Microsoft Delivers Secure China-Only Cut of Windows 10 (theregister.co.uk)

Earlier this week, CEO of Microsoft Greater China, Alain Crozier, told China Daily that the company is ready to roll out a version of Windows 10 with extra security features demanded by China's government. "We have already developed the first version of the Windows 10 government secure system. It has been tested by three large enterprise customers," Crozier said. The Register reports: China used Edward Snowden's revelations to question whether western technology products could compromise its security. Policy responses included source code reviews for foreign vendors and requiring Chinese buyers to shop from an approved list of products. Microsoft, IBM and Intel all refused to submit source code for inspection, but Redmond and Big Blue have found other ways to get their code into China. IBM's route is a partnership with Dalian Wanda to bring its cloud behind the Great Firewall. Microsoft last year revealed its intention to build a version of Windows 10 for Chinese government users in partnership with state-owned company China Electronics Technology Group Corp. There's no reason to believe Crozier's remarks are incorrect, because Microsoft has a massive incentive to deliver a version of Windows 10 that China's government will accept. To understand why, consider that China's military has over two million active service personnel, the nation's railways employ similar numbers and Microsoft's partner China Electronics Technology Group Corp has more than 140,000 people on its books. Not all of those are going to need Windows, but plenty will.

Comments

Re:No need for Microsoft to spy on the Chinese

[Zontar The Mindless]

There aren't any Muslims in China, so they don't face the same terrorism issues that western national do.

Wrong, and wrong.

Different level

[DrYak]

I suggest you read up on what sudo is capable off. You can easily setup sudo via its configuration file (/etc/sudoers) that will allow users that require elevated privileges (eg. Database and Web Administrators) to do their work without needing root access.

The parent poster was referring to a different approach to security.

with sudo, you set up a list of commands that a database or web admin can run.
you limit user access by restricting which commands the user can run. But said commands will be run with root privileges.
In case of a bug in the command, you could use it for privileges escalations (*you* were only restricted to run this command. but *this command* runs as root and could do anything).

what the parent refers to is more closely related to the various "CAP_*" capabilities used in the linux kernel.
i.e.: even if you run a command as root, that command would never, even in the case of a bug, reconfigure the network interface, because the corresponding CAP_{blah} capability isn't enabled.
By carefully crafting a very precise set of capabilities that you hand out to administrative programs, you make sure that they only do what they are supposed to do, even if an attacker manage to find a way to force a program running as root to do arbitrary actions.

(It's a bit similar like how some smartphone apps come with a whitelist of API calls that you need to validate before installing : "can access your contacts list", "can access your webcam", etc. Even if the weather app get hacked, it can never be used to spy on you, because it's not whitelisted to access your mic and your cam... Well except that nowadays every single last app seems to be obliged to ask access for nearly anything (Hey, now your Weather app can automatically recognise the city you're travelling into simply by flashing the QR code of your travel ticket ! Needs cam privileges !).
Under Linux the same granularity exists, except that this done at the kernel API level, instead of the Java user libraries like on Android)

In the past few years Windows has been implementing similar restrictions. That's what the poster was referring to.

On Linux, the facility to apply this king of control exist in the kernel too (the various capabilities). But there aren't many software using them. I only know of SELinux and AppArmor. And they are not used system-wide, but only to put specific software into cages (those software for which they have rulesets).

I think this is dues to the fact that the basic user/group access rights of Unix can provide already quite some security if you take the time to organise enough granularity in your groups and memberships, instead of making everything restricted to root-only and needing thus to be root for nearly any action.

(Because of the Unix philosophy, lots of things are represented in unix as files. Therefore, lots of the actions controlled by capability can be mapped to file accesses (e.g.: to device files in /dev/ ). Putting correct group access on files can acheive the same results.
e.g.: a virtual machine might need USB passthrough. One way would be to grant the corresponding capability to it.
The way VirtualBox does it, is that it runs as "vbox" goup, and there's a script that hands out USB devices nodes with that as group access)

In practice, distributions such as Debian have been using tons of specific groups to control access to specific resources precisely, years before SELinux was a thing.