Security 'impossible' for Win9x, buy XP now, says MS exec

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28100.html

By John Lettice
Posted: 14/11/2002 at 12:41 GMT

Yesterday Microsoft senior VP and head trustworthy computing honcho
Craig Mundie delivered his 'annual report' on the company's
trustworthy computing initiative. He had much to say about the
progress that has been made since Microsoft discovered security, but
the bit that interested us was way down the bottom of this, where he
explained why people are going to have to ditch their old MS stuff and
buy lots of lovely new MS stuff instead.

He begins with a graph, which regrettably we do not have, but clearly
it illustrates the deployed population of different versions of
Windows within a total active user base of approximately 400 million.  
He notes that the "single largest bump on this graph is Windows 95,"  
while "the newest systems, the ones that have had all this work [all
what work? Security work, allegedly, anyway] done to them are down
here in these little slices. They're the ones that are in the earliest
stages of deployment."

This is not good. Not good for security, not good for Microsoft, not
good for the economy. "And what society is doing and we're doing as a
business is dragging around behind us a giant tail of systems that, of
course, were built and deployed quite a long time ago." Tut. Society
is to blame. As well as Microsoft, that is.

"If we wanted to go out, and some days I think about the challenge
that we face and we say, oh, if you have to do this with the conscious
effort of real people it would be roughly many times worse than just
saying, okay, we just want to get every single person in New York City
to do the same thing today to their computer system, please to fix it
today. And even if it was just New York City you'd have a tough time.  
The reality is we have the equivalent of about 30 or 40 New York
Cities that all want to in some sense move together or get repaired in
one fell swoop."

And here comes the axe: "So we know that in practice it's impossible
for us to remediate the threats that we know exist in the world today
in systems that were designed in 1991, '2 and '3 and deployed in '95
and which are actively still in use today... Now, we know that these
waves just keep rolling through and they will ultimately change, but
it shows how long the threat exists of bad things happening and why
it's not completely possible to fix every old system.

"The message here is that there will have to be two tradeoffs that
have to be made, and to some extent the events of last September have
facilitated us in making one of those tradeoffs or changes."

Windows 95, and presumably the decidedly similar Windows 98, will be
tossed to the wolves, reluctantly and begrudgingly: "We have decided
that we will begrudgingly forsake certain app compatibility things
when, in fact, they don't allow us to have a default configuration
that opts for more security. In the past, the biggest thing that
happened to us was IT managers would come to the company and say, hey,
all those new features, they're great, all that new security stuff,
that's great, but whatever you do don't break my app. So just turn it
all off and trust me, we'll fix the apps and then we'll turn it all
on. And the reality is that never happened.

"And so we're going to tell people that even if it means we're going
to break some of your apps we're going to make these things more
secure and you're just going to have to go back and [here comes the
tab] pay the price."

Naturally, being secure is going to cost money, but if you are
insecure because you're unprepared to fot that bill, then your
insecurity stems from your own irresponsibility: "And the other thing
is that the customers, whether they're individuals or corporations,
are going to have to make a decision about when and how much they
spend to get these machines to be more secure. And to some extent you
can do it by insulating them, to some extent you can do it by putting
things around them or in front of them that protect them, you know,
firewalls in some sense. And then in some cases, you can just replace
them when you get new machines or new software or both that have
intrinsically better capabilities.

"But I think one of the things that we say, and even if you look at
the national cyber security plan that was put forth, Dick Clark and
the people at the White House have realized that security is going to
cost some money, whether it's having a new transportation safety
authority to make people feel like they have more security in the
airport or spending other things on homeland defense. It isn't free,
and to some extent as the threat models continue to emerge in new
ways, then we are all going to collectively have to spend more, both
in the development and maintenance of these machines if we're going to
be secure."

Mundie also, incidentally, had a few words to say about Longhorn,
first indicating that it was still a couple of years off, then this:

"So Longhorn, which will be the next big version of Windows -- the
rights management architecture, the underlying Palladium, which is the
codename for our system working with the hardware folks to create a
trusted security environment within the hardware framework -- all of
these things will be there."

The "rights management architecture" is a particularly interesting
component, because it sounds rather like it will be the Windows half
of the Palladium deal we reported on last week.



-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn'
in the BODY of the mail.