Microsoft Eyes PC Isolation Ward To Thwart Botnets

CWmike writes "In a paper published Wednesday (PDF), Scott Charney, who heads Microsoft's trustworthy computing group, spelled out a concept of 'collective defense' that he said was modeled after public health measures like vaccinations and quarantines. The aim: To block botnet-infected computers from connecting to the Internet. Under the proposal, PCs would be issued a 'health certificate' that showed whether the system was fully patched, that it was running security software and a firewall, and that it was malware-free. Machines with deficiencies would require patching or an antivirus update, while bot-infected PCs might be barred from the Internet."

Comments

Modelling real disease?

[gringer]

If you want to model how our body recognises and deals with disease, you need to concentrate on whitelists, rather than blacklists. Vaccinations are similar to a community blacklist, but for most pathogens our own immune system can work out what things are appropriate to reject.

Re:A better PC health idea

[postbigbang]

They've been championing 'network admittance control' for a long time. It's pretty difficult to do, especially in a heterogeneous OS network. Add smartphones and other possible attack vectors, and it's nigh impossible.

Yet it's a nice idea to block machines that probe servers on ssh ports with logon names like 'oracleadmin' and so on. Isolating suspect systems has to be coupled with a method to vet systems, and therein lies the rub. Unless you use pattern matching to watch system traffic for phone-homes and wierd characterizations, it's simply too tough to get anything but a homogeneous (read Microsoft clients only) network intrusion detection system to work.