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FSF Responds To Microsoft's Privacy and Encryption Announcement
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft announced yesterday their plans to encrypt customer data to prevent government snooping. Free Software Foundation executive director John Sullivan questions the logic of trusting non-free software, regardless of promises or even intent. He says, 'Microsoft has made renewed security promises before. In the end, these promises are meaningless. Proprietary software like Windows is fundamentally insecure not because of Microsoft's privacy policies but because its code is hidden from the very users whose interests it is supposed to secure. A lock on your own house to which you do not have the master key is not a security system, it is a jail. ... If the NSA revelations have taught us anything, it is that journalists, governments, schools, advocacy organizations, companies, and individuals, must be using operating systems whose code can be reviewed and modified without Microsoft or any other third party's blessing. When we don't have that, back doors and privacy violations are inevitable.'"
How is encrypting data in motion going to help when they will simply provide the NSA the keys or otherwise provide access to the data. They are just another participant in the 'we never provided direct access' lie, when you simply provide everything on demand they don't need direct access, nor do they need to decrypt data off the wire.
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Who cares if the software is non-free? That's not even the issue.
"Microsoft announced yesterday their plans to encrypt customer data to prevent government snooping. "
And I bet Microsoft will just hand over the encryption keys / passwords to the NSA.
Gutsy, they're basically pissing on the entire box-package software development industry, and no small number of hardware/firmware companies, when they say you can't trust closed-source.
It's right of course, but if truth and justice mattered enough to the people who make decisions about how large corporations and governments are run we wouldn't be in this mess now would we?
So, Microsoft finally does something no geek could object to and the FSF's response is "even if this looks like a good thing, this can't be a good thing because it's proprietary". It just makes me wonder why they bother making a statement; it's proprietary, it always is and it always has been.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
If the NSA revelations have taught us anything, it is that journalists, governments, schools, advocacy organizations, companies, and individuals, must be using operating systems whose code can be reviewed and modified without Microsoft or any other third party's blessing. When we don't have that, back doors and privacy violations are inevitable.
No, they have not taught us that. Most of the NSA revelations have been about snooping telecommunications networks. Using open source software would not have made it any different.
I don't see what's unrelated about the FSF's argument. The debate pretty simple and it goes more or less like this:
MS: Trust us! We're good guys! We'll start using encryption, we promise.
EFF: People should trust what they can verify. Until you have the full details of MS's implementation in front of you, there is no way to be sure they've done it right. And until you have the right to modify the code for yourself, there is no way to be sure that security holes will get patched promptly and correctly.
As far as I can tell, the counter-arguments against FSF's position boil down to "well I trust {Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle} anyway, so there!" and "who cares if you can trust your computing infrastructure anyway, get over it!" If you have something more to add to those illuminating arguments, please do so.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Though I agree, that a corporation can be forced by an authoritarian government to put a backdoor into their product, I don't believe, open-source software is immune against backdoors either.
There are scores of people with commit-access to Linux kernel, for example. If the NSA — or its counterpart from any other rich country in the world — put their mind to it, they could use any one (or more) of them to weaken the security functionality in there.
It does not need to be obvious — making the /dev/random's output slightly less random, for example, may reduce the time it takes to tap an ssh or ssl connection with this host from many years down to days. Same goes for PGP-keys generated on the affected host... Nor does it need to involve blatant coercion — the committer may simply receive a patch by e-mail with a fix to some other bug or an improvement, and fail to spot the weakening.
It could, in fact, have already been done years ago for all we know. Who knows, if this little problem was not deliberately introduced? And even if it was not — who knows, whether various security agencies exploited it from 2006 to 2013 the way Alan Turing et al exploited mistakes of the German radio-operators during WW2?
Is it easier to plant a backdoor into an open-source project than a closed-source one — and keep it there for a useful period of time? I'm not at all sure, what I'd bet on, to be perfectly honest. Both can done and, by all appearances, both have been done...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Let's face it: as far as we know, the door lock manufacturers also have a master key to all our houses. The schematics and design of the lock are not publicly available, and most people lack the skills to know if the schematics they are looking at are secure or not. It's the same with an OS. And while I *could* take the lock apart and figure out how it works, I still wouldn't know if my particular lock were secure or not, because I have not seen enough locks to know if this particular one is good or not.
Anytime this condition arises, we replace our own lack of knowledge with a trust in experts. We have to defer the judgement of security worthiness to an expert we trust, in which case we are again disinter-mediated from knowing if the lock is actually secure or not. We all trust *someone* with very specific knowledge to help us make decisions, whether that be medical, scientific, security or otherwise, and in each of those cases, we can find examples of where the expert has let us down.
I was on the Linux desktop KDE, and somebody sent me a link when I clicked on the link the file was a torrent file and KDE torrent file program opened up and with a pop-up message it calls tips it give me a lecture about copyright. I quickly deleted KDE.. I've never had a desktop even a Windows desktop or an apples desktop lecture me about copyright and call it tips. I'm such a stubborn free minded person KDE was obviously never going to work on me I hate social manipulation.
Vim also has an introductory message which suggests to donate for poor children in Uganda. That's probably not a bad idea, but it's a bit awkward to have that text at that spot.
It really is arrogant of FSF to imply that a user trusting one or a small group of individuals running an opensource project is somehow better off and more secure than microsoft.
Unless a user audits the code, compiles the code (with a known to be good compiler) and manages all elements of the server and routing, there is NO assurance of security or privacy. And never mind the fact that few users even compile from source anymore.
Offtopic: why am I being sent to the beta site to post comments? Very annoying as it does not remember my login credentials and noscript is reporting XSS issues.
Then again, if it were open source, everyone would see what they were doing and remove the backdoor, meaning it's pointless asking MS for the key to your stuff again.
Unless it's done server-side. Again, having the source code to the OS, etc. tells you nothing about how data is stored or being used on their servers.
How would I find out, personally, that Linux Mint is sharing keys with the NSA? The likelihood that I would personally discover that secret is somewhere between slim to none. I can't read code well enough, nor am I likely to spend the time necessary to read every line of code in the programs.
My assurance stems from,
1. Thousands (at least) of other end users actually do peruse the code, looking for errors, back doors, exploits, etc.
2. My OS comes from a "trusted source" - one which I personally trust.
Yes, there is a weakness in there. That weakness is, I have to trust someone. At the same time, there is a strength hidden right beside the weakness. I get to CHOOSE who I trust.
What, exactly, has convinced you that you can actually trust Microsoft? Has MS invited you to personally examine their code, to satisfy yourself that there are no exploits in their system? No? I didn't think so.
Linux, on the other hand, invites me to read any or all of their source.
You choose what you want, I'll choose what I want, thank you very much.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Not only can the end user choose which algorithm, they can come up with their own. The right to read and modify the source code ensures that the truly paranoid can modify that source code, in whatever way they choose, to actually ensure that their stuff is secure.
Little Joey Nerd decides that he really, really, REALLY doesn't want anyone to read his stuff. Three pass encryption results - first with Blowfish, then with his own home brewed encryption, and finally with AES. So, the attacker understands AES quite well, and manages to strip away one level of encryption. What is he left with? A garbled mess for which there is no documented decryption anywhere, except in Joey's head, or on his device.
You can tamper with Joey's device, or his head, but chances are he is going to know about it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
A lock on your own house to which you do not have the master key is not a security system, it is a jail.
I get his overall point regarding source, I do, and I agree; but it would help his case if he didn't use such broken analogies. If I have a key, and the landlord has a master key, it does not mean I'm in "jail"; he's not going to lock me into my own home because I have a key of my own, just not a master key. It's just that the landlord can get into my home too. It's more like easy-peasy burglary, but "jail" was a rather stupid way to put it.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
If this NSA kerfluffle has amounted to anything, it is a validation of the idea that "Security through obscurity" is as invalid as we've all been told - since the 1980's.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The other part of that equation is that there are some pretty strong coders among the privacy nuts out there. There are also people who are good at watching changelogs, SVN commits etc.
Even if not everybody is reading the code, there are some pretty clever people who do.
How many people open up the deadbolts on their homes to make sure that they were properly constructed? Some, perhaps. But not many.
There has to be a trust at some level. Let's say you looked at my deadbolt and verified it as good. Why should I trust you either?
well, the only way that microsoft could be doing that server-side would be to pass the key to the server from the client, which you could see in the source code. It doesn't tell you what they are doing with it on the server, but there's no reason to store the encrypted data and the key on the server unless you intend decrypt it without the involvement of the client, and that'd be a big red flag that something questionable was happening.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre