is valid (and trusted). All this hack is doing is causing the kernel to turn off the part where it refuses to load an unsigned driver.

From the article:

Vista is perfectly aware that an unsigned driver has been loaded: you will even get a warning a bit after the driver is loaded.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[morgan_greywolf]

(BTW--I've been using Linux as my primary OS since 1996, so no I'm not Linux bashing)

Well, one thing to consider is this -- how different are other OSes like Linux? With Linux, a root exploit in a kernel module gains you access to the whole system as well, especially when you consider that it uses a monolithic kernel. IOW, kernel modules directly patch the Linux kernel, live, in memory. Now consider that the ATI drivers for Linux are based at least in part on the ATI drivers for Windows.

Mind you that some things like SELinux might help to mitigate some of this in some scenarios, but not in all.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Tim C]

Each of those probably stands a 50-50 chance of being either rooted or patched with the new key the first time it's connected to the 'net.

It's a local exploit.

did I mention that finding another bug in another driver signed with the new key will mean the whole process must be repeated?

Third parties write crap, exploitable code and it's MS's fault? You can write exploitable kernel modules for Linux as well, yet somehow I don't think you'd be blaming that on Linus. If anything, this is an argument for open source drivers, not against MS's scheme - although how many people actually have the skill to audit the code they run, let alone auditing it?

did I mention that if someone finds such a bug and sits on it, they have root to any Vista system in existence

Every Vista install that uses the exploitable driver, you mean. Just as an exploitable driver for Linux would open every Linux install that uses that driver. For example, I have an NVidia card; as and when I upgrade to Vista, I won't be vulnerable to this particular exploit.

Try to tone the hyperbole down a little, it's not very becoming.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Microsoft have a key to revoke, when this happens (probably just a matter of time, if it aint already happned) on OSX, Linux, *BSD etc you wont even get that unsigned driver warning.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[tttonyyy]

But you'll also find that the Linux kid will also drop a "load in his shorts" if he's using a kernel module with a flaw that can be exploited.

It is impossible to prove that any piece of software is 100% bug free. Impossible. Regardless of your operating system, if you trust kernel-level drivers (you actually want to *do* something useful with your system?), chances are that somewhere there is an exploitable flaw. It's just that no-one may have found it yet. There is no such thing as a 100% secure system.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[neaorin]

What are Microsoft going to do now? Revoke the key they used to sign drivers with? How many copies of Vista wich verify drivers with the now-revoked pubkey have already been sold?

I was under the impression that each certified vendor was issued their own driver signing certificate, issued by the trusted CA. Thus, all MS has to do is revoke that specific certificate, and notify everyone via automatic update. I am not very familiar with Vista so I might be wrong though.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista is perfectly aware that an unsigned driver has been loaded: you will even get a warning a bit after the driver is loaded.

Vista is looking like an incredible joke after all this effort was made to secure it and a simple signed driver can get it to load unsigned drivers. And it is even aware of it but does nothing to stop the unsigned driver.

Are the unsigned drivers loaded with malicious intent going to sit around and wait for Vista to do what it wants to do next?

--
Off topic question:
Does anyone know how to run the Win XP command prompt in fullscreen mode on the main display and mirror it to a secondary display? Video output (on the mirror) always seems to die when command.exe is put into fullscreen mode. Does not seem to matter the make/model of video card or motherboard.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[dkf]

You do realize that the kernel does not do any signing, that's Verisign's job, right? Even that's wildly inaccurate, and just demonstrates that you're confused as to how digital signature systems (and other things based on a PKI too) work.

Verisign just signs the driver author's certificate, and even then just to say "these guys are who they say they are, and they're doing code signing with the key matching this certificate". They most certainly say nothing at all about the correctness of the drivers; that's up to the driver author (and maybe Microsoft too).

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[domatic]

If you're paranoid, you can build a kernel with all the drivers you need and disable module loading. It isn't something I would do but .......

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[KiloByte]

Actually, Windows will accept only stuff signed by Microsoft itself, and they take a hefty chunk of change for the privilege. You cannot also choose to have a driver which Microsoft doesn't like signed -- so that state-of-the-art professional sound processing tools are a no-no if they somehow can be used to record "premium content". Or if, say, the driver's authors somehow competes with MS.

VeriSign can sign only SSL certs and certain less-well-known types of keys for you.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

It starts here, with me. Microsoft is making driver devs jump through hoops with the whole signed-drivers thing when all it takes (as has been shown in this case) is ONE signed driver with ONE exploitable flaw to break the whole scheme.

And it takes ONE patch to fix it.

Let's be real here. It's not like DRM'd music or media, where once it's cracked, there's no way to uncrack it.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

It starts here, with me. Microsoft is making driver devs jump through hoops with the whole signed-drivers thing when all it takes (as has been shown in this case) is ONE signed driver with ONE exploitable flaw to break the whole scheme. It's been shown before. The hoops with the signed drivers are nothing about security and all about controlling who can develop for the platform.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[jaavaaguru]

the Linux kid will also drop a "load in his shorts"

No, he will dump a core in his shorts.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[morgan_greywolf]

Yeah, I know. I've been using Linux really since the very early days of Slackware (just not as a primary OS), so I remember before there were such things as kernel modules. ;)

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[LurkerXXX]

This is exactly why the OpenBSD folks have been fighting against binary blobs and demanding open source drivers for hardware. Too many other open source OS's will gladly take a closed binary blob so that they can run hardware. And that leads to possible exploits down the road.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[mhall119]

Well, one thing to consider is this -- how different are other OSes like Linux? First off, this is part of the reason binary driver use is discouraged. Secondly, this only seems to be a way around Vista's requirement of using signed drivers, something Linux doesn't even try for.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Compholio]

Third parties write crap, exploitable code and it's MS's fault?

It is when they've been espousing this whole "we check signed drivers to make sure they're good!" thing.

You can write exploitable kernel modules for Linux as well, yet somehow I don't think you'd be blaming that on Linus.

People do once they've been included in an official release of the kernel, which is equivalent to saying "we checked the driver to make sure it's good!".

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[jhol13]

Third parties write crap, exploitable code and it's MS's fault? I think the OP meant that requiring signed drivers is inconvenience to the driver writers and users. A lot like Linux requiring recompile of non-distribution-included drivers in every kernel patch.

Do I need to say why Microsoft likes signed drivers? Do I need to say why Linus likes to break out-of-kernel-tree drivers? Both reasons are equally idiotic, btw.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[morgan_greywolf]

Secondly, this only seems to be a way around Vista's requirement of using signed drivers, Which is the mechanism Microsoft designed to defeat the installation of malicious drivers, right?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Yetihehe]

and they take a hefty chunk of change for the privilege.

Actually about $250. Joanna Rutkowska has managed to sign her own driver intended to punch a hole in vista, registered as microsoft partner and obtained the certificate.

Or if, say, the driver's authors somehow competes with MS.

She clearly competed with them in security business ;)

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[mhall119]

Malicious to whom? This systems seems designed more to prevent the installation of kernel-mode drivers that would allow the circumvention of things like DRM. I guess it could stop the installation of rootkits too, but there are other ways to stop them. It's funny (to me at least) that there are things that Windows can stop even an Administrator from doing on their own machine.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[petermgreen]

What are Microsoft going to do now? Revoke the key they used to sign drivers with?
They could just blacklist the ati driver in question. Of course that alone would probablly cause a LOT of customer upset.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[mrsteveman1]

Yes, but you'll understand why I'm unwilling to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, or another chance.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[a.d.trick]

You can write exploitable kernel modules for Linux as well

Yeah, but someone would have to be an idiot to use it (and a rather hapless one too if you can get them through the install process). All the drivers in the main kernel has worked on by kernel devs, so they are actually responsible for the code. The ones that aren't in the kernel are either:

1. Crap code that doesn't belong in drivers to begin with.
2. Binary drivers which have always been a Bad Think.
3. Really weird stuff that normal people shouldn't touch anyway.

It's not Microsoft's fault that third parties write bad drivers. It is Microsoft's fault that they rely on third parties to write the drivers in the first place.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[kurokaze]

It is when they've been espousing this whole "we check signed drivers to make sure they're good!" thing. The driver IS SIGNED. Therefore, as far as the OS is concerned, its good. Just because a driver is signed doesn't mean it doesn't have a flaw. The OS cannot do a code audit and ensure that there are no exploitable holes!

Sheesh

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[kurokaze]

It is Microsoft's fault that they rely on third parties to write the drivers in the first place. uh... WHAT? This makes absolutely no sense! Do you expect the kernel devs to write NVIDIA drivers?

Sure, there's a generic video display driver.. similar to what Windows has, but if you want any sort of performance out of that card you're going to need the card makers to write a proper driver for it. This is no different on Linux or Windows boxes.

My God... has logical reasoning gone completely out of the window???

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why Linux will never become successful on the desktop.

"Yeah, but someone would have to be an idiot to use it"

Brilliant. Let's all assume that end users have a degree in Computer Science. I guess I have to agree, people are idiots if they use a device driver from a device driver developer, duh!

"Binary drivers which have always been a Bad Thin[g]"

Sure, because every company in the world believes in open source (in fantasy land). The fact is that some device drivers are binary and it is all you got. The alternative is to dual boot to Windows, which also has a binary device driver for said device but since it is Windows we don't care about its integrity. Oh wait! That is what people still do to this day. They dual boot because Windows just happens to provide that one little thing Linux can't. D'oh!

"It is Microsoft's fault that they rely on third parties to write the drivers in the first place."

WTF?? Where do I begin? I don't fully understand this sentence. Ummm, YEAH Microsoft has to rely on third parties to write the drivers. The third party is the one who invented the device, you idiot. What? Is Microsoft going to write device drivers for all hardware companies now? How does that work? How much of the device's design has to be submitted to Microsoft so that they can write the driver. How is intellectual property protected? Are you insane?

Next you'll be writing how it's Microsoft's fault for relying on third parties for providing software for their platform. If the next version of Adobe Photoshop contained a nasty exploit are we going to say "well it's Microsoft's fault for relying on Adobe for writing image editing software in the first place."

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Third parties write crap, exploitable code and it's MS's fault?

it is, when MICROSOFT SIGNS THE FUCKING CODE, ASSHOLE

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Cythrawl]

Umm Microsoft DIDNT sign the code, ATI DID. The drivers ARENT WHQL verified... Who's the asshole now?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Please cite a source for this FUD.

Or read this: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/drvsign/kmsi gning.mspx

You *can* buy a software publishing certificate from VeriSign and you *can* use it to sign a driver which you *can* load in Vista.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[kestasjk]

Revoke the key they used to sign drivers with? I expect so, it'd be easy to update the flawed driver and add the key to the revoked list using Windows Update. It's no different than any other security flaw, really. (I guess it's newsworthy, but as per usual it's not as serious as people are making out.)

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Compholio]

It is when they've been espousing this whole "we check signed drivers to make sure they're good!" thing.

The driver IS SIGNED. Therefore, as far as the OS is concerned, its good. Just because a driver is signed doesn't mean it doesn't have a flaw. The OS cannot do a code audit and ensure that there are no exploitable holes!

Then they shouldn't state directly in their literature that the point of the signed driver is to ensure quality:

For device drivers and other kernel-mode software, drivers signed as part of the Windows Logo program increase end-user confidence in the quality of the software and improve the user experience, because a Windows Logo belonging to a driver indicates that the driver was tested and the digital signature that accompanies the Windows Logo confirms has not been altered since testing.

Maybe your definition of quality doesn't include potential security flaws, but I would argue that is one of the most important things to check for in a driver audit.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[kurokaze]

the digital signature that accompanies the Windows Logo confirms has not been altered since testing. All that says is that the driver you are loading is the same driver that the manufacturer has published. It makes no warranties with respect of the quality of the driver.

Maybe your definition of quality doesn't include potential security flaws, but I would argue that is one of the most important things to check for in a driver audit. Who should be doing this audit? Should MS be doing it as part of the WHQL certification? or should the onus lie on the driver maker? Your position is that is lies in MS's hands. I disagree, I say it lies in ATI's hands.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[ozmanjusri]

Do you expect the kernel devs to write NVIDIA drivers?

Um yes.

They've made the offer, including agreeing to NDAs. http://www.kroah.com/log/2007/01/29/#free_drivers

My God... has logical reasoning gone completely out of the window???

That has to be the gayest line I've ever seen on Slashdot.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Lord Ender]

I think Microsoft's main consideration with driver signing is stability, not security.

It is a lot easier and more reliable to test a driver for stability than it is to test it for security. There is so much crap hardware with flakey drivers floating around which causes stability problems, Windows has an undeservedly bad reputation for stability. Everyone blames Microsoft when the see a BSOD, but in many cases they should be blaming the manufacturer of their $10 SATA adapter.

I'm posting this from an Ubuntu box, so I'm no MS apologist. But Windows' reputation for being unstable is greatly exaggerated. Signed drivers may help correct this particular market perception.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny (to me at least) that there are things that Windows can stop even an Administrator from doing on their own machine.

Then, sir, you're easily amused.

An OS's kernel needs access to stuff not even an admin should touch. Direct low level access to hardware, some special CPU ops, direct memory management, CPU scheduling, etc.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Compholio]

Don't you dare straw man my argument like that. You are either ignoring or intentionally removing an important part of that quote:

For device drivers and other kernel-mode software, drivers signed as part of the Windows Logo program increase end-user confidence in the quality of the software and improve the user experience, because a Windows Logo belonging to a driver indicates that the driver was tested and the digital signature that accompanies the Windows Logo confirms has not been altered since testing.

Microsoft does audit the drivers - it tests and certifies all signed drivers. My position is not that all blame lies at MS's hands; however, they do deserve some of the blame for certifying a driver with a potential security problem.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[mhall119]

_Should_ never touch and _can_ never touch are two very different things. But, since you bring it up, I _can_ touch all of those things on my machine if I wanted to. Many Linux users, and especially admins, _do_ touch those things on a fairly regular basis to get the best performance possible out of their system.

But let's say for the sake of argument you are right, what media file you can play, when, where, and how, shouldn't be something an OS kernel should be limiting. An OS's kernel should not be in the business of policing copyright, should it?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[mrchaotica]

In fact, I recall a while back there was a bug and/or exploit found in the binary Nvidia driver for Linux. I remember the Slashdot article about it was tagged "haha..."

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[A non-mouse Coward]

It's a local exploit.

You mean, "local" as in how long does it take a trojan to trick a user into installing a local rootkit?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's problem are stupid administrators. What would you do if you had stupid administrator of our system?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[mhall119]

I'd fire them.

Heck, that solution is even cross-platform!

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[FlatLine84]

Depends on who lines the pockets of the developers I guess... Fundamentally, no, an OS should only perform the functions of being able to utilize your hardware to the fullest extent (anyway you want) in an efficient manner.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Jul 30 21:08:00 linux kernel: nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Knuckles]

how different are other OSes like Linux

Very. The driver source is open. If you load a proprietary binary module, you (a) taint the kernel (which is not "Linux" anymore), and (b) it's your own decision. The Ubuntu "restricted drivers manager" (don't know about other distros) even tells you that there are security issues.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[mikael]

Here's the article Root Exploit For NVIDIA Closed-Source Linux Driver

There is a reference to Nelson Muntz: As Nelson Muntz would say: "Ha ha".

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Allador]

Microsoft does audit the drivers - it tests and certifies all signed drivers. No, it does not. You need to read the content you linked.

Windows Logo Program (for hardware) != signed drivers.

All drivers shipped as part of the Windows Logo Program are signed, but not all signed drivers are part of the Windows Logo Program.

And there are levels of testing in the Logo program, as well, some more rigorous than others.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[a.d.trick]

Well actually, I think it would work the other way around. The people who right NVIDIA drivers should be kernel devs. Whether they work for NVIDIA or not is a secondary issue.

That's how things have work with Linux from the start and it hasn't stopped them from writing high performance code.

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Magada]

Oops. Who gave ati the signing key?

Re:Let's blame Microsoft

[Kalriath]

Uh, actually, in cases like this, Microsoft requests that the CA who issued the Software Publishing Certificate revoke it. As you well know, certificate publishers publish a list (known as a Certificate Revocation List) which most things that rely on crypto signatures check prior to validating a certificate. The downside of that is that all ATI software for all operating systems become uncertified. If it's WHQL, that's easier. Microsoft merely adds ATI's certificate to their own CRL and the Win64 version of the driver no longer loads, and the Win32 one complains.

FP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi everyone!

lol wut

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic that ATI drivers are the first major downfall of Vista.

Re:lol wut

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic in what sense? ATI has always been know for good hardware, and some of the quirkiest drivers in the market.

We need to strip ATi of its driver team, and then strip nVidia of their hardware team, and merge the remainder.

Re:lol wut

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironic because ATI drivers are the cause of so many Linux troubles.

Re:lol wut

[Bert64]

Great idea, remove competition from the videocard market so that buyers only have one choice for high performance video cards.
Then watch as prices rise, and the pace of improvement slows massively.

Re:lol wut

[fuzzix]

We need to strip ATi of its driver team, and then strip nVidia of their hardware team, and merge the remainder.

What does it matter? Neither of them bother with proper overlay any more.

My last nVidia card was simply without overlay hardware. My last ATi card's overlay dropped resolution when a high refresh rate was used. At least the nVidia card could play a video at full res without resorting to GL.

It's not all about the 3D... :)

You do have a point about the drivers, though. While closed, nVidia's Linux module hasn't provided nearly as much heartache as ATi's... abomination.

Re:lol wut

[Anonymous Coward]

As a matter of fact I think the optimal solution in this case would be everyone getting punched in the face very hard.

Re:lol wut

[Anonymous Coward]

Your nVidia card is defective. RMA it. I had two 7900 that had broken overlay.

Re:lol wut

[morgan_greywolf]

ou do have a point about the drivers, though. While closed, nVidia's Linux module hasn't provided nearly as much heartache as ATi's... abomination.

I take you never had an Athlon XP with an AGP nVidia card, huh? Not that it's nVidia's or the driver's fault, it was really AMD's fault, but still...I'm just sayin...

Re:lol wut

[jaavaaguru]

Just like the OS market... look how Windows' price has risen and how much of an improvement Vista is over XP.

Re:lol wut

[Hatta]

I have an athlon XP with an AGP nVidia card. 6600 series IIRC. Runs like a charm. What's your issue?

Re:lol wut

[Metasquares]

Athlon XP and an AGP NVidia GeForce 6800. No problems :)

Maybe it was a problem with your particular chipset?

Re:lol wut

[X=X 0]

Crappy ATI driver blue screens my Vista box every day... Maybe the attention this is getting will help me get better then 1 day uptimes for once!!!!

Re:lol wut

[fuzzix]

Your nVidia card is defective. RMA it. I had two 7900 that had broken overlay.

What, you don't think I'd check?

This one is a 6600GT - my research at the time suggested it presented an Xv interface so overlay would work but it wasn't implemented fully on the card - stuff like gamma control for Xv doesn't work.

Obligatory post

[ilovegeorgebush]

In Soviet Russia, Kernel tampers you!

...yeah

trusted computing

[Anonymous Coward]

ok...
so windows vista trusts ATI.
ATI trusts themselves.
I don't trust no one, especially closed-source drivers from ATI.

shouldn't they simply replace their "fglrx" with "ati", in their xorg.conf?

Re:trusted computing

[A non-mouse Coward]

I don't trust no one

Well there's your problem. "I don't trust no one" means you trust everyone. Must be a simple double negative in the driver's source code then. ;)

Re:trusted computing

[lordtoran]

shouldn't they simply replace their "fglrx" with "ati", in their xorg.conf? The open source driver has no support for R500/R600 based hardware (not even 2D). So, some of us still have to use fglrx.

Re:trusted computing

[TheLink]

Yeah, right. ;)

Re:trusted computing

[galador]

Maybe they should. If Vista used X.org <_<

Re:trusted computing

[Smauler]

"I don't trust no one" means you trust everyone.

Technically, no it doesn't. It means you trust someone, not necessarily everyone.

Re:trusted computing

[I'm Don Giovanni]

"I don't trust no one, especially closed-source drivers from ATI."

If you really "trust no one", then open-source drivers won't do you much good either, because in order to trust them, you'd have to trust those that take time to audit the code. Or are you going to sit there and pretend that you, yourself, are qualified to audit the code of every driver you use AND that you'd actually take the time to do it?

So I read it right?

[Wooky_linuxer]

Vista has an anti-DRM mechanism built-in? Wow, and I thought Linux stood for free sofware... way to go Redmond!

Re:So I read it right?

[CarpetShark]

and I thought Linux stood for free sofware...

Linux does NOT stand for free software. It happens to have a (now old and relatively flawed) free software license. The main direction for Linux comes from a guy who likes Tivoisation (ie, DRM), and is of the opinion that politics like Freedom issues don't matter; he just wants to create tools.

If you want a Free Software kernel, that guarantees you'll still be able to use it at version 11.6, you'll need to look further afield.

You could argue that kernels don't matter much anyway, as long as they're posix, and that's true, to an extent, but most desktops are now embracing HAL, etc., which are linux-specific.

Re:So I read it right?

[KingKiki217]

You could argue that kernels don't matter much anyway, as long as they're posix, and that's true, to an extent, but most desktops are now embracing HAL, etc., which are linux-specific.
"I'm sorry, Dave; I can't do that."

Re:So I read it right?

[sgt scrub]

udev is part of the Linux kernel project, while HAL and D-BUS are not.

So, why doesn't Linux have a HAL? I can tell you the answer in one word - Tradition. The Linux kernel emanates from kernel.org, which essentially produces a white box OS, supporting x86/IA-32 compatible CPUs. With that Wintel architecture, things like code compatibility, BIOS, and chipsets come together to form what I call the PC/AT "virtual machine." Linux, like Windows, leverages basic knowledge about this platform, so that booting and hardware initialization are taken care of, leaving a kernel to worry about the more interesting things. As one hacker says, "on x86, it just works!"
http://www.open-mag.com/features/10_02feats/HAL/HA L.htm

Re:So I read it right?

[CarpetShark]

I didn't say HAL was "part" of Linux, I said it was Linux-specific. From http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal:

Dependencies
Linux kernel 2.6.15 (or later)

Re:So I read it right?

[Kalriath]

HAL isn't a piece of software, it's a class of software.

The Windows Kernel also has a Hardware Abstraction Layer.

Re:So I read it right?

[CarpetShark]

No, it's both, depending on context. In the linux world, it's a piece of software.

Fr1st or sekund prost!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

yes yes

anti-DRM

[radmege]

"... effectively defeating the new anti-rootkit/anti-DRM mechanism built into Microsoft's newest operating system." Increased security and anti-DRM? I guess Microsoft is finally listening to what consumers want!

Re:anti-DRM

[radmege]

"... effectively defeating the new anti-rootkit/anti-DRM mechanism built into Microsoft's newest operating system." Increased security and anti-DRM? I guess Microsoft is finally listening to what consumers want!

Re:anti-DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely it is Microsoft's response on the Vista platform to this. If SONY could do that, imagine what someone else might pull with pirated software cd copies or porn cd sold at the local computer flea market, etc.

Open Source drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this happen if ATI drivers were open source?

Re:Open Source drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes.

Re:Open Source drivers

[Yvanhoe]

But it would only appear on the frontpage of /. after two or three days, once it has been fixed.

Re:Open Source drivers

[lordtoran]

But then at least you could patch the source.

That's why microkernels are useful

[Anonymous Coward]

if each driver had its own separate space, this flaw wouldn't affect the rest of the system.

Re:That's why microkernels are useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that it would matter anyway, because the system would be too slow to be useful anyway.

Re:That's why microkernels are useful

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus, are you posting here now ?

-Andrew Tanenbaum.

Re:That's why microkernels are useful

[A non-mouse Coward]

Mod Parent Up.

Even Microsoft Research is looking into making microkernel operating systems with their Singularity project.

Of course, the Minix 3 Project has been doing this for awhile, supposedly even having a fully POSIX compliant product at this point.

The major design factor of Microkernels is that it's bad practice to have a trusted path from any driver or system service in kernelspace to any other driver or system service in kernelspace. Just because you're "in" doesn't mean that anything else that's "in" should trust you.

The largest hurdle microkernels have to overcome, however, is the problem of DMA. As long as a malicious ATI video card (nevermind the driver) has direct access to all memory locations via DMA, it could easily just patch the driver's memory at runtime every time via hardware. That's why microkernel development is going to have to go hand-in-hand with tools like IOMMU, for controlling access to critical areas of memory.

Of course, critics often complain about Inter-process Communication (IPC) as being another limitation to microkernels, but at this point, it's really just an implementation hurdle as there are several ways to get processes that are in different memory spaces to communicate with high performance, especially as Moore's Law brings CPUs faster and faster.

Re:That's why microkernels are useful

[sgt scrub]

The largest hurdle microkernels have to overcome, however, is the problem of DMA
Absolutely correct and imho correct for all types of kernels. As long as hardware uses system memory to function, and the location of memory is not properly restricted, this problem will persist. Drivers openly developed could easily be developed to restrict specific device types to specific memory areas.

Re:That's why microkernels are useful

[TheLink]

The hardware people are going to have to fix/modify DMA anyway, if they want fast IO, hardware etc with virtualization.

They might as well do something more innovative and useful, after all I heard they were running out of ideas on what to do with all those transistors, and resorting to stuff like more cores and more cache.

Should sit down with the O/S, DB etc people, and brainstorm some stuff that will make doing things the "right" way easier (or even just possible). Sure there's often no real right way, but I bet we're doing a fair number of things _wrong_.

Kernel Type

[canistel]

I wonder (obviously not a kernel developer here), would a micro kernel prevent these types of problems, where malicious code which normally wouldn't have permission to do things, attack a part of the kernel (video driver) which does and so gain permissions?

Re:Kernel Type

[ilovegeorgebush]

I'd prefer a decently written & thoroughly tested Kernel API to be honest. It's not like they haven't got the cash to invest in decent developmental and quality assurance practices.

Re:Kernel Type

[TheRaven64]

Depends. A video driver needs to be able to DMA data to and from the card. Even if it's in an isolated address space, a compromised driver can write all over physical memory by telling the card to. If you have an IOMMU then this can be alleviated somewhat. Some kernel component outside the driver could provide DMA apertures in the correct places, and if it did correct validation of the driver's requests (i.e. not let it open windows anywhere into memory except where it is owned by a process using the driver) then it would be possible for a microkernel to be safe from this kind of thing.

Re:Kernel Type

[Magada]

It's an interesting dilemma for Microsoft - they can't have DRM without video drivers running in kernelspace (performance issues), but DRM is broken if they allow drivers in kernelspace. Consider this: anyone can now load the vulnerable driver, apply Ionescu's magic and WHAM! I predict pirate-patched video card drivers for windows are coming soon - the oportunity to strip the DRM out of high-def movies from the comfort of your own PC is just too nice to pass up. And doing it with a legitimate copy of Vista? Priceless.

Re:Kernel Type

[drawfour]

You may have missed the part in the article where the kernel *knows* it's running unsigned binaries, and thus turns off the DRM stuff. So there is no way to strip out the DRM, since that capability will be turned off when the system detects it's running unsigned binaries.

From the article:

Vista is perfectly aware that an unsigned driver has been loaded: you will even get a warning a bit after the driver is loaded. This also means that PMP will become aware that the driver is loaded, and disable high-definition media playback. This means that this tool will not help you bypass DRM in any way, because the original Vista protection mechanisms are still in place. Note that on Vista 32-bit, this behavior already exists by default in the OS, so it is not a "bug" of Purple Pill.

Re:Kernel Type

[Opportunist]

That's exactly the problem: If the program runs "as" the driver, which is signed and thus trusted, the kernel does not notice that it's unsigned code. For the kernel, this is signed code. Worse (or better, depending on your POV), you run with a fairly high level of trust (being the graphics driver), thus you have a rather good chance to pop the DRM altogether.

Re:Kernel Type

[makomk]

That's because the exploit uses the ordinary driver loader (but presumably modifies it so that it allows unsigned drivers), presumably for convenience. I think it could just as easily bypass the module loading code altogether or modify it to totally ignore the fact that the the driver is unsigned. Of course, that'd put the author at risk of being arrested under the DMCA...

Rules of the Road

[mfh]

When hardware drivers are responsible for system integrity, all hope of safety is permanently lost. Introducing the new battleground for virus writers... fake patches:

YOUR VIDEO CARD NEEDS NEW DRIVERS: CLICK NEXT!!!!!

Re:Rules of the Road

[maroberts]

AFAIK, this doesn't happen. I'm under the impression each release of a driver for Vista has to be tested and signed off by MS. However it does pose the possibility of an insider creating a sekret backdoor. Once you've created one backdoor, it'd probably be a good insurance policy to create an extra one so that when the first one is discovered, you maintain access.

Re:Rules of the Road

[a.d.trick]

This is why hardware owners need to open the specs to their equipment so that the kernel writers can be responsible for writing the code. They don't need to provide any code, we can do that. That's how it works with the Linux kernel, with the exception of binary kernel drivers from ATI/Nvidia and a few other oddballs. It's actually been wildly successful for Linux and is (I think) the primary reason why Linux is so much more stable than Windows. Most of the crashes in Windows these days are from poorly written drivers.

Re:Rules of the Road

[petermgreen]

btw is there an official "test" version of vista 64 bit intended for driver developers to use that doesn't have the protections?

Re:Rules of the Road

[VertigoAce]

For the first part of your question, you can install debug versions of Windows. These are known as checked builds. They don't have any compiler optimization and add a lot of internal checks to help identify issues when writing drivers. In particular they do extra parameter validation. The retail builds (known as free builds) basically trust kernel-mode code to be written properly, so each function doesn't check all of its parameters for validity.

I assume it's easy to boot checked builds into a mode that accepts unsigned drivers, since that is what the build is designed to test.

Re:Rules of the Road

[Anonymous Coward]

A driver does not need to be signed by MSFT or tested by MSFT. It just needs to be signed.

Read: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winlogo/drvsign/kmsi gning.mspx

Re:Rules of the Road

[tlhIngan]

I assume it's easy to boot checked builds into a mode that accepts unsigned drivers, since that is what the build is designed to test.

You can also just use the OEM Test Certificate to test-sign your driver, then use it on a regular Vista "free" build. The only caveat is that a driver using the OEM Test Certificate will cause the system to put "OEM Test" or some such text in the background. This is so driver writers can test their driver outside the checked environment - there are a number of things that differ between the debug and retail versions (anyone who has programmed something in debug mode and suddenly have it crash horrendously the instant they took out the debug options...). It's only Microsoft that can sign your driver so that it can be released without causing "OEM Test" to show up.

Even for Windows XP, vendors cheat and even ask how to hide the fact they use the OEM Test certificate. It's actually amazing just how bad some vendors are, knowing they can hide behind "Windows sucks" veil. (Yes, it's not all Microsoft's fault! And no, I hate Windows as much as the next guy - prefer Linux and OS X...).

Re:Rules of the Road

[Culture20]

With a lot of people, the alert could read:
X needs Y! Click Next!
and they would.

Bug or feature?

[martinag]

FTFA, quoting a Symantec senior manager: "Basically, that ATI driver has functionality that allows you to read and write kernel memory. It's either a bug or a feature of the driver." I guess it's a feature to the bad guys. To everyone else, it's a bug.

Re:Bug or feature?

[mugenjou]

I guess it's a feature to the bad guys. To everyone else, it's a bug. I guess it's a bug to Microsoft and the content industries. To everyone else, it's a feature.

Re:Bug or feature?

[Opportunist]

If you consider someone a bad guy who wants his legally purchased machine to do what he wants, then yes.

Ah, you kids have it easy...

[Glowing Fish]

The fact that people are actually going to the lengths of breaking into Windows by using a legitimate driver with kernel access to load in rootkits...the fact that it even requires explaining, means that Windows has reached some type of real security. I mean, with Windows 98, you would just hit enter on the login dialog box, and there you were!

Re:Ah, you kids have it easy...

[sleekware]

Good point, Windows is almost ready for a networked environment! All kidding aside, I agree - Windows has come a long way in the security area.

Re:Ah, you kids have it easy...

[Train0987]

I think that says more about our expectation level of Redmond, not that they're finally making inroads.

Re:Ah, you kids have it easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Enter only worked if the last user to login had no password, the escape key canceled the login box and just booted you into the desktop.

Re:Ah, you kids have it easy...

[DoofusOfDeath]

I mean, with Windows 98, you would just hit enter on the login dialog box, and there you were!

You had me when you clicked OK.

Re:Ah, you kids have it easy...

[Miykayl]

Now, if only Windows didn't require hardware, then we wouldn't have all of those driver-based atack vectors to contend with!

Re:Ah, you kids have it easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what the login was for. But yes, everyone had root type access in 9x.

Re:Ah, you kids have it easy...

[Glowing Fish]

And in stability, and if I do say so, its probably due to Linux.
It was right after Linux started getting more popular, around 1999 or so, that we saw Microsoft start to be serious about improving the operating system instead of marketing it.
I haven't really used Windows in a couple years, but from what I understand, it doesn't blue screen or become incredibly sluggish after three hours, like it used to.

Re:Ah, you kids have it easy...

[Skrapion]

Even the windows you buy in hardware stores require, well, hardware.

ATI will patch this

[Dekortage]

Seems like the real concern is not that ATI's code opens a security hole. You know ATI will patch it. A more important question is, how many other securely-signed drivers, etc., have similar holes? How many drivers are there in a typical Windows Vista system, anyway?

At least Microsoft can say (with some truth) that it's not THEIR software which introduces the problem! (it actually is, of course, but not directly)

Re:ATI will patch this

[Iphtashu Fitz]

You know ATI will patch it.

And how will ATI ensure that all people using the flawed drivers upgrade to the newest ones? How will the average Vista/ATI user even know that they are at risk of this flaw? Unless all those flawed systems are patched this will remain a fairly big hole to be exploited by the unscrupulous.

Re:ATI will patch this

[Dekortage]

That's true. I would hope that Microsoft could roll this into its "critical updates" -- not that ALL users would get it, but it should cover a big spread.

Re:ATI will patch this

[MostAwesomeDude]

ATI will patch it?!? ATI has, in my opinion (and I am not alone,) the worst track record among companies who write their own drivers. The hardware is not bad by any means; grab an old Rage or Radeon before the X100 series, and you can play many modern games using the open-source drivers. Works excellently. Unfortunately, they write some of the shittiest code in existence, and their driver has needed constant fixes for years now. On Linux, ATI drivers are behind both nVidia and Intel, both of whom have made drivers available that expose all functionality of their cards.

Re:ATI will patch this

[DimGeo]

Microsoft do have driver updates on Windows Update. It remains to be seen if this particular driver fix will end up there, but my bet would be yes.

FYI, you got SP, not FP

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Re:FYI, you got SP, not FP

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, but i noticed that very shortly after I posted.

No shit

[trifish]

A kernel-level driver can own a system? No shit!

(BTW, that's one of the reasons drivers need to be signed to run on Windows Vista x64.)

Re:No shit

[sleekware]

It makes me wonder what Microsoft's security qualifications really are for a signed kernel level driver. How much do they really try to crack in to make sure that it is secure? Or do they just trust ATI to take care of this and sign anything they release?

Re:No shit

[trifish]

As I wrote elsewhere (the /. threaded system prevents me from replying to two people at once):

"The point is that an author of a malicious kernel-level Trojan horse wants to stay anonymous, but can't. The certificate authorities (Verisign etc) need to verify your identity first before they issue a code signing certificate for you.

That's how it's much much harder for moronic script kiddies to release kernel-level Trojan horses for Vista x64. Because we (or at least the police) would be able to find out their names and addresses."

Re:No shit

[mhall119]

It makes me wonder what Microsoft's security qualifications really are for a signed kernel level driver. I believe they use the Verisign security test: If the check clears the bank, the code is secure.

Re:No shit

[dc29A]

A kernel-level driver can own a system? No shit!

(BTW, that's one of the reasons drivers need to be signed to run on Windows Vista x64.) If by that you mean DRM, then yes. The reason drivers need to be signed is to prevent "theft", to prevent the DRM from breaking.

Re:No shit

[putaro]

You missed the whole point.

The problem isn't that the certificate issuing process is flawed. The problem is that a properly signed driver had a security hole that could be exploited. The GP was not asking what the process for issuing a vendor certificate was, but what the process for certifying the driver (i.e. making sure that it didn't have security holes) was.

Re:No shit

[trifish]

You missed the point. As I wrote elsewhere:

"The point is that an author of a malicious kernel-level Trojan horse wants to stay anonymous, but can't. The certificate authorities (Verisign etc) need to verify your identity first before they issue a code signing certificate for you.

That's how it's much much harder for moronic script kiddies to release kernel-level Trojan horses for Vista x64. Because we (or at least the police) would be able to find out their names and addresses."

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

You have missed the point twice, I'll break it down for you:

* Legit company gets signed drivers for their holes-n-more wireless card.
* Their drivers have security holes
* Anonymous script kiddies enter the kernel enclave anonymously via the above security holes in the signed driver from legitco.
* Anonymous malpeople remain happy and anonymous and send a box of chocolates to legitco as thanks for the new army of vistabots.

Does that make it through?

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

lol. you don't read the other flamer's texts at all ???

he's not trying to talk about the ati driver. he's just pointing out that the driver signing doesn't actually solve anything, so even if ati fixes it's own flaw, you can still never be sure what to trust or not.

you are trying to explain the point of this article, but the other flamer is talking about the problem in a bigger scope, windows is still screwed(tm) :p

Re:No shit

[putaro]

You've now written the same stupid thing in three places. Try reading and comprehending.

If you can exploit someone else's signed driver to get trusted access you don't need to apply for a certificate to sign your exploit. Therefore since you never applied for a certificate there's no way to track you down.

Re:No shit

[trifish]

Sorry, but you're just plain stupid. The things you say are as stupid as saying: "Linux firewall is defective by design because there was some unpatched security hole in it (yes, there were many) and someone exploited it and rooted the system." See how stupid you are?

Re:No shit

[trifish]

Authenticode was there before Vista driver signing. You know why? It was used to sign ActiveX components which moronic script kiddies used to install malware. The browser can be configured to run only signed ActiveX components so the script kiddies can't do it (they want to stay anonymous which they can't, due to the signature requirements).

On Vista it's absolutely the same. Not just for DRM-breaking criminals, but for ANY criminals who want to stay anonymous (kernel level malware is the ultimate shit).

Re:No shit

[trifish]

The things you say are as stupid as saying: "Linux firewall is defective by design because there was some unpatched security hole in it (yes, there were many) and someone exploited it and rooted the system." See how stupid you are? Does that make it through?

Re:No shit

[putaro]

It's not the same thing at all. You're saying that script kiddies will get caught because they had to sign their code. That's an assertation of fact, not an opinion. Factually, you're wrong because there are paths open for kernel level exploits that don't require you to get a certificate. See the point? It's not an opinion that you don't need the certificate, it's a statement of fact. Whether or not that makes signing the code useless is a matter of opinion, but the fact that signed drivers are not being vetted well enough to actually be "trusted" is a fact as shown by the exploit.

Re:No shit

[trifish]

If you read what I wrote again, I'm sure you'll get it. And if not, read it again. Etc. I'm not going to waste my time on you by repeating myself endlessly. This was my last post to you.

Croppies Lie Down

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, croppies ye'd better be quiet and still
Ye shan't have your liberty, do what ye will
As long as salt water is formed in the deep
A foot on the necks of the croppy we'll keep
And drink, as in bumpers past troubles we drown,
A health to the lads that made croppies lie down
Down, down, croppies lie down.

Comforting, in a way...

[an.echte.trilingue]

For my part, I'm not going to play the blame game since I don't know better either way. I am, however, in some strange way comforted to see that Windows users are starting to have issues with ATI drivers, too.

All those years of trying to get fglrx to work, avenged!

So, is that what you call passive aggression?

Re:Comforting, in a way...

[Gazzonyx]

... All those years of trying to get fglrx to work, avenged!

So, is that what you call passive aggression? No. after trying to get them to work once on Solaris (over the span of a week), I'd say it's justifiable grounds for homicide.

Re:Comforting, in a way...

[Markspark]

ati drivers used to make my win 98se freeze, my win xp freeze, my win 2000 freeze, and they've been a bitch in ubuntu (which i've been using since warty..) so the main question i guess is: How can ATI still be in business?

It will not work. Ever.

[Opportunist]

Actually I'm amazed it took almost a year. I would've betted my annual income that something like this would surface before May.

Let's take a look at the inner workings of the system. Yes, MS has full access to the source code, so their drivers will probably not leak. They also have no "real" competition on the OS market (yes, there's Linux, there's MacOS, but what company would switch?). They can take their time to proof and perfect their drivers until you can be certain that they don't leak.

Do third party vendors have the source? No. Do they have tight schedules and competition breathing down their neck? You bet. Will they prefer performance or security? Well, what of those two is tested on pages like THG?

Worse yet, what if such a driver actually allows a user to "crack open" his system and use it as he pleases? Could you see people buy a cheap ATI card just for the purpose of disabling the DRM? I mean, there have been really, really crappy games for some consoles that sold surprisingly well, because they contained a bug that allowed disabling certain security measures. Save-game exploits were quite popular for a while.

Could you see that this "security" bug could actually be a selling argument FOR the hardware rather than against it?

Re:It will not work. Ever.

[Tony]

(yes, there's Linux, there's MacOS, but what company would switch?)

Ernie Ball
Wotif.com
Burlington Coat Factory
Peugeot

Just to name a few.

And of course IBM and Novell, but they don't count, as they are strong GNU/Linux players.

Of course, Siemens was a bit off in their prediction of 20% market share by 2008. But I'd say there's the chance we might make 20% some day.

Re:It will not work. Ever.

[tknd]

Could you see that this "security" bug could actually be a selling argument FOR the hardware rather than against it?

In the case of some thing like the iphone, yes.

I see...

[lixee]

So the reason ATI is not giving us Linux users free drivers, is because they care about the security of our systems. Talk about irony!

In Other News

[Anonymous Coward]

  In Other News .... Dell Asks ATI for better windows vista drivers.

Linux fglrx module possibly also exploitable

[chrb]

The fglrx module expects the registers related to Thread Local Storage to be in a certain state. If you mess around with it, you can cause a kernel crash. Try running wincecfg from =0.9.31 includes a check for fglrx in TLS mode and aborts), it will crash the kernel with 100% repeatability. You can find details in ATI and wine bugzillas.

I always wondered if this could be turned into a more dangerous security exploit. And now I wonder how much code is shared between fglrx and the Windows driver, as it seems it has similar bugs.

Re:Linux fglrx module possibly also exploitable

[Bralkein]

I'm sure anyone who's had much experience with the fglrx driver would be surprised if that piece of crap only contains one vulnerability ;-)

And this is why

[Ravenscall]

And this is why I have used nVidia hardware since I upgraded from my Voodoo 3 3000. While ATI and nVidia may go back and forth in hardware performance, nVidia has much better driver support on Linux or Windows.

*Still rather upset That there is no linux acceleration driver for the ATI Rage Mobility in the original iBook, I would much rather run Linux on it than OS X or OS 9.

Re:And this is why

[a.d.trick]

I agree that nVidia has pretty good drivers and cards (I <3 my new 8800), but they've had the same kinds of problems too. People don't write perfect code and if it's not open, the chances of bugs like these slipping through is very real. This is a problem for both companies.

Re:And this is why

[Anonymous Coward]

bugs also slip through in OSS, having the source available doesn't guarantee bugfree software on the first shot and unpatched OSS software is just as much a security risk as unpatched closed source software.
if not.. why again are there all kinds of bugfixes and patches for OSS software if it's just so superior and perfect?

Re:And this is why

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you have not used Nvidia hardware on Vista... their drivers are buggy as hell. From screen corruption when changing resolutions on a 7900GT, to the inability to playback videos stored on SATA drives in quicktime using the nforce4 drivers, you never know what will fall apart next

Re:And this is why

[Ravenscall]

Actually I did, and the only issue I ran into is a game would crash after an hour or so if I was running Dream Scene. I experienced none of the other problems, but then my board is an nForce 550.

Really cleaning up the Internet

[tjstork]

The whole problem with the internet is that our anti-malware strategy is defensive, and honestly, its just getting downright annoying and expensive. We need to go after people that actually create malware, and with some serious tools. It is increasingly reckless to let a few bad eggs hold the entire world hostage.

a) It's time to design the internet so that anonymous traffic is not possible. Make it possible to track the spread of this malware back from to the source. Make malware not just the crime of malware itself, but of identity theft as well.

a) Declare any writer of malware to be a Terrorist Enemy Combatant. If someone is writing an attack on an American computer system from offshore, we should have the CIA / FBI, etc, sending them to Gitmo as well. If foreign nations are not willing to enforce or do something about computer crime laws, then the United States has to enforce those laws for them. Send a few malicious geeks off to Guantinomo, I say. Cyberware IS terrorism.

Really, I'm way past hackers and security people being portrayed as some black and white struggle that we all must take part in. I'd much rather have my good guys in government going and killing all of the bad guys, without me having to even think about it.

Re:Really cleaning up the Internet

[frakfrakfrak]

Your troll-fu is weak, Daniel-san. Only when you can praise Jon Katz will you be ready.

Re:Really cleaning up the Internet

[Knight2K]

1. It is important to use the correct names for things. The word "terrorist" is subset of "criminal". My working definition of 'terrorist', which can doubtless be improved on, is: one who uses violence to create terror or panic within a populace in order to achieve political ends. Without the political component, a terrorist is simply a criminal guilty of assault, murder, theft, etc. and should be caught and prosecuted accordingly. By using this term incorrectly, you are just as guilty of spreading FUD as the U.S. government. While this may be an effective way to get attention, it is alarmist, unethical, and immoral.

By expanding the meaning of the term, the government has been able to greatly expand its power at the expense of its citizens. It certainly is important to catch and prosecute cyber-criminals, but discuss it rationally and pass appropriate, targeted laws to deal with the problem. More importantly, enforce the ones that already exist.

2. In most cases, a non-anonymous network would probably be fine, as long as encryption was used to keep data private. Unfortunately, we live in a world where, in some places, using encryption will get you tossed in jail, regardless of the content. In other words, it can be important to hide not only what you sent, but the fact that you sent it. A concrete example would be blogging in China. Given recent events with the NSA, I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. government starts to take a more active role in discouraging personal strong encryption. How do we solve that problem?

3. Guantanamo is one of the worst violations of human rights in recent history. Even the basest criminals are entitled to due process. That's what makes our system justice and not revenge. The United States is NOT the world police. There is a process to be followed to enforce change in other countries. The lack of serious international backing is part of our problem in Iraq. The U.S., despite being the last world superpower, does not have the resources to fight every battle and prosecute every crime that other countries won't deal with.

You are right that we need effective computer crime laws and effective enforcement of them. The way to do it is to lobby other countries for this and establish treaties with them. Use diplomacy and sanctions where necessary. It isn't impossible; if we can get intellectual property laws perverted across the globe, surely we can expend the effort needed to reach cyber-criminals where ever they choose to hide.

4. The government is supposed to work for us, but it needs watching. One of the most important lessons of modern history is that we have to be active and mistrustful of government, in order for it to function correctly. The Bay of Pigs was the first warning and the Watergate scandal made this manifest. The Iraq war, NSA wiretapping, and the PATRIOT Act are examples of what happens when we fail to perform our role of government watchdog. I'm not going to trust the government on who the bad guys are. I want the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, etc. to gather evidence and arrest criminals and bring them before the appropriate judicial authority and prove their case before the public.

You are correct that this is a serious international problem and needs serious international intervention, but it also has to be done right.

Re:Really cleaning up the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this "our" crap? Not everyone uses Windows. Windows is defective by design. You do not need to defend against malware if your operating system is already designed ground up to prevent methods of bad behavior known in computer science for decades. Windows Vista is just a hack on top of all the prior Microsoft Windows releases. While Microsoft Windows itself is just a hack on top the profoundly insecure and stunningly badly-coded DOS.

You cannot build a decent building if your foundation is rotten.

Microsoft is guilty of profound neglience in its operating system/Office suite monopoly.

But when you have that much money it is easy to buy off the judges.

My understanding was that video runs in ring 3

[NullProg]

Oops, I guess not....

Because WPF is largely written in managed code on the common language runtime, it never ran in kernel mode. There are elements of WPF (called the MIL) that are written in unmanaged code, but that code also largely runs (and always has run) in user mode. Insofar as WPF needs to touch kernel mode stuff (e.g., drivers), it interacts with them through the existing DirectX APIs. The user mode and kernel mode aspects of the WPF architecture haven't changed.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051216-5788 .html

So what did Microsoft gain with the Vista GDI changes?

Enjoy,

Re:My understanding was that video runs in ring 3

[A non-mouse Coward]

This is actually a bug in the driver, which is in kernel space, not a bug in the way the ATI card renders images/graphics on screen (directX libraries, etc.). Yes, that part may be better insulated, but kernel driver bugs are kernel takeover bugs.

Re:My understanding was that video runs in ring 3

[Foolhardy]

In NT 3.x, the Win32 video driver model was created from scratch. A video driver consisted of two parts: a video miniport driver that does the actual talking to hardware, resource allocation, etc., running in kernel mode and a display driver that handles all the drawing and display functions, running in user mode with the window server (winsrv.dll) hosted in csrss.exe. In NT4, Microsoft moved the window manager into kernel mode (win32k.sys), which took the display driver with it.

Vista supports two display driver arrangements: XPDDM, the XP display driver model, which is compatible with XP drivers (with the display driver in kernel mode like NT4), and LDDM (Longhorn display driver model) which has moved the display driver back into user mode, hosted in dwm.exe with the new desktop window manager.

There is a private interface for the display driver in user mode to communicate with the miniport driver in kernel mode. This is presumably where the ATI driver flaw is: the miniport apparently has a function to let the display driver read and write to arbitrary memory locations. Note that the caller has to be privileged to even open the miniport device object for communication. The flaw here allows a privileged user to bypass driver signing requirements.

For example, with nVidia's drivers, the XPDDM version has nv4_mini.sys as the miniport, and nv4_disp.dll as the display driver (kernel mode). The LDDM version has nvlddmkm.sys as the miniport and nvd3dumx.dll as the display driver (user mode).

The miniport has always been in kernel mode because it has to talk to the hardware. The display driver has gone from user to kernel and back to user mode.
Linux also uses a split kernel mode / user mode driver (in the X server) model.

Re:My understanding was that video runs in ring 3

[ozbird]

So what did Microsoft gain with the Vista GDI changes?

Leverage to "encourage" people to upgrade to Vista to run DirectX 10 games?

Drivier signing != driver quality

[Old time hacker]

Every Vista install that uses the exploitable driver, you mean. Just as an exploitable driver for Linux would open every Linux install that uses that driver. For example, I have an NVidia card; as and when I upgrade to Vista, I won't be vulnerable to this particular exploit.

Errr... Are you sure? The bad guy can bring the ATI driver with him, and load it on your system. The key question is whether it will stay loaded long enough for the exploit to work even if the hardware is not present. At Blackhat this year, a bunch of similar exploits in Vista drivers were described, and at least some of them (possibly all) did not need their specialized hardware to load and stay loaded on the box.

Also, please note that getting your own signing key is not difficult or expensive ( $1000 ) and then you can sign any old chunk of malware that you like. Of course, you might want to make it do something useful as well so as to give yourself plausible deniability if it gets detected.

Re:Drivier signing != driver quality

[Anonymous Coward]

"The bad guy can bring the ATI driver with him, and load it on your system."

If a bad guy can access your system then the game is already over. Why would the bad guy want to install the ATI driver when he can go ahead and install a root kit?

"The key question is whether it will stay loaded long enough for the exploit to work even if the hardware is not present."

No, the key question here is how the hell did this bad guy install a device driver on your system. As I already said, it implies the game was already over before the ATI driver comes into play.

Re:Drivier signing != driver quality

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get it, YOU ARE THE BAD GUY. The whole point of this driver signing scheme is to prevent you from getting access to certain parts of the system, so that the DRM can remain secure. Of course, you could always use a bootkit to regain control, at least until a TPM is required for everything.

Re:Drivier signing != driver quality

[Anonymous Coward]

"The bad guy can bring the ATI driver with him, and load it on your system."

There, I reposted the original poster's words and highlighted two parts of the phrase. Following me here? Good. The original poster IS TALKING ABOUT TWO PEOPLE! Count it. One, two. Do you know who they are? They are 1) the bad guy, 2) the end user. The end user is NOT the bad guy. Let me repeat that, the END USER IS NOT THE BAD GUY!

The original point I was making is that this buggy driver with an exploit is not a security hole. Why? Because if the bad guy can install a device driver onto your computer then access to your computer has already been compromised (long before ATI released buggy device drivers)

There's always the Intel drivers.

[Grendel Drago]

Intel has been supporting open source drivers for their video hardware for quite some time now. I suppose the hardware isn't nearly as sexy as that from nVidia or ATI, but it is an option.

Re:There's always the Intel drivers.

[Ant P.]

From what I've seen, even nVidia are making an effort to improve their 2D driver. ATi don't even bother having someone respond to the mailing lists.

More likely an "oops" moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

which needs more than "n/t" since apparently this needs to be more original as someone has used the same comment before.

I'm not going to blame Microsoft

[ajs318]

I'm not going to blame Microsoft. I'm going to blame the various countries' legislators for not passing a law demanding that driver Source Code be published as a condition of approval of hardware for sale.

If there were such a law on the books, many vulnerabilities would be flushed out. The closedness is at the very root of the problems, and the only way to solve them for good is to enforce Source Code availability.

(I don't buy your "Let the Free Market Decide" bleatings. I can see where you're coming from, but you have to realise there is no free market in the computer hardware sector anymore, just a cartel of vendors who use various dirty tricks to prevent competition from outside. In this situation, only Government can make a difference.)

Re:I'm not going to blame Microsoft

[Eighty7]

I don't get the modding on this site. Many others later said the same thing & got modded up for their trouble.

ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

News like this only reminds me why I've stopped buying ATI video cards ... their drivers have always sucked big dead bison balls.

purple pill? O.o

[Spy der Mann]

I only knew about the red pill and the blue pill. Hmmmmmmmmmm........

Morpheus: This is your last chance, Neo. After this, there is no turning back.
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you awake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.Remember: all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more.
Neo: And the purple pill?
Morpheus: Oh, the purple pill gets you high. I can't guarantee what happens later.
Neo: I'll take the purple pill. (*gulp*)
(After a short pause...)
Whoa, dude, I can see what's behind the mirror! Whoa... everything's like computer code! I understand what the Matrix is now!!
(Back in the nebuchadnezzar...)
WE'RE LOSING HIM!
Neo: I can fly dude!!! Excellent!!!
Flatline: beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep....

(Some time later...)
Trinity: Seriously, Morpheus. This is the 20th time we lose a potential "One" because of the purple pill!
Morpheus: He wasn't "The One". "The One" would have survived.
Trinity: Idiot.

Now, seriously, what's "purple pill"?

Re:purple pill? O.o

[elFarto the 2nd]

That's different to the purple pill one I heard:

Morpheus: You take the purple pill, you wake up in your bed and I show you how far the rabbit-hole goes.

Regards
elFarto

Re:purple pill? O.o

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, seriously, what's "purple pill"?

Nexium?

Re:purple pill? O.o

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, seriously, what's "purple pill"?

Nexium. I think. I always ignore that guy on TV when he tells me to ask my doctor about the purple pill.

Re:purple pill? O.o

[fbartho]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=334

I think it deals with recent hypervisor rootkits. Via google and extra keywords of hypervisor and security, you should be able to find more literature.

Re:purple pill? O.o

[Tarlus]

Now, seriously, what's "purple pill"? It's what you get when you mix the red and blue pills.

Break the signing

[Tony]

How long before a signing tool comes out?

This whole business of "signing" is ridiculous. It's no safer than the current model. Perhaps even less safe, as it gives both the OS programmers and the end-users a false sense of security. "You can trust a signed driver."

No, you can't.

The only way I can see to make a truly safe system is to run each driver in its own VM, and create a virtual network between the drivers and the core OS. Each user-end program would also run in its own VM, and IPC would occur via the system network, rather than direct system calls. Each IPC message would have to have a signature for types of input (data type, string length, etc) and a common, well-audited message dispatcher would have to validate each message for conformance.

This is microkernel architecture on steroids, meaning it's big and slow and dumb, but solid. Even then, a single security flaw in the VM system would compromise the entire system.

Re:Break the signing

[trifish]

The point is that an author of a malicious kernel-level Trojan horse wants to stay anonymous, but can't. The certificate authorities (Verisign etc) need to verify your identity first before they issue a code signing certificate for you.

That's how it's much much harder for moronic script kiddies to release kernel-level Trojan horses for Vista x64. Because we (or at least the police) would be able to find out their names and addresses.

Re:Break the signing

[Anonymous Coward]

> How long before a signing tool comes out?
Like the one in the SDK?

It's not about safety, its about traceability.

Re:Break the signing

[GTMoogle]

Exceeeept... apparently you can piggyback on signed drivers to accomplish anything you want to do. We can't just wish ATI to have non-crappy code.

At best we can hope that MS learns a few more things to add to their toolbox for refusing to sign off on kernel level drivers.

Re:Break the signing

[pandrijeczko]

The only way I can see to make a truly safe system is to run each driver in its own VM, and create a virtual network between the drivers and the core OS.

But wouldn't that make your nice shiny new Windows system slow to the speed of a 386 33Mhz?

Oh, wait a minute...

Re:Break the signing

[trifish]

Red herring comment. If there's a security flaw in a driver, the vendor fixes it and you download it. It doesn't mean the system is flawed. Linux has security vulnerabilities too. It doesn't mean the system is inherently insecure forever.

Re:Break the signing

[GTMoogle]

Red herring? Is the article not a specific example of a program being able to anonymously run kernel level code, bypassing the signing mechanism? I wasn't saying it's intrinsically broken, just that what you said (anonymous code can't run) is evidently not the case.

That it exploits a flaw in 3rd party software does not change the fact that the system is currently breakable. Signing simply makes it harder, which is certainly a good thing. It does not confer complete trust, which is what absolute statement like the one you made imply.

It does have the advantage of all the failure points being reviewed by one source (MS) that can be improved over time to catch attacks like this. They obviously are not yet perfect, but it's a marked improvement. But still, how many holes are found by people who aren't honest security researchers? How many people get patched? We have no way of judging the safety of the system, nor if its improvements are increasing at a sufficient pace.

Re:Break the signing

[trifish]

(anonymous code can't run) is evidently not the case

Anonymous code can't run when all security holes are patched. That's the state of the system which we should be judging (not one with unpatched vulnerabilities).

Re:Break the signing

[Anonymous Coward]

when all security holes are patched

You're joking, "when all security holes are patched" in an MS product?
That is the seventh seal - one of those world changing events, as they say...

Re:Break the signing

[Skrapion]

Wow, somebody hasn't done any software engineering.

You shouldn't even rely on having all your own security holes patches, how can you rely on a third party having all its security holes patches?

Re:Break the signing

[trifish]

You shouldn't even rely on having all your own security holes patches, how can you rely on a third party having all its security holes patches?

Yes, so you, too, whenever the Linux kernel has a security hole discovered that allows one to own the system remotely start crying "Oh my God, the system is defective by design!"?

Re:Break the signing

[trifish]

Yes, it is possible. For example IIS (the Windows web server) never had a single remote exploit (unlike Apache). However, you didn't get it. If you want to say that a system is defective by design, you must judge its default ideal state (that's for the "by design" part).

And, most importantly, the things you say are as stupid as saying: "Linux firewall is defective by design because there was some unpatched security hole in it (yes, there were many) and someone exploited it and rooted the system." See how stupid you are? Does that make it through?

Re:Break the signing

[Skrapion]

I don't think "defective by design" means what you think it means...

Re:Break the signing

[trifish]

I don't think "defective by design" means what you think it means...

Or maybe it's just that your way of thinking is defective by design.

I thought the kernel was the holy of all holies

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is MS allowing 3rd party drivers in the kernel in the first place?

Dang...

[PJ1216]

...and just when you thought Vista was secure, somebody finds some way to break in...

PATCHES DO SHIT

[Inoshiro]

"Seems like the real concern is not that ATI's code opens a security hole. You know ATI will patch it."

That's a really naive attitude. I think Bruce Schneier put it best: "Once you stop thinking about security backward, you immediately understand why the current software security paradigm of patching doesn't make us any more secure. If vulnerabilities are so common, finding a few doesn't materially reduce the quantity remaining. A system with 100 patched vulnerabilities isn't more secure than a system with 10, nor is it less secure. A patched buffer overflow doesn't mean that there's one less way attackers can get into your system; it means that your design process was so lousy that it permitted buffer overflows, and there are probably thousands more lurking in your code."

I say to ATI: your Kung Fu is lousy. This would also be why I haven't (on purpose) purchased an ATI card in years, and also why I continue to be disappointed with some of Apple's hardware choices. At least Apple manages the ATI drivers themselves, but if you wanted to use BootCamp (...). We know ATI does software as well as Microsoft does hardware (how many Xbox 360s are dead?); why do people continue to buy their snake-oil and bullshit?

Re:PATCHES DO SHIT

[Dekortage]

To quote from the Schneier column you mention: "A patched buffer overflow doesn't mean that there's one less way attackers can get into your system; it means that your design process was so lousy that it permitted buffer overflows, and there are probably thousands more lurking in your code."

Well, Bruce, it means BOTH things: it's one less way attackers can get into the system AND the design process was lousy.

You suggested that my attitude was that patches will fix everything. Not hardly. Read the context: I'm saying that ATI will patch this particular hole, but the VASTLY MORE IMPORTANT question is how many other supposedly securely-signed drivers have similar holes? You think ATI is alone in this? Or even that this is the only hole in ATI's code? Of course not. So this isn't really news about ATI. It's news about Microsoft's supposed "secure drivers" process being a joke. I'm sure we knew that already, but here is hard proof.

Re:PATCHES DO SHIT

[Blakey Rat]

We know ATI does software as well as Microsoft does hardware (how many Xbox 360s are dead?);

I assume your question is rhetorical. So an abnormal amount of Xbox 360s have problems. Microsoft, to resolve this issue, extended the warranty for every Xbox 360 to three years for free. That's a lot of commitment to their customers, above and beyond what the vast majority of the industry does when hardware defects arise. (You mention Apple; they're a good exception also. Their replacement program for faulty iBooks was great. And a hell of a lot more, by percentage, of those G3 iBooks are dead than Xbox 360s-- I'd be surprised to see any of them still running now.)

In any case, I have had no problems with my Microsoft keyboards and mouses. I have a Microsoft wireless internet router that's the best one I've ever owned: My Netgear one's antenna busted, the Seimens one couldn't keep a connection open longer than an hour without cutting it off, and the LinkSys one just randomly died one day. This Microsoft one is the second one I bought, years and years ago, and it keeps on chugging on like a champ with no problems. (Pity they don't make them anymore!)

Windows drivers worse then Linux drivers?

[nukem996]

For the longest time I thought that all ATI drivers sucked equally on all platforms. But I guess they suck even more on Windows then they do on Linux.

Re:Windows drivers worse then Linux drivers?

[Frenchman113]

Since the Linux drivers share a good deal of code with the Windows drivers, it's not at all impossible that the Linux fglrx kernel module is also exploitable.

HA-HA!

[rAiNsT0rm]

A few months back (after over 12 years with Linux) I finally took the plunge and went Linux-only on my main home PC. I went with Ubuntu 7.04 simply for the basic completeness and fair stability. There are some of the same glaring issues that have plagued Linux since 12 years ago which is so damn frustrating I can't even begin to explain it, there are still some big unification/usability flaws, but the one thing I don't miss at all? Shit like this. A video driver opening a hole that I can't see or close that could cause my computer to be wrecked.

The iron is as hot as it has ever been for Linux, I just wish one distro would come out with something truly amazing and awe-inspiring in the next round of releases to capitalize on the current attitude towards Windows. From what I've seen the big players are just continuing on with incremental upgrades, little to no art or polish, and nothing really newsworthy... I'm just hoping someone has a big ace in their sleeve. Maybe Redhat, PCLOS is growing fast, and my personal darkhorse that I've been pulling for: PC-BSD and their PBI packages, amazing! If only Ubuntu or someone would get something similar.

Re:HA-HA!

[Control Group]

Honest question, not intended as flamebait - I really don't know the answer. Has any Linux distro implemented true, system-wide copy/cut & paste? As minor as it is, it's one of the niggling little annoyances that prevented me from switching quite some time ago (last time this was the reason was, I think, when I was trying RedHat 5). Other problems have prevented me since (Inkjet drivers at one point, wireless NIC drivers at another, wireless USB dongle drivers currently), but I've reason to believe they've been resolved.

Re:HA-HA!

[rAiNsT0rm]

Truthfully, I hear this a lot, but it has never affected me. I do mainly stick to Gnome and Gnome-based apps, but I use Amarok, K3B, and a few other KDE apps and have never had any trouble with copy/paste. I will say that it is an issue that needs addressed, along with a number of other UI and UI unification issues. All the levels of abstraction are great at times, but in reality it does make for a mess that is too complex for the average user.

I never understand why we have to insist on having X, a desktop environment, AND a window manager for average desktop systems. I would absolutely kill for an all-in-one system geared for home use. No choice, no thousand and one options. I also wouldn't mind a distro to be tuned for at most 4 users at once.

CUPS is pretty good for printing now, however sharing printers is a bit of a mess (moreso than it needs to be). Wireless has come a long way, I have one laptop that is not supported well but the rest work fine... as for wireless USB I have no idea.

If anything, pop in an Ubuntu 7.04 LiveCD and give it a shot, it won't hurt anything and you can at least see the current state of things. HTH

Re:HA-HA!

[Creepy Crawler]

I had the same questions too about cut and pasting.

Simply enough, hilight/middle-click works on every X-Windows application. If it's a gnome app, works. If it's a kde app, it works. If it's a motif (egads), it works.

It just works.

Re:HA-HA!

[TheAwfulTruth]

What are you talking about?

Linux is rooted ROUTINELY. It just rarely gets reported on in /.

There was just a giant BSD root festival reported on yesterday.

"Shit like this" happens everywhere and ignoreing it or pretending it doesn't exist on Linux is just plain ignorant.

Re:HA-HA!

[msuarezalvarez]

I never understand why we have to insist on having X, a desktop environment, AND a window manager for average desktop systems. I would absolutely kill for an all-in-one system geared for home use. No choice, no thousand and one options. I also wouldn't mind a distro to be tuned for at most 4 users at once.

The fact that the X server, the window manager, the window decorator, the compositor, the selection manager, and the `desktop environment' (which is really a big compositum of many many parts) are separate pieces is rather irrelevant for `home use' or for mostly any other use apart from developing them. Windows does separate some of those roles too (you can change the window manager, for example)

Most of the popular distros of the day do not really present a huge number of options. If you install Fedora, say, and unless you go to the lengths of looking for the options (which in particular means that you already know about them, and that you care about changing the defaults) you get presented with no thousand options for any of the pieces you mention. This week I installed Fedora 7 on a coworkers computer, and pressing the Next button a few times presents you with not much more choice than the username for the non-root user. She's been using Fedora since FC1 and I am quite sure she is not aware of the possibility of having a compositing manager which is different from the window manager which is different from the window decorator nor, really, of the fact that those entities exist at all.

Re:HA-HA!

[rAiNsT0rm]

Yeah, no. FAIL. Rooting requires a failure on the user side, meaning YOU have control over it. A driver from a company that you have no option but to just trust with your safety is a different story. You go ahead and accept the one of 30,000 ways you can get screwed on a Windows box, I'll stick the the few (which I can control) on mine.

Re:HA-HA!

[rAiNsT0rm]

That depends, from the angle you are talking about yes you are correct. However, go ahead and have a user install Compiz. Then when they lose their borders, and other "irrelevant" things needed to use the environment see how important it is. Sure, when shit works perfectly no one needs to know or care, but when there is an issue, prepare to dig through all of those layers to resolve it... and for the average Joe that's like asking them to do their own dentistry. Hell, even installing a program requires the user understand about desktop environments. Again, this is the kind of stuff that needs worked on. Not for you and me, but for a true desktop OS. Look at OSX, do people need to be concerned with 20 choices in each area of UI? Nope, it just works.

Re:HA-HA!

[msuarezalvarez]

I do not think I know anyone who knows how to change the default window manager in Windows.

As for compiz, I'm quite sure clicking the appropriate checkbox in the aptly-named Add/Remove Software dialog that's invoked by the last item on the default Applications menu in FC7 will install compiz. I wouldn't know, as I have never found any use for it so I've never installed it.

In any case, `being able to install compiz' is hardly the bar for being desktop-ready. A default install of FC7 has 95% of what 97.5% of the people need for their home use, up to drivers and codecs. And no one needs compiz.

Re:HA-HA!

[rAiNsT0rm]

This is exactly what is so frustrating about Linux. You've never ACTUALLY tried it, but your sure you're right. *smacks forehead*

Yes, it is as simple to install as clicking on it in add/remove in FC/Ubuntu/whatever and 9 times out of 10 your window borders will disappear and the average user is then screwed.

I did not place my entire reasoning on simply installing Compiz, nice try at a straw man argument. *I'VE* never had a problem with lots of shit in Linux, because I can fix it... so by your logic that means if YOU personally aren't affected, then there is no problem. Exactly my point. People have different hardware, software, needs, likes, dislikes, and on and on and you have to cater to all of them somehow in an OS... that is part of it. Well, *I* can see just fine so screw accessibility options and magnifiers and screen readers! I mean 95-97.5% (I love how you got so specific with fake percentages) of the population CAN SEE JUST FINE, so why even bother?

Christ.

Re:HA-HA!

[msuarezalvarez]

When I said I've never installed it I meant I've never installed it as an user. See, I have the source for my complete desktop environment, I can work out my way around quite well, I know my window managers, their related specs, and such stuff quite well (I am even guilty of having written a window manager in my youth) and I am actually one of the (essentially ex) maintainers for one piece of this desktop which gets quite a lot of exposure. I was in fact doing pretty well with Slackware back in mid '94, so if I used my own experience as a measure, the linux desktop has been around for over a decade. I do not judge the state of the venerable Linux Desktop according to how it affects me or what problems I have.

I still maintain that your comment that:

I never understand why we have to insist on having X, a desktop environment, AND a window manager for average desktop systems. I would absolutely kill for an all-in-one system geared for home use. No choice, no thousand and one options. I also wouldn't mind a distro to be tuned for at most 4 users at once.

makes essentially no sense.

BTW, I am quite convinced that the desktop sucks. All desktops. Unifying logically separate stacks into a big massive piece of code will not fix that (I am posit that it'd make changing window managers quite a bit more complicated, in fact!)

Re:HA-HA!

[rAiNsT0rm]

That was my point, not to change WMs. Just as OSX is unified, so should Linux. Not all Linux, and not even a single distro, make it optional. If I, joe user, wants the default personal desktop install I get a single UI. period. It does not have to be all of the others mashed into one, it can be it's own system which is capable of calling the needed libraries in the background (Gnome, KDE, etc.) so nothing truly changes programatically as far as apps are concerned, just the user.

Is it a big job? yep. I fully understand the ramifications of what I am saying, again I too have been with Linux for over a decade. 12 of its 16 years.

Advanced users could easily select an advanced install and choose a true setup with full blown X, WM, DE, etc. OSX has Linux beat in a lot of areas and most of them boil down to the UI and usability. To deny Linux is failing in this area is folly.

What a bunch of malarky

[tjstork]

A terrorist is someone who causes harm in order to achieve an end. Viruses do cause harm - economic harm. They subvert law enforcement because they hide in countries that sanction those attacks. Thus, stopping the terrorist requires some form of violent action, as that nation who hosts those attacks uses the implicit violence of its sovereignty to hide him.

Gitmo is not one of the "worst abuses in history" as you claim. I would suggest that you research topics from the Holocaust, before you make such an absurdly alarmist claim.

Doing it right, means not listening to a word that you say.

Re:What a bunch of malarky

[m.ducharme]

A terrorist is someone who causes harm in order to achieve an end. You know, surgeons do cause harm when they cut into you. They have a good reason (usually), but harm is caused. Or how about the tax man? Taking your hard earned money from you to build a road or educate someone else's child is certainly harmful to you, and may not even do you any good. What about the parent who spanks their child? Or grounds a child? What about the revolutionary heroes of the American War of Independence? All terrorists? Do you want to maybe rethink your position?

Re:What a bunch of malarky

[Knight2K]

I was trying to avoid Godwin's law, since there are many other examples that can be appealed to besides Nazi Germany. The genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Darfur works as well. Saying Gitmo is "one of the worst" is not the same as "is the worst". I am certainly aware of the Holocaust, know a great deal about it and certainly acknowledge that it happened and was terrible. I have no problem with the Holocaust being the worst, but Gitmo is clearly wrong and abusive.
In a way, is there any point in ranking these things? They are each violations of human rights; some are certainly more horrific than others, but a violation is a violation just the same.

I debated adding illegality as a criteria for terrorism, but assumed it was implied. I wouldn't mind amending my definition. I agree with you that lawful force can be necessary, but the keyword is 'lawful'. International laws are laws as well and need to be respected until they can be changed to address the situation. We have standards for when invading other countries is allowed; we can't just choose to enforce our laws on other people's sovereign territory without getting a legal mandate to do so. If you argued that the U.N. is not up to addressing these issues, I would agree, and suggest that fixing the U.N. to be a more effective organization would help.

This is Slashdot, of course, so you are certainly free to ignore my suggestions, but I would hope that the due process of law falls under "doing it right".

Re:What a bunch of malarky

[tjstork]

I'll keep it short. The point is, we have to fix the UN but in a climate where the world resents the past abuses of American Power, through both political parties, therefor, it is a hell of a problem.

Re:What a bunch of malarky

[roadninja]

I don't know where you get your definitions or if you just make them up, but all of the definitions I looked up include the word "violence". To my mind your not a terrorist unless you use violence to achieve your goals. Intimidation is not enough. The proper quote was "Guantanamo is one of the worst violations of human rights in recent history." What do you consider recent? Personally, recent would be anything that has happened in the current or even the last generation. Therefore the Holocaust would not be considered "recent". It's been almost seventy years. Thats just loo long to consider it recent. You said "I'd much rather have my good guys in government going and killing all of the bad guys, without me having to even think about it." Who defines who the guys are? If it was me, I'd be OK with that, but if it was you, I'd have a problem with that. I don't think that the current administration has the credentials to be qualified as the "good guys". At best they are a bunch of extremists that think because they have power they have a right to use it to subvert the will of the people. Who defines the bad guys? What defines bad. I don't think that anyone would have a problem hunting down and killing Osama Bin Laden, but I don't think that's the right way to lead. As an American child in the 70's, I was told that the "rule of law" was what made this country great. That people couldn't simply decide to jail others without due process. Not that due process is perfect or even close, but refusing to give the people in Gitmo the simple human rights we take for grated dimminishes us all. I think that makes George W Bush a criminal for human rights violations. If we call something a "Human Right" doesn't that mean it should apply to all humans.

Re:What a bunch of malarky

[Anonymous Coward]

Impressive!

You're the first lawful/good person I've seen online!

Not so.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a graphics driver. It can tell the graphics card to issue DMA bulk transfer requests. Bye-bye memory protection.

Partly correct (slightly OT)

[Lonewolf666]

Windows Vista is just a hack on top of all the prior Microsoft Windows releases. While Microsoft Windows itself is just a hack on top the profoundly insecure and stunningly badly-coded DOS.

Considering the lousy reviews, it seems that Windows Vista is indeed "just a hack" on top of XP.

But it is no longer correct that it is a hack based on DOS. Parallel to Windows 9x, Microsoft introduced the Windows NT line. Windows 2000, XP and Vista are based on that.
In a direct comparison of Windows 2000 to Windows 98 (yes I've used both), Windows 2000 is a lot more stable, especially when confronted with bad applications. It is not perfect but definitely good enough for desktop use.
I'm using XP only occasionally, but it seems OK as well.
Vista - cough - no thanks. The reviews and personal accounts I've read are reason enough not to even try it. And the quality is only half of it, the EULA is even more inacceptable. Even if I strongly suspect it would be unenforceable in my country, I'd rather avoid getting anywhere near it.

Re:Partly correct (slightly OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

When you summarize, you have to leave out the details. Thank you for expounding. Vista is really just like XP, but buggier and with things put in wrong places, everything slowed down, application incompatibility problems, missing drivers, painful eye candy, and the necessity to constantly have to re-assure the system you really meant to do what you just indicated you wanted to do why the hell can't you listen Vista damnit this is annoying fuck you bill gates no i don't want to run it as administrator i just want to run it and have it do what it is supposed to do this is a royal pain in the ass and i paid money for this broken broken broken point of service software.

Re:Partly correct (slightly OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a bit of history for you:

Take an acronym and increment each letter by one

IBM -> HAL (famous example from something everybody should know... this is also a true story as to the creation of the name)

Next:

VMS -> WNT

Windows NT is at least an intelectual decendent of VMS (albiet with massive amounts of hacked in dos and windows code) given it's developer base (namely David Cutler)

Re:Partly correct (slightly OT)

[rtechie]

I'd just like to note that I heard EXACTLY the same things about XP (it's just a hack of Win2k) and they were even more justified then, but everyone is using Windows XP now, aren't they?

Vista isn't fatally broken. It has better hardware support, by a wide margin, than any previous Microsoft OS. Aero is pretty. It *IS* marginally more secure. Some of the new apps are nice. Desktop search is nice.

People bitching about things being in the wrong place can always switch to "Classic" views. There's even a Theme to make this easy.

Besides, you might actually want patches in the future.

Re:Partly correct (slightly OT)

[Lonewolf666]

Vista isn't fatally broken. It has better hardware support, by a wide margin, than any previous Microsoft OS.

I doubt that one. At least for now.

For almost 6 years, XP has been the current version of Windows, and about every hardware vendor made sure to have drivers for it. And will continue to support it for a few more years.

Vista, in contrast, is in the same situation that XP was in when it was new:
No drivers available for a lot of older hardware, because the hardware vendor does not sell it anymore and couldn't care less.
Of course, this will change over time, assuming that most users will eventually adopt Vista instead of deserting to Linux & Co. I guess that 5 years from now Vista will have better hardware support than XP.

Re:Partly correct (slightly OT)

[rtechie]

Vista, in contrast, is in the same situation that XP was in when it was new:
No drivers available for a lot of older hardware, because the hardware vendor does not sell it anymore and couldn't care less. Contrary to what most people seem to think, Vista includes almost EVERY driver and lots more than were included on the WinXPSP2 CD. Also, you CAN use XP drivers in Vista if you want to. Vista bitches, and there might be some bugs, but you can do it pretty easily. Out of my pile of storage controllers and network cards I could only find ONE controller that outright refused to work in Vista. One of the network cards would randomly drop packets, but I think that was the card.

Vista also has pretty steep hardware requirements (in practice), meaning that you really shouldn't be running it on older hardware anyway. I'd argue that this is more true for Vista than any previous MS OS. Lest you bitch about this, I have several systems that can't run RHEL5 because the requirements went up from RHEL4.

Driver Flaw?

[Sh!fty]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if a driver's flaw opens a hole to the operating system's kernel, shouldn't we say the flaw is actually in the operating system?

Re:Driver Flaw?

[Anonymous Coward]

So - how many holes do you want to have in your Gnu/Linux system? Just install a driver...

Revoke ATI's certificate

[jrumney]

So will Microsoft lobby Verisign to revoke ATI's certificate, and add the ATI driver to Windows Defender's malware list now that this hack to circumvent the DRM on HD video is out there in the wild?

I don't see that as accurate anymore

[bogie]

Nvidia's drivers have turned to crap, especially for Vista. Their 8800 series is still full of bugs(alt-tab in and out of games much?) and they almost had a class action lawsuit because of their deceptive marketing. Talk about a botched launch... They've gone from having the best set of unified graphics drivers available to a company who many users feel can't be trusted to support the hardware they are selling. I've pimped Nvidia for years as the gpus to buy because of their former solid drivers, now ATI/AMD is many accounts a better choice for Vista users and stabiilty.

Both companies trade places for who has the best gpu or driver for any given time period and right now Nvidia is just not cutting it.

PS if you want to use Linux but your a gamer dual-boot or buy a console. Complaining about ATI's linux drivers is problem #4,239 for why Linux doesn't make a great desktop for most people, don't expect that to change anytime soon.

Re:I don't see that as accurate anymore

[Tarlus]

now ATI/AMD is many accounts a better choice for Vista users Did you not just read the article?

Re:I don't see that as accurate anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

i read the article and I am still happy I pulled the piece of shit 8800 out of my system and replaced it with an ATI card. all code has bugs, ATI will patch theirs, 9 months after launch Nvidia STILL dont have a semi decent stable driver.

I thought the purple pill was

[Anonymous Coward]

nexium

about Alex Ionescu

[bitflusher]

Alex Ionescu knows a thing or wro about the workings of windows. he was an active dev on the reactos team reverse engineering windows until he got a job offer he could't refuse. he was probably studying the inner workings of vista when he found this, i beleve he's not a security hacker.

he has a bit of a problem being a team player though, there is more than one discussion that ended in a flamewar. althougt i think the reactos team hated to loose his skills few people miss his people skills...

on a personal note i hope everything goes well Alex Ionescu, this was not ment as a personal attack, keep breathing. ;)

You can already do that in dev mode

[rabtech]

You can press F8 to select disable driver signing verification (or you can modify BCD's startup switches for Vista to enable that option all the time). Also, if you can attach a kernel debugger it turns off verification automatically.

In either case, once you have code in kernel mode all that remains is to suss out where the DRM system detects debug mode (to disable high-def playback) and override that protection. Essentially your kernel-mode code patches the kernel to erase its tracks.

I suspect this route would prove much easier than trying to exploit driver weaknesses; alternately just run Vista in a VM and do whatever you like. If they add VM detection code just patch it in memory to bypass the detection.

could someone clarify

[sentientbrendan]

whether windows vista graphics drivers run in kernel mode? I've heard both ways, and I'd like to hear for sure from someone who has actually written drivers for vista.

Re:could someone clarify

[Anonymous Coward]

The driver is split in two parts, one that runs in user mode and one that runs in kernel mode. See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms797619. aspx

*All* computers are vulnerable

[Myria]

Every Vista install that uses the exploitable driver, you mean.

Except when you consider that you can just package the driver with your malware and issue a command to load it. In some cases, you can get a driver to load well enough even when the victim computer doesn't have that device.

this ATI's flaw requires administrative privileges

[thisispurefud]

this ATI's flaw is locally exploitable only and it requires administrative privileges.

in linux it's possible to replace the whole kernel

[thisispurefud]

This ATI's flaws requires administrative privileges... In linux it's possible to replace the whole kernel with a single command line, because linux kernel hasn't a code protection mechanism. linux has a worst protection than Vista