6 ms·
Although it's not said explicitly in the article, there's an interpretation of the subject that is both literal and true. Microsoft distributes constant opaque
by danarmak 9y ago
Although it's not said explicitly in the article, there's an interpretation of the subject that is both literal and true.
Microsoft distributes constant opaque silent updates to all modern Windows systems. With Windows 10, some editions cannot even postpone installing those updates for long. An update deliberately bricking Windows computers, targeted to all of Europe, a country, an organization, or an individual's home. That is, quite literally, a digital killswitch.
Of course Microsoft the company wouldn't do such a thing as long as it's following its own interests. But, being an non-EU entity, it could conceivably be forced by US authorities. Or, of course, the secure distribution channel could be hacked. It's far more likely that an attacker would distribute an update that merely backdoors all systems; but if done as an act of war (or terrorism), bricking is a somewhat plausible goal.
As the article correctly notes, the same problem affects most other software; it's just that Microsoft Windows is both so widely used and so infrastructure-critical (you can't replace it with a different OS and keep running your native Windows applications). OSX and iOS have minority market shares and you can buy competing products. Android phones and Linux distributions don't have a single update channel for all of them. Non-operating-system software generally isn't installed on most computers and has alternatives for most of its users. Windows is in a pretty unique position.
- abandonliberty 9y agoYou're right! It's rarely about who creates the backdoor/update channel/law but about who can leverage and abuse it (hacker, next president, etc). We are slowly starting to realize how big these issues are. I hope.
- pepve 9y agoAhem, the next president?
- rcthompson 9y agoThat ties into the overall point of the comment that the person using the backdoor may not be the one who created/mandated it, i.e. one president that people trust mandates a backdoor but never uses it improperly, but the next president after them is more unscrupulous and uses that backdoor for nefarious purposes, effectively piggy-backing on the trust of the previous president. The point is that it might not be appropriate to give someone the keys to the castle even if you trust them completely not to abuse that power, because people don't last forever in a position and that power will eventually pass to a successor who may be less trustworthy.
- abandonliberty 9y agoI laughed out loud reading this. This is a great, very clear explanation (though I think you may be responding to a joke). Can I get you to write my comments from now on? :)
- vidarh 9y agoThis is an important approach to this problem. If you attack a hypothetical future leader, everyone can picture someone that might be worse, whether or not they like the current leader. It's a good way of avoid being dismissed over partisan concerns.
- hinkley 9y agoThis seems to be a pretty big blind spot for our two-party system here. Every president I can remember has set precedent by using some rule/loophole in the powers granted to the Executive Branch and then their party gets bent out of shape when the next president uses that same technique to do something they don't like. Doing the 'right thing' the wrong way just conditions the American public toward accepting an autocracy. While particularly bad for one party, it's not great for either of them, and certainly not for the citizenry.
- tormeh 9y agoHonestly, when the big bad comes around, any loophole will be used, the eternal classic being a state of emergency. If everyone abuses these loopholes anyway, then maybe there's a chance that they'll be closed in time. One can dream, right?
- gonvaled 9y agoSame reason why you would never trust any country to be a nuclear power, no matter how trustworthy it seems to be. Specially one which has used nuclear weapons against civilians in the past. Oh, wait, never mind ...
- palunon 9y agoThe problem is that once a country is a nuclear power, taking the nukes from them is kinda hard. Even when you simply don't trust them.
- ScalaNovice 9y agoREKT! How will Drumpfff recover from this?? Surely this is proof that he can be impeached!!!!????
- treehau5 9y agoCurrent president isn't intelligent enough to pull the political maneuvers to pull this one off -- even his base would be up in arms. You can't say "bigly cyber" and click your heels three times and get back doors.
- beamatronic 9y agoAlso in the case of hostilities, there's no way you could block this channel ( OS updates ) on a large enough scale, fast enough. This vector would be utilized in advance.
- lend000 9y agoWindows users should be blocking all Microsoft spyware with a DNS blackhole, except for when they occasionally want to pull in an update. I would share mine, but it's only running on a micro instance...
- le-mark 9y agoI rarely hear about black hole dns, and I often wonder why it's not more prevalant? Does anyone have insight into the pros and cons involved?
- lend000 9y agoYou need to be slightly technical to set one up and make sure your devices use it, and if you use a VPN that intercepts DNS like mine does, you need to host it on a publicly addressable IP. Personally, I'm glad more people don't use it or I'm sure Microsoft would resort to hard-coded IP's and other methods, which require a very configurable router to block (like OpenWRT).
- thesuitonym 9y agopf can block by IP address, so you could just set up an OpenBSD router. Again, technical, but if it ever DID become necessary, I can't think of a good way for MS to address that.
- danarmak 9y agoThere are lots of ways. Think of it from an anti-malware perspective: how can the botnet agent on my PC, which has OS-level privileges, discover and communicate with the daily command-and-control server, if each day the network admin blocks the previous day's CnC server IP address? Any network communications that the OS is allowed (or that a Microsoft program or driver that the OS trusts is allowed) can be used to carry extra data about which IPs to talk to in order to exfiltrate "telemetry" or download updates. DNS and WHOIS queries (where MS can publish arbitrary queryable records), peer to peer DHT-like networks (ditto), Tor (designed not to let your router/firewall know who the OS it talking to), the list is endless.
- agumonkey 9y agoIt's interesting because some cities publicly documented their switch to Linux, then came back to MS things (for some reasons). But in the end having open source, untied software is of political importance if you want to avoid being tied.
- zanny 9y agoMunich never switched back, which is probably the city you are talking about, but Microsoft has been throwing millions of dollars into both defamatory propaganda against the city and attempts to either elect officials to force them back to Windows or to buy off key officials to make it happen. It is extremely crooked when you read the narrative as its unfolded over the last decade. Microsoft is extraordinarily aggressive in maintaining its monopoly in the public sector.
- agumonkey 9y agoI remember articles but nothing by Microsoft. Maybe influenced by MS though. There were a few other cities too IIRC. ps: hooray for liberal private business right :)
- throwaway7645 9y agoYea I remember reading about this in Linux Format magazine (yea I pick up a copy occasionally when at the bookstore...great read on all things Linux, and FOSS) a few years ago. It is crazy how far Microsoft will go if the stories are true. If Munich wants to use LibreOffice, then let them, or maybe make an OS that doesn't require an almost unfathomable amount of resources.
- zanny 9y ago> Android phones and Linux distributions don't have a single update channel for all of them This is pretty much saying that, because an OS is open source, that means anyone can put it on almost anything and sell it, so the fact that the original developer can't control all possible distributions of the software that said software is untenable. In practice, that is not how it works. You don't approach broad deployments of Android or, say, RHEL while getting supplied by a half dozen different OEMs. You pick one and stick to it. In much the same way Windows shops work - you normally either go with just Dell or just HP. Hell, you can't lump Linux and Android in the same boat either. Vendors never guarantee perpetual phone OS updates on Android, because they always abandon their devices. The exception might be Google, maybe, with one of their device series from the last 5 years since the Nexus 4 which did get dropped, but you might be able to get a perpetual update contract with them for an extended support period. I have no idea. But for something at Government scale, adopting Android is actually really trivial. At least it used to be - you could have just approached Cyanogen to support all devices with a guaranteed support period. Now I'm not sure if there is a corporate entity to barter with backing Lineage, but the same principal applies. There are ways around Android's horrible update model. For desktop Linux, though, its no competition. You will always be going to one vendor, using that one vendor, and getting consistent updates from that singular vendor. Be it Dell or Red Hat or Canonical or whomever you plan to contract with. They aren't going to be throwing Gentoo randomly on a couple of your thousand Ubuntu boxes, and if you want they will certainly preconfigure the images to point the update servers to your own self hosted ones to control updates if you really want to.
- Qwertystop 9y agoTrue, but there's still a difference: One organization will homogenously use a single distributor/vendor/update channel within itself, sure. But different organizations might use different vendors, or even different sections of an organization if they're bureaucratically separated enough (e.g. not sharing budgets and IT staff). If you're running Windows, you're getting it from Microsoft, end of story.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> If you're running Windows, you're getting it from Microsoft, end of story. You talk as if nobody ever bootlegged Windows.
- mseebach 9y agoYour interpretation may be true, but it's certainly not literal, since they literally state their interpretation (in bullet points, for clarity) and that ain't it. (most of the Windows deployment under consideration would be enterprise edition, and they don't take updates automatically) File under: garden variety EU chest beating.
- mynameisvlad 9y agoDisclaimer: Employee, not on Windows. > With Windows 10, some editions cannot even postpone installing those updates for long. Not saying that users will necessarily find the place to do it, or understand the implications of this action, but anyone can permanently postpone installing the updates by disabling the service. http://www.thewindowsclub.com/turn-off-windows-update-in-windows-10 http://www.thewindowsclub.com/turn-off-windows-update-in-win... I think you were referring to the "defer updates" feature which is only available in Enterprise (and maybe Pro, I'm not sure about that one.)
- qffk 9y agoAs a home user, I would prefer to be able to select which updates I want to download/install, and when. I don't want to blanket disable all updates, because of course I do want security updates as soon as possible, but I want to be able to block specific updates for however long I want, potentially forever (in Windows 7, the "Hide Update" functionality does this nicely). I make it a habit on my Windows 7 system to read each and every update's KB entry and determine if I want it. I wish I could do this with Windows 10. In short, I don't think disabling the update service in Windows 10 is even remotely an ideal solution to this problem.
- temac 9y agoYou can't do it anymore on Windows 7, because they switched to the consolidated patch model of 10. Now, the possibility you have are mainly a linear security only channel, and a linear security+stability(+eventually features) channel.
- qffk 9y agoRight, I forgot. Well, at least with Windows 7, you can choose to install only security rollups, whereas with 10, AFAIK, you have to take it all or nothing.
- retox 9y agoThis is why I'm in the process of switching to Linux as my daily driver and for service hosts. Putting all sorts of shit in the urgent security patch category was the final step. If you can't trust a security patch you can't trust microsoft at all. I wish I could remember the exact things they pushed but I have a feeling they were windows 10 related.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> Microsoft Windows is both so widely used and so infrastructure-critical (you can't replace it with a different OS and keep running your native Windows applications) If the US declared war on part or all of Europe, and caused Microsoft to send updates bricking legitimate Windows installs within that region, the victims could still use pirated Windows to run their native Windows applications. I doubt there would be any legal repercussions.
- literallycancer 9y agoThen again, if US declared war on Europe, they'd just brick the hardware (which is what bricking usually means), or take out key parts of the backbone, then it doesn't really matter what the capabilities of individual users are.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoWhen the problem is "we need to be able to run our existing native Windows applications", this matters. No matter what Microsoft does, a country can't be prevented from running their own native Windows applications on their own machines. They have all the necessary software and expertise locally. One strike is not a victory.
- __jal 9y agoIf MS, for whatever reason, bricked an entire country during wartime, the war would likely be over before most folks could figure out Bittorrent.
- easilyBored 9y agothe victims could still use pirated Windows to run their native Windows applications. I doubt there would be any legal repercussions. When...a month after ? Too late. Damage's done. War's over.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoThat is an unusually optimistic view of what it takes to win a war.
- jacquesm 9y agoI'll bet you that would be the year of 'linux on the desktop' at last.
- ErrantX 9y agoAlthough its not much of a hurdle (as MS provide the hurdle too) don't modern large scale MS-based IT systems still rely on a local controller to push updates? This used to be the case with domain controllers a few years ago.
- danarmak 9y agoThey can if they want to. It's called WSUS - Windows Server Update Services. But all it amounts to is a glorified local mirror and central point for pushing updates. You still don't know what individual updates do, still can't cherrypick individual fixes out of monthly rollups, still can't install some update without installing they prerequisite updates. And, like you pointed out, you can't fully trust the WSUS software, which also talks to Microsoft to update itself. WSUS might delay or stop an attacker who takes over the MS distribution channel from publishing an update telling all target computers to shut themselves down right now. But a smarter attacker will distribute a time bomb as part of a legitimate update, that people will install for legitimate reasons, and that will be triggered after enough computers have installed it. The trigger may not even come via the Windows Update channel. And to quote, "there's another theory that states that this has already happened."