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AU Government To Build "Unhackable" Netbooks
bennyboy64 writes "In what may be one of the largest roll-outs yet of Microsoft's new Windows 7 Operating System, Australia's Federal Government decided to give 240,000 Lenovo IdeaPad S10e netbooks to Year 9-12 students. Officials are calling them 'unhackable.' iTnews reports that the laptops come armed with an enterprise version of the Windows 7 OS, Microsoft Office, the Adobe CS4 creative suite, Apple iTunes, and content geared specifically to students. New South Wales Department of Education CIO Stephen Wilson said that schools were 'the most hostile environment you can roll computers into.' While the netbooks are loaded with many hundreds of dollars worth of software, 2GB of RAM, and a 6-hour battery, the cost to the NSW Department of Education is under $435 (US) a unit. Wilson praised Windows' new OS: 'There was no way we could do any of this on XP,' he said. 'Windows 7 nailed it for us.' At the physical layer, each netbook is password-protected and embedded with tracking software that is embedded at the BIOS level of the machine. If a netbook were to be stolen or sold, the Department of Education is able to remotely disable the device over the network. Each netbook is also fitted with a passive RFID chip which will enable the netbooks to be identified 'even if they were dropped in a bathtub.' The Department of Education also uses the AppLocker functionality within Windows 7 to dictate which applications can be installed."
This needs a "goodluckwiththat" tag...
100 worthless USD for cracking it open in less than 30 days
Your setup is flawed from the start.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
...when Slashdot news beginning with "Australian Government" won't necessarily end with a rephrasing of "shows off its technological naivety".
This is the same govt. that put a guy in jail on child pornography charges for having a Simpson's parody porno on his computer.
Ignorance and arrogance seem to always walk hand in hand.
Lunch or deal. Some state politician and/or bureaucrat must be getting a nice thanks later in life.
The PR reads like pure MS marketing slop with a cute upgrade hint.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I just spoke to a friend in Australia.. its been pwned already using the nuke the bios and boot from a livecd method.
They even disabled the RFID.
"Tracking software embedded at the BIOS level"? Last I checked, those "tracking schemes" just force-fed Windows some driver/app at the BIOS level. Install any other OS and it becomes useless (not to mention that BIOSes these days aren't even hard to hack). As for the RFID, I don't see how disassembling it and taking it out is rocket science. Nevermind that the students themselves are going to be owning any kind of app installation protection in the blink of an eye.
Sorry, using software to secure a platform against its physical holder has never worked for long, but even just trying to do it on an insecure platform like an x86 PC is beyond useless. None of this is has even a remote chance of working without the heaviest-handed TPM-on-CPU-die functionality and signing of each and every piece of software, but that has no chance of working because no one would want such a platform, it would be painful and expensive to develop, and it could never exist given the buggy and insecure nature of PC software in general.
Video game consoles with strong hardware security and tightly controlled software environments with little interoperability requirements get cracked all the time to run homebrew and/or pirate games, what makes these people think their little netbook won't be?
For what it's worth, Linux vs. Windows here makes little difference. The entire scheme is doomed to fail from the start due to the nature of a PC solution like this. Sounds like Microsoft just sold these guys a bunch of nonexistent security.
Setting aside the fact that I don't think giving students laptops is the most efficient use of resources (smaller class sizes, more funding for teachers, arts and science programs etc would be better)... I can't help but wonder if this will be as unhackable as $84 million porn filter released a couple years ago.
What is it with governments and hubris? If they had just shipped all these laptops without any mention of "unhackableness", you know what would have happened?
1: 240,000 kids would have gotten reasonably secure systems with useful software on them
2: People would have noticed how secure and safe the systems were, and appreciated the low rate of problems they experienced
3: Eventually, some smart students would have figured out how to bypass all the security so they can play world of warcraft or something, but nobody would have cared and it wouldn't have gotten any press
Instead, some asshat announces to the world "Bow to our unhackable laptops! We are awesome! HAHAHA!", and now thousands of hackers and security researchers out there have made it their personal crusade to find a way to totally decimate all the security on the box. You're right... It's gonna take about 1 month for an exploit for these things to make it to the front page on slashdot. Fucking idiots.
Footnote:
Yes, I'm aware that security through obscurity is no security at all, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that instead of nobody caring or trying to break the reasonable security they've implemented, now they've got thousands of people working on it. THAT does matter.
I dont understand why this would be considered unhackable. Exploits have already been released for windowed 7.
It is quite simple: Microsoft said that it was unhackable, so as far as the idiot politicians were concerned it must be true.
What grates with me is that the Australian Federal Government is spending money training kids to use MS s/ware - something that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. The MS marketing department must be overjoyed.
What education should be about is understanding, if you just train someone in one version of s/ware many just adopt a point and click approach with little understanding of what they are doing. You need different sorts of s/ware to make them think. Schools should use a mixture of: MS, Mac & Linux PCs.
While the netbooks are loaded with many hundreds of dollars worth of software, 2GB of RAM, and a 6-hour battery, the cost to the NSW Department of Education is under $435 (US) a unit.
The netbooks have hundreds of dollars of software loaded and still only cost $435 a unit. So the cost of the unit is being subsidized and the department is hailing this as some big leap forward in cost of ownership? And some of the big changes are related to the BIOS.
Already, the department has noted the loss or damage of just six netbooks out of the 20,000 rolled out since August - and have tracked one teacher using their device on a field trip in New Zealand.
Yeah, really cool that the school can track and potentially monitor everyone using one of these devices, even if the machine is not physically turned on via the RFID tags. Now there's a big win.
DET also uses the AppLocker functionality within Windows 7 to dictate which applications can be installed on the device.
Even better. Add McAfee filtering to control content and MSFT's own antivirus technology...add up what all that would cost in a real world enterprise. Just the software costs alone would dwarf the cost of the device.
I look at the cost of the device, the software and all the centralized control and think, "Or just install Linux and get 95% of that functionality right out of gate." And the 5% you don't get is the spying and monitoring part. What lesson is the school teaching here?
This is certainly a win for someone, but I'm not sure it's the students and teachers.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Why would anyone issue a challenge like that over netbooks for students? Unhackable? Bullshit! Some hacker out there is going to take that as a challenge and hack into the thing in, I'm guessing, less than a week. And some poor student is going to have his netbook hacked because some nimrod decided to talk smack about how awesome-sauce these netbooks are and described it a "unhackable." Unreal...
If they're so locked down that the students can't do what they want with them, then no, they won't. They will just teach the students to accept spoon-fed information and not to try to investigate anything for themselves.
I work for one of the departments involved, hence the anonymous post.
This is typical government posturing, and has nothing little to do with the what's actually going on.
From what I've seen, the RFID chips are redundant, they're using the machine's BIOS UUID to track machines through software, I don't think they even record the embedded RFID codes at all, as that requires a physical reader device, and they're not handing them out to schools. Normally, RFID tags aren't used for anti-theft, but for inventory tracking.
The BIOS tracking is pretty standard and off-the-shelf, it's not designed to stop professionals, but it will catch stupid thieves. Software protection is not huge, but most 'problems' will be met with an F12 network boot and a fresh system image, so the harm students can do will be limited and easily reversible. Students get limited space to save their work, and that is backed up centrally, so they shouldn't lose any data. On top of that, most questionable sites are blocked by the internet proxies, so that cuts out lots of potential sources of harmful stuff.
Really, the true protection the laptop gets is that every student receives one for free, but a replacement laptop has to be paid for out of their parent's pockets. Students will learn to be careful with them or face punishment from their parents.
There's lots of other silliness going on though, especially as it's my tax dollars going to waste.
For example, the enterprise agreement for the Adobe CS4 suite was a big deal. They spent millions purchasing the software before anyone had actually tried running any of it on an actual laptop. Only after the government had signed the contracts did they bother, only to find out that the screens were too small. All of the Adobe dialog boxes were designed for a vertical height larger than the physical screen resolution, so the OK/Cancel buttons are cut off. The workaround was to install a driver that supports a larger virtual desktop and pans the screen around. It's hideous. This is what happens when you let politicians make technical purchasing decisions.
Similarly, the laptops are rather anemic, which is expected for a netbook, but a lot of the software and content they want to publish is very video-centric. Apparently some types of video, like Flash content and h264, don't always play well, and high-res content is a slide show.
If I recall, China's People's Liberation Army is part-owner of Lenovo.
Exactly why do the Aussies thing there won't be back doors built into the hardware or BIOS?
What education should be about is understanding, if you just train someone in one version of s/ware many just adopt a point and click approach with little understanding of what they are doing. You need different sorts of s/ware to make them think. Schools should use a mixture of: MS, Mac & Linux PCs.
You seem to have severely misunderstood the purpose of these machines.
etch-a-sketch!
To run a live CD of Linux... wouldn't the BIOS have to be set to boot from CD-ROM? The locked BIOS?
So, now you're cracking the case open, and disconnecting the (possibly soldered) battery and hoping the BIOS resets to factory defaults that haven't been set to include the lockouts.
Or, pull out the hard drive, plug it into another machine and do what you will - which might not do a lot of good if they've got the processor set to run signed code only.
I'd try pulling the hard drive and cloning it then playing with the copy until I found out the limits of what I could do.
And don't discount the importance of it, either. All security, no matter what type it is or how it is implemented, is basically designed to slow down anybody who might try to break it. Indeed, security through obscurity itself does this, but the actual slowdown it provides is minimal, and it adds an extra cost: it is difficult to tell when somebody out there has successfully broken your security. By opening up, you can get a bunch of people working on your security to strengthen it, to help offset the few people who might be interested in breaking it.
Anyway, why would you go to such great lengths to slow down any individuals who might see a profit in cracking your systems, then go and piss off a bunch of 1337 haxxorz all over the world and get thousands of them working on the problem in parallel? Kinda defeats the purpose of using strong security in the first place, doesn't it?
AppLocker restricts which applications are allowed to run, not which are allowed to be installed. See e.g. this review.
What education should be about is understanding, if you just train someone in one version of s/ware many just adopt a point and click approach with little understanding of what they are doing. You need different sorts of s/ware to make them think. Schools should use a mixture of: MS, Mac & Linux PCs.
I think it's a little more subtle than that. 90% of the kids using these things will go on to be standard users in life, treating computers as one tool among many. Have you seen how regular users treat computers? Most of them are uncomfortable using a new app without formal training -- even today's twentysomethings. Even on a Mac (yes, I'm a Mac guy).
What concerns me more are the other 10%, who will become power users, sysadmins, and developers. If all they know is MS and their pitifully low standards for stability, security, and usability, I am scared of the outcome for the next generation of software; not for the 0.1% of brilliant developers whom you can't keep down, but for the rest who grind out code in obscurity producing internal-use-only enterprise apps and vertical markets apps.
I think of a kid in my son's Boy Scout troop who had no idea that "SQL" had a broader meaning than a Microsoft product named "SQL Server". He's a brilliant kid and will go far, but he needed to have his horizons broadened quite a bit. I don't fault him -- rather, I fault those who mentored him and didn't show him the alternatives.
--Paul
It's analogous to the Streisand Effect. And when the machines get hacked, the id10t who declared them "unsinkable" will experience Titanic Syndrome.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
... give the impression that Austalia's governors are stupid fucks.
Well yes, it's a well-known fact among computer scientists (and apparently not by politicians) that the following inequality is a physical property of the universe:
physical access >> root access
What I was referring to was the potentially useful but soon to be pummeled security the laptop could have offered to students who didn't lose or wipe their laptops. Too bad too.
Even in the community of nations, someone has to have the least competent government on earth.
I guess the USA lost that title in the last election...
The Roku vidio player is an excellent example of security through "meh". It's almost an ideal box for a Boxee or MythTv frontend, but it is pretty much unhackable (cryptographically signed u-boot, kernel, and ramdisk). They've released their sources (but not their crypto key) months ago, yet not one single crack is available for it.
Why? Because (a) they don't make a big deal of the security features to the public, b) it's stupid cheap ($99 USD), and (c) It Just Works.
The combination of all three make 'meh'. Due to (a) there is no implicit challenge to the security community, (b) trumped the TiVo problem of trying to get 'more value for your money' out of an expensive piece of kit, and (c) prevents your Average Joe hacker from wanting to break a working (and useful to him) device.
Good counterexamples are TiVo, Linksys routers, and the Wii.
For TiVo, it was expensive enough that people wanted to get more value for their money, and felt it was time well spent to hack it.
With Linksys routers, It just Doesn't Work caused people to spend a lot of time finding a way to make some perfectly good equipment work at all for them.
The Wii advertised to the community that it was unhackable, which promptly cause all manner of security professionals to take up arms and figure out how to hack it.
A country run by anonymous cowards...
Wait! Whats a sig?
When the communities say I told you so, I wanna see Bill Gates cry.
The problem is that won't happen.
This was issued with great fanfare, press releases all around. What happens next week when it gets broken?
Nothing. Nobody will hear about it. The government isn't gonna issue a press release saying "oops, we were wrong", and the hackers that pull it off either won't have the resources to buy a feed in PR Newswire, or if they do, nobody will publish it, out of fear of offending their advertisers (ie. MS.)
It will be published on Ars and BoingBoing, and the people who make these sorts of decisions will never know, and continue to think this is what *they* have to do to make their environments "secure".
Perhaps they meant "hack" in the original sense, i.e. you can't do anything useful with them.
It seems to to me that, given the Slashdot summary, GradiusCVK is correct when he said this in his original comment, although he could have shown more elegant manners:
'Instead, some[one] announces to the world "Bow to our unhackable laptops! We are awesome! HAHAHA!", and now thousands of hackers and security researchers out there have made it their personal crusade to find a way to totally decimate all the security on the box.'
However, the problem is with kdawson, the Slashdot editor, not the Australian government or the article to which the Slashdot summary links.
The article says, "[government] seeks to build 'unhackable' netbook network". The meaning is that the Australian government is doing the best it can in building a network.
kdawson, the Slashdot editor says, "... Government To Build "Unhackable" Netbooks".
kdawson made the title sensationalist and misleading. This amazes me: In all these years, Slashdot editors seem to have learned nothing about being editors. kdawson turned a wonderful story into a misleading experience.
Right, well, I actually attend one of the schools who have a deployment of these laptops.
There's a label on the bottom that threatens you that if you steal it the police will find you. There's tamper-proof screws, so normal phillipshead's wont do the job. The BIOS is obviously passworded, and I managed to break the bootloader of Windows 7 by pressing ESC twice. No OS found apparently.
For "secure" laptops, you can right click pretty much anything and run it as an admin. We ran cmd.exe as an admin to create a proper Admin account. Completely bypasses AppLocker. Apparently, according to the laptop admins, the government wont allow printer drivers that aren't already part of Windows 7, so no printing for you.
The laptop maintainers don't even have administrator access. They have to box the laptops up and ship them to a centre to be "fixed", even if it's as simple as reinstalling a driver. Pathetic.
It's only early days, and the nuking of the bios can be done easily, through Wubi or other means, but USB boot is disabled so you'll have to find alternative means. And I know it's likely moot to post so late after the rush, but I had to say it.
Btw, it's CS4 Elements, it's not the true suite. And it includes Dia, the open-source diagram editor, which I found odd. Open source deployments always amuse me.
To finish, Firefox is not included by default and has many issues when installing, as you don't have access to Program Files, so it confuses the installer to no end unless you change where you're installing it to.
These laptops require ethernet access to activate and are mapped to a single username, so good luck using it if you don't have a Department of Education account. The all have filtering software so no porn for you kids, even when at home. Myspace and Facebook are blocked even from home connections. It's a rather horrible crippled setup that I'd wish upon no-one.
Welcome to the future of computing. Homeschool your kids.
Disagree != mod troll.
Stephen Wilson and New South Wales were supposed to be pro open source. I guess Microsoft and a bunch of others ridiculously discounted their software again to get them to bite. Stephen Wilson was reputed to be pro Linux. I guess the powers that be got to him. Too bad, so sad. Notice how these netbooks are eerily Orwellian in their surveillance. Also, no computer is unhackable - given a short length of time, we will see the Slashdot posting that these netbooks have been hacked. The only unhackable computer is the one not connected to any outside network.
OK, let's ignore for now, the "Un-Hackable" nonsense. What if I want to learn Physics Modeling using LISP? Sign Language? I have to go buy it? But it's free software! Wait? I have to wait to have some faceless multinational corporation "grant" permission? My homework is due next Thursday, and my teacher says, "no excuses". How about my paper due on Shakespeare's Histories? Bing says, "do you mean Shake Spears? Sorry, no matches" I can get extra credit if I make, and submit a short video on the properties of a Candle Flame; YouTube uploads are now blocked? What Educator said, "It's OK to only learn a tiny subset of knowledge."
"If a netbook were to be stolen or sold, the DET is able to remotely disable the device over the network. Even if the hard drive of the machine was swapped out or the operating system wiped, it would be useless to unauthorised users."
/. groupthink even posits how easy it may be. I think we've seen 'Windows' mentioned and somehow assumed they would inevitibly make obvious mistakes like allowing booting from usb/cd.
It may be hackable yes,
They appear to have some kind of kill switch at the BIOS level, which sounds pretty potent and difficult to circumvent to me. I would presume when the stolen machine connects ot the internet, it calls home, if it's been nuked, it then bricks itself and refuses to boot of anything.
Doesn't mean you couldn't strip the laptops for parts if stolen. That is if you didn't go the trouble of replacing bios chip (if not flashable)
Despite that, they do seem to have to gone to significant lengths to thwart theft more than anything. However whatever IT outfit told them that the product would be 'unhackable' is guilty of telling lies, that kind of statement smacks of marketing department (not engineers) of some company telling it's ignorant client what it wants to hear (yet can't reasonably expect to get) just to get paid.
So it will be hacked, of course and the blame will fall everywhere (ie students) except the marketing people who made the claims.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
These machines will be as unhackable as the Titanic was unsinkable.
All the Government are doing is putting out a challenge and ultimately proving that a committee of "IT Experts" will be no match for a determined teenage schoolboy who wants to look at porn.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
We've been exposing kids to heightened levels of UV radiation for years by installing fluorescent lamps. I don't see any hue and cry about excessive UV radiation damaging our childrens' eyes and giving them skin cancer.
We've been exposing kids to chalk dust for years, I don't see any hue and cry about heightened levels of respiratory illness due to chalk dust inhalation.
We've been exposing humans to 50-60Hz EM radiation for decades, with no research into the effects of having that much electricity coursing through your body day and night.
Why should we be getting all concerned about WiFi radiation?