3 ms·
>This pressure on OEMs is an anti-competitive move by a monopoly abuser and, as such, must be dealt with properly. Dealt with by making an average Windows user
by recoiledsnake 15y ago
>This pressure on OEMs is an anti-competitive move by a monopoly abuser and, as such, must be dealt with properly.
Dealt with by making an average Windows user more vulnerable to undetectable malware? The Chinese would be pretty happy with this.
Microsoft is feeling the pressure from Mac on the desktop regarding security and they should be banned from securing their machines? And this applies only to the "made for Windows 8" sticker, nothing else. It will happily boot on other and older machines.
The proper way to "deal" with this lies with conditions etc. imposed on the OEMs, not Microsoft who should have the right to secure their OS from undetectable rootkits. You're barking up the wrong tree.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoChinese would be extremelly happy with UEFI secure boot. They would force OEMs to include their chinese CA in every BIOS of every motherboard sold there, so they can boot whatever they want and the user would never notice. I can't think of one reason why they wouldn't.
- rbanffy 15y agoImagine then a backdoor that allows a third party to remove Microsoft's key from UEFI. All of a sudden, no Windows box is bootable.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoThe problem is that the UEFI would not be writable (at least if you aren't lucky), so you can neither remove MS key nor add your own. If it would, of course malware would install its key and remove MS one to make machine only bootable with their payload.
- recoiledsnake 15y ago>Imagine then a backdoor that allows a third party to remove Microsoft's key from UEFI. You seem to have no clue how UEFI works. The keys are not stored in some magical place in the cloud. Removing MS's key from UEFI(even if it were possible) will only make Windows on that machine unbootable.
- rbanffy 15y agoI was going with guard-of-terra's idea that all Chinese-made machines would be required to come with a key that could then be used in whatever cyberattack (or even spy-your-citizens-ware) the Chinese government wants to employ. In this case, the Chinese won't even need to do the cyberattack themselves. Just leaking one of the signing keys to a willing third party would be bad enough. Since a system that doesn't allow the removal of a compromised key is useless, there would be a way to remove Microsoft's key from all successfully compromised machines, rendering them useless.
- AndrewDucker 15y agoHow would that be different to the current situation?
- guard-of-terra 15y agoThere would be an explicit green light about your boot being "safe".
- AndrewDucker 15y agoSo in both cases the government could install whatever they want. In both cases an uninformed user would be none the wiser. In both cases a very informed user would know that government hijacking was a possibility. The only difference seems to be that some users would know that they were using secure boot, but not realise that the government could bypass it. I'm not sure that's a massive win for the government.
- guard-of-terra 15y agoLook at it the other way: China has a big IT ambition and it surely doesn't want to get locked out of its own PCs, so it would try to push their CA into BIOSes just to be a first class citizen if they'll try to build their own OS. But the fact that they have their CA in the BIOS would be unsettling for some.