Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Opens 'Transparency Center' For Governments To Review Source Code
MojoKid writes with news that Microsoft has announced the opening of a 'Transparency Center' at their Redmond campus, a place where governments who use Microsoft software can come to review the source code in order to make sure it's not compromised by outside agencies. (The company is planning another Transparency Center for Brussels in Belgium.) In addition, Microsoft announced security improvements to several of its cloud products:
As of now, Outlook.com uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to provide end-to-end encryption for inbound and outbound email — assuming that the provider on the other end also uses TLS. The TLS standard has been in the news fairly recently after discovery of a major security flaw in one popular package (gnuTLS), but Microsoft notes that it worked with multiple international companies to secure its version of the standard. Second, OneDrive now uses Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Microsoft refers to this as a type of encryption, but PFS isn't a standard like AES or 3DES — instead, it's a particular method of ensuring that an attacker who intercepts a particular key cannot use that information to break the entire key sequence. Even if you manage to gain access to one file or folder, in other words, that information can't be used to compromise the entire account.
Governments shouldn't be using closed source garbage to begin with. It just locks them into a specific company and keeps them at their mercy, not to mention that even if the government reviews the source, the public can't do the same. Not a good message to send.
Who cares if you can look at the code? What matters is what you're running.
Looking at the code gives you nothing if you can't compile it to the exact same binary that you are running.
And even if they let you do that... you still need to trust the compiler, and the compiler that compiled that compiler, etc.
The TL;DR version for folks who haven't seen it before or don't want to read it (which you really should do): just because the source is trustworthy doesn't mean the binaries are. The process to accomplish this sort of attack is fairly straightforward:
1) Modify, say, the compiler's source code so that it adds backdoors to some/all of the code it compiles.
2) Compile it, then replace the clean binary for the compiler with this new, tainted binary.
3) Revert the changes to the compiler's source code, erasing any evidence of wrongdoing.
By itself, that doesn't create a backdoor, but anything compiled using the tainted binary could potentially have a backdoor secretly added, even though the source code for both that code and the compiler would appear to be perfectly clean. The problem could be very hard to discover or pin down as well, only manifesting when a particular file is getting compiled, or even a particular line of code.
I think most of us are already familiar with this sort of attack, but it's worth repeating, since it's exactly the sort of thing that Microsoft's "Transparency Centers" don't address, and exactly the sort of thing we'd be expecting a government to be doing.
Hundreds of legacy code developed for Windows platform using Windows development tools run only on XP and are not supported by 7 or 8.
So not only have you tied yourself to a particular version of a proprietary OS that - as we all know from previous experience - has a limited lifetime but you chose to do that by using proprietary software that won't run on anything else and you didn't think there might be a problem with that? Seriously? If you cut corners then you're going to get burned.