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Date: Wed Jun 28 06:19:52 2006 From: brate_sanders at yahoo.co.uk (Brate Sanders) Subject: Microsoft's Real Test with Vista is Vulnerabilities Dear James Tucker: If I am not interested in a mass discussion, I usually hit "Reply" and if I think it may be useful to a wider audience I hit "Reply All". But in spite of that I can't argue with any of your points, since you clearly are an expert in security products and operating systems. If securing an OS is the goal, there is advantage in having a short term solution and a long term solution, and a defender like product is clearly the right path for the short term solution. But if it is more profitable to derive a recurring monthly revenue from a defender like solution than selling a copy of an OS every five years and spending more on it to maintain its security, as the law requires, a corporation should be promoting/selling the higher profitable solution. I am not against them making a higher profit or having a OneLive solution, but I was just commenting on Gadi's misplaced hope that future operating systems like Vista will be more secure by design. Brate Sanders BTW on "application error reports are even while in beta, being looked at directly by humans" - I have not read the privacy policy. But if MS Word crashed when I was writing a business plan or when a DOJ lawyer is writing a brief, clearly we would want MS Engineers to look at our document fragments in the error report and fix MS Word. ----- Original Message ---- From: James Tucker <jftucker@...il.com> To: Brate Sanders <brate_sanders@...oo.co.uk> Cc: Gadi Evron <ge@...uxbox.org>; bugtraq@...urityfocus.com; funsec@...uxbox.org; full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk Sent: Tuesday, 27 June, 2006 9:42:25 PM Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Microsoft's Real Test with Vista is Vulnerabilities Brate Sanders wrote: >Honestly, do you believe MS would care too much about security in Windows or their applications? If they did, would they come out with the One Live subscription based solution to protect against their design/implementation vulnerabilities? Once One Live subscription becomes more wide spread you can expect press releases like, if you are using One Live this vulnerability will not affect you. If not we are working on a solution for your problem, which may be available in your next monthly patch cycle. > > Not interested in a mass discussion, however you clearly know nothing about the difference between a 'security product' and an 'operating system' and it's related libraries. Your rant here is like a *nix user claiming they will never ever need an anti-virus program. I suppose you shouldn't really need an IDS either? Where did the OneCare application set come from? Why is it coded the way it is? Why is this method of scanning condusive to prevention of otherwise available exploits on a local machine? Is it therefore reasonable that something may be prevented by a third party application even if it's not created by a third party? Is this unusual in non-MS worlds? >Microsoft has tried multiple times in the past to come out with a subscription model for Windows, which has failed every time. So now they have another oppurtunity to get into the subscription based model. They may even give away Windows OS for free and just charge you for the OneLive solution, since it is a better business model any way you consider it. > > If you've been testing Vista Beta 2, and not being overly unnecessarily paranoid (despite the clearly written privacy policies and so on) then you'd have probably noticed that application error reports are even while in beta, being looked at directly by humans. The perfect example being the customised responses I have had to several application failures, one of which provided me with a suitable fix and added a bug ticket for the next release. This is completely seperate from the Live services. >So if they can earn more from the subscription based security solution where is the incentive to make the OS more secure? Eventually they are a corporation aimed at maximizing their shareholder value. > > All US coroporations are bound BY LAW to do as you suggest there. Campaign against US Law if you have an issue with that. If you fight a battle on the wrong field you'll never meet your enemy. With regard to incentive to secure the OS, the OS is still being secured, as it has been with XP, the reason the distinction exists can be clearly seen by the following example: A customer reports that the elevate priviliges request is exploitable by providing it with excess data. The function filter system in a random system defender app can filter this immediately, thus an update for the FILTER system is released immediately, all 'defender' based machines are now secured. The core function change requires the arguments of the function to be changed, the type of one argument is altered - this requires a wrapper function, and FULL common usage bounds checking for ALL applications using that function. - The easiest way to do this is to collect demographics to see how often it is used, easiest to collect through the function filter. Testing for the above CORE OS CHANGE is going to take some time, in order to maintain backwards compatibility, including supporting some odd applications where programmers decided to use the 'exploit' for productive purposes. To change this immediately without providing a wrapper or checking common usage is likely to break legitimate software, to prevent the use of one piece of malware. In terms of productivity in the wild, such things are only destructive - see professional gentoo deployments for examples. >Brate Sanders > > The man who should clearly be writing YOUR update policies.
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