full-disclosure - Support the Sasser-author fund started

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Message-ID: <20040518054247.GA22603@mordor.angband.thangorodrim.de>
From: als at thangorodrim.de (Alexander Schreiber)
Subject: Support the Sasser-author fund started

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 12:39:46PM +1200, Nick FitzGerald wrote:
> "Shane C. Hage" to Bill Royds:
> 
> > I agree with most of your statements below.  
> 
> Well, actually, he was wrong if you consider the NT family of OSes 
> starting in about 1993-4 (true, OOTB they were configured to be "fully 
> Win 3.x compatible" -- that is, with all security disabled/dumbed down
> -- but the underlying architecture design at least met most of the 
> minimum criteria for C2...).

Sorry, in a networked world, C2 ist just a bad joke. Keep in mind, that
you do not get a blank certificate for 'this OS', but the certification
always is for the full OS/hardware combo. No, you can't purchase the
hardware for C2 certified NT anymore (not new, anyway). Even so, it was
a specially patched Windows NT 3.51 that got certified on a (AFAIR)
specific Compaq machine. It hat no network card (absolutely great - most
Windows security problems could be avoided by ripping out the network
cards - too bad that this is unrealistic because it would pretty much
reduce the usefulness of the machines to almost zero), no floppy drive,
no printer - the only way to get data in was keyboard & mouse, the only
way to get data out was the screen. The printer spool system was
disabled. The Windows system directory was read-only (not allowing your
users to overwrite the system installation is computer security 101, but
this _is_ windows, after all) making the installation of MS Office
(which wants to dump a metric crapload of stuff there), unfortunately,
impossible. So you had a system where you could log on, play
minesweeper and log off again. Lots of use, that.

Besides, the C2 stuff is rather tame, things like no object re-use
(clear all memory and disk blocks before handing them to another use,
don't re-use user-ids, ...), auditing, identify users (no open system,
user have to log in - what everybody else was doing for 30 years at this
time), discretionary access control (think chmod - again, what others
were doing since probably 30 years then), protected system mode of
operation (read: your users are not supposed to able to overwrite kernel
memory at will) which is really old stuff too. So, while the marketing 
department got a nice spin out of it, everybody with a clue just 
shrugged and said "So, you've discovered sliced bread too? What an 
_amazing_ discovery, isn't it?".

Keep in mind that _high_ grade security (things like mandatory access
control, security labels, security levels (and making sure there is no
downwriting) and so on) has been understood at this point for quite 
some time. Some of this work even went back to the time of MULTICS,
which started life in 1965 and was the first OS to get a B2 rating in
1985. And B2 is already really interesting.

Regards,
      Alex.
-- 
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
 looks like work."                                      -- Thomas A. Edison