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Israeli Security Company Builds "Unhackable" Version of Windows
New submitter Neavey writes: Sounds too good to be true, but Morphisec, an Israeli startup, claims to have built an unhackable version of Windows. Its not yet publicly available, a red flag if ever I saw one, but internal testing has had a 100% success rate: "In a statement for BI, Dudu Mimran, the co-founder of the company, describes this new OS version as the Windows that 'Microsoft should be doing,' explaining that, while the platform was initially designed for government use, it can be actually installed by any enterprise that wants to make sure that no hack is possible.
Basically, this operating can block any zero-day attack, the founder says, thanks to the operating system randomizing all memory, which means that the hacker cannot target the computer memory and compromise the data stored on the drives."
What things memory randomization does not fix, left as an exercise for the reader.
I hope everyone at that company is prepared for a long week.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
It is being offered to the mullahs on a flashkey.
Another Israeli Security Company will hack them tomorrow.
You may want to take a look at some of this company's other products, including flying serum and invisibility powder.
Why do people still claim these things, and why to techies (not marketing people) consent to attaching their names to such nonsense?
Stupid because:
1) No, it is not unhackable. Throw a contest with a bounty to easily prove this.
2) 99% of "hacks" work through social engineering nowadays, and these work regardless of how secure your software is.
This is probably ignorant, but how can a startup "build" a custom version of Windows? Last time I heard, national goverments struggle to get access to windows source?
Just remove all input and output capabilities, and the power supply. Most secure computer in the world.
Bullshit smells the same no matter where it's from.
Show me! I'm not from Missouri (although I've visited a number of times).
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
According to my own internal testing, of which i've done none.
Per the article, they've raised money and it's under development. Sounds more like they're at the generate some buzz for some more money stage of development.
But I concede that randomizing memory (contents) does make a system pretty secure.
...suck your dick?
And we all know how that turned out.
The trouble with being the fastest gun in the West is that everyone wants to come try you out.
This company (or whoever wrote TFS/TFA about them) seems not to understand the concept of a zero-day vulnerability.
It is ridiculous to say that one is not vulnerable to zero-day attacks. They are, in security parlance, the "unknown unknowns" - the things you don't even conceptually know of as vulnerabilities right now. One cannot design a networked computer system with any functionality whatsoever in which they can somehow know and anticipate the "unknown unknowns" (as opposed to the known unknowns, some of which can be mitigated if you're lucky).
The unknown unknowns are, by definition, *not yet known*, so you can't design a mitigation against them until *after* you are aware of them. If awareness comes in the form of a zero-day hack, then you will fail to defend against the attack at the time it hit due to your lack of information about the attack vector.
Also, unless this company has full access to all Windows source code for the build they have, it is very likely that one singular memory-based mitigation will not be effective against every possible attack vector that exists in the Windows codebase. So unless they have performed full formal methods verification of the entire Windows codebase to guarantee that there are no "unknown unknowns", and then fixed every security vulnerability that exists in the product in the original state in which they received it from Microsoft, this is basically snakeoil.
Also, don't we already have ASLR? The mind boggles at the stupidity of these people. Who do they seriously think is going to buy this?
Actually, forget I asked. They said their target was governments. I have no doubt they will sell thousands of licenses.
has had address space randomization for how many years? Hardly unexploitable still...
Oh yeah, I've seen builds that were 100% solid on internal testing. Not a thing wrong with it according to automated tests, scripted manual testing, smoke testing, and random usage testing. Not a thing! A million monkeys could bang on keyboards all day long and nothing would break. Much simpler programs than an entire OS, mind you. But still, they were bullet-proof, air-tight, divine works of software engineering.
Then we pushed them to production. Murphy's law is a moooootherfucker.
Captcha: enraging
...for approximately 15 minutes to hack the unhackable today and then resumed normal business with smirking faces all around...
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I mean, if it's invincible to tech-based hacks, kudos to them... but the other side of that is the wall of gullible idiots that will be manning the "unhackable" systems. Some quick social engineering and their impenetrable fortress will have more holes in it than Swiss cheese.
Memory randomization has been around a very very very long time. It's not going to help with logical programming errors.
Just make it so that it can't boot - or even better so that it can't turn on at all. :)
It is very easy to build a system that the system's designer could not hack, or code a crypto library that the library's programmer could not break. Then if you could successfully keep the product away from other people you could have an unhackable system.
I suspect this is the approach this startup took.
1) Disable all network access. 2) Disable all external storage access (USB, DVD, etc). 3) Most importantly, disable all user logins.
Just remove the TCP stack.
If you have physical access to the machine however, that's a different story.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Any computer that's unplugged is unhackable.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Sweet, my laptop is unhackable!
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
It's a liiiiie ... DAMMIT!
LOL!! Need I say more?
Evil Maid attacks may require that the device be powered off.
How does that defend against race condition attacks?
My guess is it gets a Blue Screen of Death during boot, so yes it is unhackable, unusable as well but that is a trade-off for being 100% secure.
Slashdot has often featured articles from Israeli companies that seem to me to be fraudulent. For example, The Car That Makes Its Own Fuel. That Slashdot story links to this article: The Car That Makes Its Own Fuel.
Right? That never sank did it?
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Are they just talking about Address Space Layout Randomization? Let's see - Wikipedia says [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization] for Windows - to turn it on edit a registry key. Is that what this company did, "create" a version of windows with a registry key set?
These folks are fucked. Just like the LifeLock dude running around posting his ssn everywhere. He got boned and these folks will too.
"Its not a bug its a feature" - NSA
There's one right in the title..
... but what are the chances of that?
Security relies on certain assumptions.
If I have a military base, I assume that whomever comes to attack my base has fewer guys with guns than I do... and I generally it will be a cold day in hell before they'll get very far into the base.
And you assume other things... you assume that your security people can tell the difference between someone with security clearance and a birthday clown.
We assume that the people with clearance obtained it legitimately.
We assume that the people that were given security didn't subsequently decide to sell us out for hookers and blow.
Assumptions.
And there are good assumptions... assumptions that really will hold under most circumstances and bad assumptions.
And good security is basically a process of separating out good assumptions from dumb ones. Then recognizing that your dumb assumptions were a convenient fig leaf you put over serious vulnerabilities that you actually don't have a good solution for...
And then you need to actually come up with a GOOD assumption that covers for what were previously laughable assumptions.
If your security is based on interlocking layers of good assumptions... are you unhackable? I don't know... its a question of perfection and perfection is hard in this universe. BUT... really fucking good security? Near perfect? Sure. I mean... you can do "excellent"... excellent is possible.
But that's not to say that even good security should be discounted as crap. Good is often the best security possible because excellent requires time and money and competent management and users that don't have their heads wedged up their asses.
Now will good security keep ze germans out or whatever? Typically yeah. Even good security is a bitch to get through even for a state sponsored hacking team.
What keeps embarressing people is SHIT security or NO security.
That is what keeps failing. Not "good security"... not "excellent security"... not "perfect security"...
F'ing none at all keeps failing.
So... lets not geek out on the "perfect" or "unhackable" claim. And instead lets focus on whether or not the change to the OS makes Windows have "good security". If it accomplishes so much as that then we're doing well. If they pushed it up a notch and it's EXCELLENT... Then we're doing very very well indeed.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I believe that I can speak for a few fellow network engineers here.
Bullshit.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Install windows, disassemble the machine and store it in a totally EM and physically sealed box.
or.....
(Sarc on) Install your new Linux distribution you called "Windows" (Sarc off)
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Any computer that's unplugged is unhackable.
Nice try, better remove the batteries and all persistent storage devices too.. Oh, and you are going to prevent any physical access too...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The headline is crap, of course.
That said, it's not too hard to have a version such that you know it's unaltered when you boot each morning. You do basically a live CD, booting from a read-only lun.
Just as you separate a normal user USING the machine from an administrator account UPDATING the OS, you can have the OS basically read-only during use and set it to writeable only when you need to update the software. That change is done outside of the OS, either via the NAS or the hypervisor.
In that way, you can come in eqch morning knowing your Windows system hasn't been hacked (past tense). As soon as you open IE, though, you could get a new exploit. That exploit disappears when you shut the machine down, though.
Everything was going very well, until Shlomo installed Flash player.
what, that's easy.
they just removed the boot loader.
LOL
Not sure what the deal is, but I seem to come into contact with a disproportionate number of Israeli tech companies claiming to be able to do absurdly impossible things like theoretically impossible compression, etc.
Dudu made several other pungent points about the company's progress on cold fusion, faster than light travel, the meaning of life, and a cure for the common cold.
Unplug the network card. QED.
I think if Windows ran everything in something like a sandbox, where programs couldn't communicate with programs outside itself, and saw its own version of a disk system which only had itself on it, things wouldn't be bad for starters. A virus then couldn't then spread to other files on your filesystems because each program couldn't access programs outside itself.
.exe, I would try out a lot more software.
It doesn't help much for legacy software, but a special memory section could be used for shared memory, and a special disk location could be used for shared files.
A system prompt would be needed before installing driver files or changing things on startup.
This doesn't stop a keylogger from getting you though. There are ways of stopping keyloggers, but no need to get to complex stuff when people will want to shoot holes through my theory "Windows as a filesystem sandbox mode". I think about this a lot since it doesn't seem like several OSes are designed to operate in the Internet environment without getting hosed by running the wrong file. If Windows could be secure from running an occasional malware
God spoke to me
Which then poses the question... just how is this any different, let alone superior to Linux's PaX patchset - which offers ASLR since 2000 - or even grsecurity?
Umm...not necessarily.
BIOS
They made an "unhackable" version of windows without....... access to the source code?
Excuse me while I laugh hysterically.
My Commodore 64.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
These people are lying to their customers. Even hardened systems need to be operated with security in mind. And, of course, OS hardening does not a lot to harden applications.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
BAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH!
100% Secure = 100% Unusable
Security is a balancing act between usability, functionality, and safety.
You'll never get 100% in any of those without having less than that in the other two categories.
Sure, they may get closer to 100%, but at what cost? Is the machine running slower? Does it eat up huge amounts of HD? Does it take a 5 minutes to verify an authorized users biometrics before allowing them to do anything and if they leave it's immediate 'secure' area it totally resets?
Not that those are what this one is or isn't doing, I was just illustrating the point that you can't have perfect security, and have a usable machine because there are always trade- offs. Especially since it's under the rule of diminishing returns. Although one great way to easily improve security is to remove humans from the loop. Of course, then you are just talking about some kind of backend or infrastructure type thing since it's only 'users' would be other machines, and even that can be compromised by compromising the machines that are allowed to be users.
That's why I say that a machine that is totally secure, is also totally unusable. It's the only way to prevent the machine being compromised, but that's not really any good to anyone either.
the bios doesn't need to be writeable. it is just easier for OEM's to configure them that way, and easier to update/flash them when an error is found, so that is how they are manufactured now.
The secret is to never connect it to the internet. or let anyone access it manually to try and hack into it....LOL!
Hubris.
BIOS is dead. With EFI, most of the boot code is in the efi partition, on the "disk" which is read-only courtesy of your san, hypervisor, or the fact that it's a cd-rom.
There is a limited firmware on the motherboard which loads the initial efi file. That could, in theory, be compromised, except that if you virtualize, you could also set that read-only in the hypervisor. So your virtual machine pretty darn safe. The host machine needs to be secured , but it doesn't need an operating system, just a hypervisor. That's quite a bit safer than running a full desktop OS.
"Unhackable windows has been hacked"
Did they install Windows 10 and get the cnf.sys blue screen too? 3 of my test PC's are unhackable too with Windows 10. Just turn it on and right after the BIOS it blue screens on this file.
"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!" vs. a fair challenge http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
* See my subject above? Thanks for proving it via evasion... you're merely a dime-a-dozen MENIAL techie & I've got your number down, weak little troll that you are (totally limited in his skills in computing, obviously, to the "Lowest of the LOW" - mere techie!)
APK
P.S.=> Keep on shooting your blowhard done nothing in computing mouth off gweihir - I'll be RIGHT THERE AGAIN to expose your crap yet again (have fun with the shame you'll have to publicly endure here & YOU STARTED IT WITH ME YOU USELESS TROLLING LOSER WITH NO SKILLS BUT LOTS OF MERE "TALK", lmao)... apk
Let me guess. The source of this article is the "Onion"
In order to log in you first have to eat a jar of gefilte fish. Not only that but you have to drink the juice as well. Foolproof.
umm isnt this already in windows?
I was under the impression that memory randomization, ASLR?, was a common practice in all respectable OSes these days.
Is it an unpowered computer that is missing the power cord and Ethernet cable?
Now, that's an unhackable Windows computer!
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Seriously, they expect to get away with such a statement. I got a bridge to sell ya.
I have lots of examples, but I didn't have time to find and put them into a comment.
The headline is crap, of course.
That said, it's not too hard to have a version such that you know it's unaltered when you boot each morning. You do basically a live CD, booting from a read-only lun.
Just as you separate a normal user USING the machine from an administrator account UPDATING the OS, you can have the OS basically read-only during use and set it to writeable only when you need to update the software. That change is done outside of the OS, either via the NAS or the hypervisor.
In that way, you can come in eqch morning knowing your Windows system hasn't been hacked (past tense). As soon as you open IE, though, you could get a new exploit. That exploit disappears when you shut the machine down, though.
Or you can put Deep Freeze on it and have the same thing every time you reboot, morning, noon, or night. MEOW!
Unhackable doesnt exists.. We all know that.
USELESS TROLLING LOSER
This is the best description of APK ever.
Let me guess: they disabled networking and all drives, memory card readers and USB ports?
Sounds like QubesOS.
Something Happened with Windows Security....
Oh wait...
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
As opposed to giving lip service about implementing a feature.
I can make one too. just unplug the usb ports and network port
You can't protect software with software, see Dr. Shimizu's paper: http://www.ibm.com/developerwo.... So while your idea is novel, it's not going to work for 100% of the cases.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
... Is "Unusable".
Pretty much all security and safety measures are a tradeoff between convenience and security -- A lock on your door means you're inconvenienced by needing to have your keys with you as the price for being protected from casual burglary; a bike helmet is slightly bulky to wear, but may save your life if you fall, and so on.
The trick to good security is to minimize the inconvenience to me and maximize the inconvenience to a hypothetical intruder, and to decide on a per-case basis whether this bit of inconvenience and expense is worth the additional safety. Generally speaking, the more important something is the more inconvenience we're willing to put up with in order to use it if that's what it takes to be safe, which is why we tend to be less willing to prove our identity while buying groceries than when we put our house as collateral to a big loan.
The only totally secure system is one that isn't used by anyone, ever.
Yes, but Qubes isn't just about isolation. It reduces the attack surface of the isolation mechanism down to the functional minimum. Currently, that means using a Type 1 hypervisor like Xen, though in the future Qubes could be ported to a microkernel. Complex code (even device drivers) is relegated to unprivileged domains.
The term "sandbox" IMO has a connotation that it is something implemented directly by a complex OS with a monolithic kernel; That model isn't very secure.
this operating can block any zero-day attack, the founder says, thanks to the operating system randomizing all memory, which means that the hacker cannot target the computer memory and compromise the data stored on the drives."
Randomizing memory isn't a panacea. It helps, but if you can escalate local privilege, you can still go looking for whatever you want to modify.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
VMs haven't been secure for a very long time. Isolation no longer contains what you think it should. You have a lot to learn about security.
I presume they just didn't connect the network cable.
tl;dr? There was another solution but PEBCAK was a management "inspired" design requirement.
Sounds too good to be true, but Morphisec, an Israeli startup, claims to have built an unhackable version of Windows. Its not yet publicly available...
...but FUD and bullshit are in endless supply!
You rather missed the entire point. The system disk, and EFI, are read-only, controlled from OUTSIDE of the operating system. You use the SAN or hypervisor to set it read-only. Sure Windows knows how to write FAT32, but that doesn't make it able to write to media which doesn't accept writes.
What I mentioned is the same concept as Deep Freeze, except far more secure. Deep Freeze is an application running WITHIN the OS. It uses (and trusts) the OS to actually write to the proper areas of the disk, and to avoid writing to areas it doesn't want written to. When the OS is compromised, you can't trust that it's obeying the instructions it's getting from Deep Freeze.
By doing the same thing from the outside of the operating system, using the hypervisor or SAN, you aren't having to trust the OS to protect it's own integrity.
So, I hope they aren't trying to patent too much of this idea. It's been prior art for 10 years. Here is a link to an archived version of my post: http://www.derkeiler.com/Newsg.... It is all I could find from my phone.
I don't mind them using the idea. I posted it publicly hoping someone would. But they can't claim to own the idea or prevent others from using it.
as long as the it industry is run by it whores for manager whores, nothing wil change. everybody can be had for a new shiny gui made out of excrement. also the rulers hate secure computers.
, because they think they must be abe to control everybody.
apple and mozilla already work on this with swift abd rust. memory safety is much more than buffer overflow protection. and worst of all, memory safety is just one necessary aspect of computer security. think of it as a safety net. you can still jump outside the net or break your neck in the net.
For about 15 minutes.
Good try, guys.
If they do, I hope they remember to leave a trap door.
Unless DeepFreeze gets exploited (which has happened).
Do they have access to Windows source code?
What, and Live CDs haven't? [pssshhh] Sure, whatever.
Right on the mark.
The Deep Freeze does require thawing before you can go about your uninstall. If you forgot the password and you are using the full version, it is advisable to follow this step carefully.
This one is a whole hell of challenge to attempt by going to your Registry Editor to do the necessary deleting of files. Please, be very careful not to do anything stupid here because this part controls how your system and applications are carried out.
Before anything go to your BIOS and back date it to 6 years into the future.
Deep Freeze is a Windows service and a set of dlls, which are loaded by Windows and which use system dlls such as vbscript.dll. Try renaming renaming vbscript.dll and you'll notice Deep Freeze no longer works. Why? Because it uses (and therefore trusts) vbscript.dll.
It just so happens that I do this stuff for a living, so I'm sorry if you bought into their sales pitch and feel silly now. Here's how you can uninstall Deep Freeze without using their uninstaller , by just setting Windows to not run it. You can try this yourself if you want:
Step 1: Go to START -- >Run .
Step 2: Type regedit and click OK to open the Registry Editor. Please, do not anything silly if you aren't familiar with the registry.
(a) [+] HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
(b) [+] HKEY_CURRENT_USER
(c) [+] HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
(d) [+] HKEY_USERS
(e) [+] HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG
Step 3: Simply click (c) [+] HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and click SYSTEM --> a sub-menus will appear. In the sub-menus click ControlSet001 -->Services---> DepFrzHi(Right-click on it and delete this file)-->DepFrzLo(Right-click on it and delete the file)-->DFServEx(This is the deep freeze executable file. Right-click on it and delete this file).
Step 4:At(c) [+] HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE-->SYSTEM-->ControlSet003-->Services-->DepFrzHi(Right-click on it and delete this file)-->DepfrzLo(Right-click on it and delete this file)-->DFServEx(This is the executable file. Right-click on it and delete this file).
Step 5: Do the same thing to (c) [+] HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE--SYSTEM-->CurrentControlSet--> Services-->DepFrzHi (Right-click on it and delete this file)-->DepfrzLo(Right-click on it and delete thif file). Next one is DepFrzHi(Right-click on it and delete this file) and --> DFServEx(This is the deep freeze executable file.Right-click on it and delete this file).
Step 6: After finishing with the processes above, click File at the top left corner of you Registry Editor and go to exit to close it. You may want to restart your computer. Deep Freeze will be gone.
Try that yourself if you want, then ask yourself- do you think I (or a malware author) couldn't write a macro to do that? That my malware kit couldn't just as easily remove or disable Deep Freeze?