Microsoft profits from Linux patent FUD

[GreyGeek]

They stopped innovating long ago, so all they can do now is try to become a leech on Linux.

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-profi...ud-7000001598/

IF ZDNet is willing to put this in print and risk losing MS ad revenues then it appears that either they no longer fear Microsoft, and/or, accounts receivable from MS isn't enough to worry about.

But, DELL hasn't convinced me that their Project Sputnik is not just another of its oft repeated tactics to get better terms from Microsoft. They've been lying to the Linux community for the last 5 years.

[HalationEffect]

Yeah, I remember when Dell first started offering machines with Ubuntu pre-installed. Trying to find them on the Dell website reminded me of something I read in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display ..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a torch."
"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

[SteveRiley]

5 May 2009 fades ever farther into my distance. This just pushed it a whole lot more, all at once.

And here I was about to post a link to a well-done presentation by Microsoft security engineers at BlackHat, a technical exploration of improvements to the resilency of Windows 8. But now, it hardly seems worth the effort.

[GreyGeek]

5 May 2009 fades ever farther into my distance. This just pushed it a whole lot more, all at once.

And here I was about to post a link to a well-done presentation by Microsoft security engineers at BlackHat, a technical exploration of improvements to the resilency of Windows 8. But now, it hardly seems worth the effort.

I've love to read (watch?) that presentation. Post the link anyway!

[SteveRiley]

Session abstract: https://www.blackhat.com/html/bh-us-...s.html#Miller2
PDF of slides: https://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-12/...ion_Slides.pdf

[GreyGeek]

Awesome, Steve! Thank you!

An aside: the presentation on "Advanced Arm Exploitation" gave me a chuckle because it brought back an ancient memory. The presentation was by two folks from "Dontstuffbeansupyournose.com". When I was 6 or 7 I was looking up my nose in a mirror and wondering how big that cavity I saw was. So, I decided to stuff peas up my nose until I couldn't get any more in. My plan then was to blow them out of my nose and count them. The part of my plan that involved stuffing peas up my nose worked perfectly. And, I was able to count them in the process! 23, IIRC. The second part of my plan didn't work so well. I couldn't blow them out and I couldn't sniff them to the back of my pharyngeal cavity and swallow them. The doctor had to use a special tool to reach up in there and pull them out, one at a time. Any sacrifice for the cause of science!

Back to the topic: It's interesting that DARPA is fast-tracking the "File Disinfection Framework" for polymorphic viruses. This approach seems to allow the development of a tool that can neutralize a wide variety of viruses running on Windows and minimize the number of Windows based applications that would have to be re-written to run on another, more secure, OS.


The presentation on jemalloc.c was also interesting:

jemalloc is a userland memory allocator that is being increasingly adopted by software projects as a high performance heap manager. It is used in Mozilla Firefox for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms, and as the default system allocator on the FreeBSD and NetBSD operating systems. Facebook also uses jemalloc in various components to handle the load of its web services. However, despite such widespread use, there is no work on the exploitation of jemalloc.

One can only guess at how many jemalloc exploits are out there, as yet undetected, since it has been seven years since Jason Evans introduced jemalloc in FreeBSD.

The presentation on Websocket hacking can apply to all the browsers, regardless of platform:

HTML5 isn't just for watching videos on your iPad. ... Vulnerabilities like XSS have been around since the web's beginning, but exploiting them has become increasingly sophisticated. HTML5 features like WebSockets are part of the framework for controlling browsers compromised by XSS.
...

But, ESPECIALLY interesting is the presentation on hardware backdoors, especially after the Cisco fiasco:

This presentation will demonstrate that permanent backdooring of hardware is practical.

We have built a generic proof of concept malware for the intel architecture, Rakshasa, capable of infecting more than a hundred of different motherboards. The first net effect of Rakshasa is to disable NX permanently and remove SMM related fixes from the BIOS, resulting in permanent lowering of the security of the backdoored computer, even after complete earasing of hard disks and reinstallation of a new operating system.

We shall also demonstrate that preexisting work on MBR subvertions such as bootkiting and preboot authentication software bruteforce can be embedded in Rakshasa with little effort. More over, Rakshasa is built on top of free software, including the Coreboot project, meaning that most of its source code is already public. This presentation will take a deep dive into Coreboot and hardware components such as the BIOS, CMOS and PIC embedded on the motherboard, before detailing the inner workings of Rakshasa and demo its capabilities. It is hoped to raise awareness of the security community regarding the dangers associated with non open source firmwares shipped with any computer and question their integrity. This shall also result in upgrading the best practices for forensics and post intrusion analysis by including the afore mentioned firmwares as part of their scope of work.

Besides Cisco, the first thought that leaped into my head was the fact that nearly ALL of today's motherboards are manufactured in a totalitarian state bent on world domination. One of the reasons that Gulf War I was so successful is that at the request of the US government several manufacturers of American made computer equipment put secret kill switch and other coded instructions into their hardware. When the first attack struck many computers, printers and hard drives suddenly shut down without reason or warning.

Such backdoors at the international level may be unnecessary, except for military computers, since a nuclear EMP weapon detonated 300 miles above Nebraska would damage or destroy electronics an area that ranged from the West coast to the East coast and from Northern Canada to Southern Mexico. Any military that uses hardware made in China and has contingency plans for a war should China attack is using a brick for a brain.


The next presentation was about industrial back doors:

This presentation pivots around the analysis of firmware through reverse engineering in order to discover additional scenarios such as backdoors, confidential documentation or software, vulnerabilities... Everything explained will be based on real cases, unveiling curious 'features' found in industrial devices and finally disclosing some previously unknown details of an interesting case: a backdoor discovered in a family of Smart Meters.

All of these presentations brought to mind the most devastating "back door" of all. The C compiler that, when compiled from examined open source code, can still plant back doors and viruses into compiled apps, including the compiler itself. A compromised compiler is only one step above the infected microcode that could be placed into CPUs made in ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)

It is also possible to create a backdoor without modifying the source code of a program, or even modifying it after compilation. This can be done by rewriting the compiler so that it recognizes code during compilation that triggers inclusion of a backdoor in the compiled output. When the compromised compiler finds such code, it compiles it as normal, but also inserts a backdoor (perhaps a password recognition routine). So, when the user provides that input, he gains access to some (likely undocumented) aspect of program operation. This attack was first outlined by Ken Thompson in his famous paper Reflections on Trusting Trust.

All in all, lots of pdf's, and very nice reads. Thanks for the links, Steve.
(Now I know why I don't trust anything...)