Author: paranoidmike

A Product Manager sharing experiences on & of the job.

Windows Vista’s Full Volume Encryption & TPM, part 2: FVE on Tablet PC?

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OK, so where was I when I last left the TPM topic? Oh yeah…

Frankly I don’t know what to think about the state of TPM-backed data encryption. I really *want* to be able to say “yeah baby – your best bet for securing data on a laptop will be Vista’s FVE” (or any other OS-level TPM-backed file encryption option). For a few hours, I actually believed it could be true – not just for an individual, but for any really big organization as well.

However, the past couple of months’ effort has me pretty much convinced otherwise. I’m not exactly optimistic for the prospect of widespread TPM-secured data protection in the near future.

It looks to me like Full Volume Encryption (FVE) in Windows Vista won’t be a viable option for anyone who isn’t prepared to drop a bundle on new computing hardware at the same time. That’s because there’s almost no computers – especially mobile computers – on the market that have a v1.2 TPM.

While I realize that there are other IHV- and ISV-supplied TSS packages to support TPM-backed file encryption, I am mostly focused on Vista FVE for a couple of reasons:

  1. Until a service is provide in-the-box with the OS, my experience with customers is that integrating vendor-specific security software is a huge hassle, and not supportable at scale over shorter periods of time (e.g. 2-3 years).
  2. There’ll often be more than one TPM-enabled package to support – generally, it looks like an organization will have multiple packages, one for every desktop/notebook/tablet/server vendor that integrates a different TPM module.
  3. It’s not clear at this time how the TSS packages are licensed, but I’ll take a SWAG and assume that you’re only licensed to use the TSS package on the system with which it was shipped, and that you’ll have to pay extra to use that package on PCs that were shipped with a different TSS package.
  4. An organization could scrap the bundled software packages entirely and just license a third-party product across the board (e.g. Wave), but the choices are pretty limited from what I’ve seen, and personally (without having had any hands-on experience to support my gut feeling) I don’t know how much confidence I’d have locking my organization’s most prized data up under this – e.g. what’s the enterprise management (archival & recovery, configuration management, identity management) story like?
  5. [Disclosure: I’m a former Microsoft employee, security consultant and spent most of my tenure consulting on EFS, RMS and other security technologies.]

I’ve been in the market for a new laptop for a while, and one of the reasons for my recent obsession with TPM is that (a) any purchase I make now will have to last well beyond the release data of Vista, (b) since I intend to continue to leverage my Windows security expertise, I should really get a computer that supports FVE so I get first-hand knowledge of how it works, and (c) you generally can’t add a TPM chip to a computer after you’ve purchased it (with at least one known exception).

Oh, and I’ve committed myself to the Tablet PC variant, since I am a committed “whiteboard zealot” and I expect to use the freehand drawing capability quite a bit.

So my mission is to find a Tablet PC that meets my “requirements”:

  • TPM v1.2 chip
  • max RAM > 1 GB
  • dedicated video RAM > 32 MB (to support the lunatic Vista graphical improvements)
  • can run from battery for at least three hours a day (e.g. bus rides to and from work, meetings away from my desk)
  • won’t break my wrist if I use it standing up (e.g. weight under 5 lbs)
  • will withstand dropping it once in a while – I’m more than a bit clumsy

I have spent countless hours scouring the Internet for TPM-enabled Tablets. After my intial survey of the PC vendors’ offerings, I figured there’d be at least a couple of options from which to choose. However, the longer I looked, the more bleak it became. Of the major vendors of Tablet PCs (Acer, Fujitsu, Gateway, HP, Lenovo, Motion and Toshiba), I have so far found exactly ONE Tablet on the market with a v1.2 TPM chip.

One.

And not exactly the industry standard for large enterprise deployment – Gateway!

Did I mention that Windows Vista will require the v1.2 chip to support Secure Startup and Full Volume Encryption?

Oh, and did you hear that Microsoft is trying like h*** to get Tablet PCs in the hands of as many users as possible?

Geez Louise, I even went so far as to contact Fujitsu (who have a really fantastic Tablet with a v1.1 TPM chip) to see if they were sitting on any about-to-be-released v1.2-enabled Tablets, asking them the following:

Could you give me some idea of the following:
– whether Fujitsu is committed to integrating v1.2 TPM chips in their computing products?
– when we can expect to see Tablet PCs with v1.2 TPM chips integrated into them?
– Any planned model or series of Tablets that the v1.2 TPM chips will be used in e.g. Lifebook 4000 series, Slate vs. Convertible, etc.?

And this is the response I got:

We fully intend to continue our support of TPM and transition to v1.2.

However, at this time we can not provide a date as to when this will be available. Fujitsu company policy and NDA agreements with suppliers do not allow us to publicly disclose future plans prior to product launch.

So what’s a guy to think? Right now we’ve got exactly one FVE-ready Tablet on the market, and according to this guy, the big wave of computer upgrades in the business sector may already be passing by. [Let me ignore the fact that I haven’t looked into notebooks yet, and assume that TPM v1.2-equipped notebooks are just as scarce. I’ll check into this further and report back.]

Between now and the shipment of Vista (perhaps October 2006, if you can believe these rumours), less than a year away, am I to believe that hordes of TPM v1.2-equipped PCs will show up on people’s desks? If so, then perhaps there might be a minority of organizations who would consider testing the Vista FVE technology (though I doubt they’d be ready to standardize on it, assuming – rightly – that they’ll have less than a majority of Vista FVE-ready PCs in their organization).

But even if TPM v1.2-equipped PCs were to quickly dominate these organizations, would I feel comfortable urging such organizations to adopt Vista to enable use of FVE to protect their data? I honestly don’t know – I don’t feel a resounding “YES” coming on, but neither do I feel a “NO” building in my gut. Perhaps it’s because I feel like this question won’t be practical for a number of years yet.

By requiring the v1.2 TPM chip for FVE & Secure Startup, I believe that:

  • Third-party TSS packages will get a lot of leeway to take the “organizational standard” position – especially for those TSS packages that also support v1.2 TPM chips
  • Most mid-sized to large organizations won’t be in a position to adopt FVE & SS as their data protection standard until say 2008 or later.

This leaves me wondering what data will be left to protect by then? Given the fact that most organizations are being forced through one regulation or another to encrypt customer-sensitive data, I believe that the next couple of years will be the final window for unencrypted user data to reside on client PCs.

Put another way: if you’re the InfoSec officer in charge of recommended strategies for regulatory compliance & avoiding liability, wouldn’t you rather just encrypt every disk on every “physically insecure” PC throughout the organization? That’s one sure-fire way to know that users haven’t accidentally stored a sensitive file in an unencrypted volume, folder or file. Only then would the organization be able to claim that a lost or stolen PC did not contain unencrypted customer data.

[Now, sure, in 3-5 years there’ll be room to re-evaluate the technology used to maintain protected data on hard drives, and it’s quite possible that by then Vista’s SS & FVE will get the nod from many organizations. Migrating from one highly-technical solution to another is never easy in large orgs, and is pretty scary for small outfits or self-supporting end users, but I’m leaving the door open for the landscape to change beyond my wildest imaginings in the 3-5 year timeframe…]

Does anyone see things differently? Does Vista FVE look like it’ll capture a significant portion of the “data protection” market? I’d really like to be wrong about this – it would suck if the best “free” on-disk data protection technology to come out of Microsoft won’t be practical for the majority until long after they had to commit to another on-disk encryption solution.

Email users getting more Paranoid?

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I read an article today about email & phishing, and I’m actually heartened by the same news that the reporter seems to take as pessimistic:
Is it ‘lights out’ for e-mail?

It says that, according to the MailFrontier Phishing IQ Test, email users can correctly identify phishing attempts 82% of the time. They also report that users falsely identify “legitimate” email as a phishing attempt 48% of the time. [Note that this is based on a set of “test” emails, not on the test subjects’ own email inboxes.]

While the writer (Anne Bonaparte, CEO of MailFrontier) seems to believe this means that people’s use of email may be on the decline, I think this is a sign that people are finally treating email as they should: not unlike other forms of spontaneous contact from the outside world.

My wife even forwarded me an email yesterday that looked pretty phishy – an invitation to join a market research survey group, sent by some third party on behalf of Microsoft. Having worked there, my read of it is that it actually *was* legit – I’ve seen plenty of feedback over the years on these marketing-driven email campaigns that – despite all of the good security practices being preached inside Microsoft – still end up looking like they’re a security threat/spam/phishing attempt (when really they’re just poorly-thought-out third-party mass-mailings]. No harm done, just a little twinge on the Paranoid-o-meter, and I really think that’s a good thing.

If someone came up to your door that you’d never met and claimed to be from the IRS and wanted to come in and see your house, would you immediately believe them? What if you got a piece of mail that said it was your bank and that you had to leave your ATM card and PIN # in a mailslot at some odd address?

I for one am glad that people are getting more skeptical about the stuff that floods their inboxes. I live a great deal of my time in my inbox, and I have gotten pretty good at sniffing out illegitimate contact among the hundreds of messages I receive every week. [Fifteen years of jealously guarding my online privacy and trust will do that to a fellow I guess.] I’m glad that others are taking a healthier attitude towards unsolicited email, and I hope this means that they’re wising up that just because someone says something doesn’t immediately make it true.

Personally, I think that people are a little too trusting of people in positions (or illusions) of authority – often believing outright the claims of news reporters, people in uniform, political figures and other “strangers” just because they have the look and mannerisms (or the claimed position) of authority. I will defer to legitimate authority as much as is wise in this day and age (I am a Canadian living in the US, after all), but it disturbs me to think that people around me would have believed any claim that winds up in their inbox.

I think it had to do with the magical nature of computers (for most people) – they don’t know how they work, they don’t understand how fallible the people are that create the hardware & software, and just how riddled with flaws and humanity these whirring beasts really are. It’s like when I tell people about how insecure all the banks are for whom I’ve worked – it shocked me at the first one, and became expected by the third, and now I understand just how thin the ice is on which our finances skate.

Same with email, and thankfully as people have more exposure to it, and see more and more what the latest news report says about what you can and can’t trust, they are starting to see through to the other side of that thin ice, and are treading more carefully.

So what if you delete a few legitimate emails? Your life will rarely end if you don’t get that message – most people, next time they meet up, will nearly always say “Did you get my email?” anyway. Or they’ll re-send the email if they haven’t heard back. Or they too will forget about what they sent, as there’ve been another 200 emails (spam, phishing, and real communications) since the time they sent that email you might’ve inadvertently (or intentionally?) deleted.

It’s a big world, and no email is an island. Especially the ones that promise you a free vacation on one.

P.S. I scored 60% on the Phishing IQ Test II, so what do I know?

I should’ve known I’d be the loner…

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You scored as Batman, the Dark Knight. As the Dark Knight of Gotham, Batman is a vigilante who deals out his own brand of justice to the criminals and corrupt of the city. He follows his own code and is often misunderstood. He has few friends or allies, but finds comfort in his cause.

Batman, the Dark Knight
79%

Neo, the “One”
67%

Captain Jack Sparrow
67%

The Amazing Spider-Man
63%

The Terminator
58%

Indiana Jones
58%

Maximus
54%

Lara Croft
46%

El Zorro
42%

William Wallace
38%

James Bond, Agent 007
33%

Which Action Hero Would You Be? v. 2.0
created with QuizFarm.com

VB Express – holy crap, I can successfully code!

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I’ve been toying with the notion of learning some “real” coding for years now. No matter how good I get at my expertise(s), and no matter how much demand for infrastructure geeks like me there is, I’ve felt a growing pressure to get some “chops”. Yeah, I can read an API, I can sometimes *follow* a codepath (almost easy in VBScript by now, still brutally hard in a C++ fragment), and I feel comfortable in using tools like Depends.exe, ProcExp.exe. Hell, I even have gotten to *almost* understand what I’m doing when I run a debugger like windbg.exe.

I took a great introductory college course on ASP.NET development from a really good friend a couple of years ago, but didn’t quite finish it (i.e. I didn’t write the final). I’ve had an IDE installed on most of my computers for years now, but didn’t hardly do much more than fire up a sample and feel inadequate.

So a few months back I spotted the Visual Studio Express betas – stripped-down IDEs that are targeted at folks just like me. At first I felt just as inadequate with them as with the full-fledged beasties – I still didn’t really know where to start, and without a good sense of the “vocabulary” of a coding language, I always felt like I was crippled from doing something practical with it. [Sorry, but I’m one of those guys that doesn’t really *learn* the lesson by using artificial dev scenarios that don’t do much more than “Hello World” crap. Maybe that works for a lot of folks, and I’m just broken, I dunno.]

Then I started seeing some really encouraging signs:

  • free training videos targeted at the Absolute Beginner
  • learn-to-code books (e.g. 1, 2) that specifically aim for the Express IDE
  • free online training courses (not just Express-oriented, but they’re there if you want ’em)

And so I took more and more steps to get closer. I got a couple of books out from the library that would give me some fun, easy, quick stuff to play with:

  • Learn Microsoft Visual Basic .NET in a Weekend
  • Visual Basic .NET Weekend Crash Course

And most importantly, I sketched out a design idea for a simple application that I would actually use. [More on that later, when I get some of the cool features working.]

But here’s the kicker: not only was it fairly easy to stumble across the basic code fragments that I would need to make the basics of my app work. Not only did I find that things like the “Me” object were damned intuitive, and some of the new controls (like the Menu Bar Toolstrip) were brilliant for quickly whipping up the stuff I *never* want to have to write from scratch. No, the bit that finally got me to blog about this “dirty secret” of mine was this:

[hmm, uploading the screenshot doesn’t seem to be working.]

I’ve run across an error like this before: “NullReferenceException was unhandled” – “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”. Seen it tons of times, and never knew what to do with it.

So when did they finally know how to translate these errors into English? Now there’s a dialog that includes

Troubleshooting tips:

Use the “new” keyword to create an object instance.

Check to determine if the object is null before calling the method.

Get general help for this exception.

*I* can actually do something with that information. OK, so hell, if I can get past this kind of vague-as-everything error message, I’m figuring this is do-able, and I’ll keep pounding away at this code.

Then I check back to Microsoft’s web site to see the current offerings, and was surprised to be able to download the released version of the Express editions directly off the web. !!!

Well holy freak, this is a pretty good deal – download any one of the Express Edition dev tools and use it free for a YEAR. What? Are you guys nuts? What happened to the 60/90/120-day evals? Won’t this eat into a giant sales opportunity? Must be giving some Marketing guy chills just considering this approach…

Well, call me crazy but I think this is great – give guys like me enough time to actually start using the stuff – long enough that I can actually justify to a manager the cost of buying one of these things.

No, wait – WHAT? [OK, I’m done after this] Seems that if you download ’em before 2006-11-07 (i.e. next year), they’re free to use forever. [which means they’re free from now on, because you *know* that you’ll always be able to dig up a download of them somewhere on the ‘net once they’re out like this.]

Sweet.

Database "intrusion detection" appliance – nice thinking, hope to see more like this

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http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,105429,00.html

I am very much interested in anything that helps an organization get a handle on the kinds of “attacks” this device is intended to detect.

My first reaction when I read “The current version of the Symantec appliance does not actually block suspicious queries — it simply monitors and reports on what the database is up to — but that feature is being considered for a future version…” was – Wow, doesn’t that make this a pretty useless piece of tech then?

However, when I think back on all the customers with whom I’ve worked, I’ve found that most of them are happy enough to be able to detect unauthorized behaviour. Sure, if preventative controls cost no more (time, effort, resources, usability) than the equivalent detective control, they’d be happy to use that instead. However, most of us have had enough experience with “prevention is the only path to security” approaches to understand that preventative security can only guarantee that it’ll block some form of intended usage, and that (as Schneier so often points out) the bad guys will always find some other way to accomplish their goals, if they’re determined enough.

Such as: if you block unauthorized use through a database “intrusion prevention” appliance, the bad guys will then try other attack vectors such as:

  • escalating the privilege of an account that doesn’t start with sufficient privilege
  • finding an account that does have sufficient privilege and breaking its password
  • finding an alternate path to the database that doesn’t go through the database IP appliance
  • cracking the appliance (sure, of course it’s impregnable, but…)
  • DoS’ing the appliance (say if nothing else worked, and they’re just frustrated enough to want to do *some* harm)

Bottom line: I like the thinking that went into Symantec’s database security appliance, and I hope to see more creative ideas like this in the future. As the article said, “…enterprise users are becoming increasingly focused on data security and regulation compliance.” [emphasis mine]

Windows Vista’s Full Disk Encryption is only available if you have Microsoft Software Assurance?

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http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/windows/story/0,10801,104918,00.html

Wow – personally, I think someone in marketing at Microsoft has miscalculated on this one. Don’t get me wrong, I can understand the rationale – “Well, most of the customers that have asked us for this feature are already on Software Assurance or wouldn’t have to spend much additional $$$ to get it. The smaller orgs still have EFS to be able to protect their data, and since they haven’t asked for anything else, they must be satisfied with EFS right?”

I don’t buy it – here’s my thinking:

  • Just because those few organizations who’ve actually taken the time to articulate their needs happen to have the SA arrangements already made (or have the EA leverage to negotiate cheap SA rates), doesn’t mean they’re the only ones who would (or could) use this feature;
  • Just because SA has been considered by many Microsoft customers to be a rip-off, and not worth buying again, shouldn’t lead to the effect (intentional or not) of holding some of the most critical features of Vista hostage from the rest of the Microsoft customer base (especially those who wish to purchase one of the premium Vista SKUs such as the rumoured Professional or Full Media editions);
  • Many of the organizations who haven’t explicitly articulated a need to their Microsoft reps for Windows-native full disk encryption [at least based on my experience with them] are either (a) still struggling with their much more limited – and challenging, in most cases – deployments of some form of file encryption on user’s PCs, and are sick of talking about encryption, or (b) have committed to another technology because Microsoft hasn’t yet provided a solution for this critical business need. However counterintuitive it might sound, those organizations who fall under (b) should be given the chance to try Vista’s full-disk encryption without having to commit to SA to do so. Many organizations with whom I’ve worked have told me they’d far rather use a technology that already comes with the products they’re using, than to have to integrate yet another piece of third-party hardware into an already-overly-complex “desktop” deployment – just so long as they believe the built-in technology reasonably achieves their overall goals. Nothing like hands-on testing (and widespread talk from others also testing) to help convince them – but it’s very difficult to get that groundswell of opinion when so few organizations even qualify to be able to use a technology like Secure Startup.

It’s not like the need isn’t critical in every organization – just the opposite in fact, based on my experience with customers over the years. I wonder if it just happens that there hasn’t been enough formal market research at Microsoft to show how widespread the need really is.

Makes me wonder what ELSE is being locked up in the SA-only Vista Enterprise SKU. I’d love to hear a response to this from those at Microsoft who’ll have to defend this to the legions of Microsoft customers for whom Secure Startup won’t be available…

EFS + SYSKEY followup, NTBackup and EFS-TPM integration

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A colleague recently asked me about a previous post of mine:

“Mike, in your blog you mentioned you must use Syskey for real protection of EFS protected data. You said if you didn’t use Syskey, it was relatively easy to get to EFS files. So 3 questions that I haven’t been able to find an answer:

  1. Are there any public attacks documented or tools to get to EFS protected data, other than cracking the user desktop login password? If yes, please link. I guess this would be cracking the DPAPI secure store.
  2. What NTBackup options are required to keep the data encrypted in the .bkf file? If there isn’t a way, how can data files in incremental backups be safely encrypted?
  3. Dell is now shipping TPMv1.1 chips in their Inspiron & Latitude laptops. Can EFS private keys be stored there? How can you know that the private key is actually stored in the TPM chip?”

First I should clear up the misunderstanding I may have created regarding SYSKEY and EFS. What I meant to assert is that EFS files are relatively easy to get at (for educated attackers) unless you use either:
(a) SYSKEY boot floppy or SYSKEY boot password, or
(b) domain logon accounts (and a relatively decent password/passphrase).

I don’t generally recommend SYSKEY in a domain environment; instead I recommend domain accounts and strong passwords or passphrases for reasonable security against brute force attacks.

As for the direct questions I *was* asked:

  1. There are no cryptographic “backdoors” to attack EFS data – the cryptography behind EFS, combined with the reliance on multiple layers of protection of the encryption keys, follows the usual best practices for software-based data encryption. I have faith in DPAPI to do what it sets out to do, and to be as secure as any software-based encryption implementation can be. However, there are a number of potential attacks on EFS’d data – none of them “magic”, but really just predictable consequences of both (a) the ways that keys must be stored on disk and (b) the integration of EFS with the Windows logon infrastructure.
  2. No parameters or configuration are necessary for NTBackup to be able to backup encrypted files – its default behaviour can natively backup EFS encrypted files. NTBackup is one of a class of applications that use the RAW APIs. Applications that call these APIs are requesting that NTFS give them the “raw” file along with the EFS alternate data streams, all in a single binary stream. This means that NTBackup gets a copy of the encrypted file and its keys, so that the backup files contain everything that’s needed to decrypt the files later. When NTBackup restores such files to an NTFS filesystem, you get back the encrypted file intact with its encryption keys. So you can backup any files you like with NTBackup – full, incremental, whatever – and rest assured that the backups are no more vulnerable than the original files. While some backup solutions end up with plaintext copies of the files, those backup apps that use the RAW APIs never expose the unencrypted file contents to later attack.
  3. All currently released versions of Windows are hard coded to ONLY use the native software CSPs for EFS (specifically, the Base or Enhanced CSPs) – they can’t use any other CSPs for EFS, even the oft-requested smart cards (nor the TPM-enabled CSPs). I have no idea whether there will be support for TPM storage of EFS private keys in Windows Vista, though they have announced plans to include EFS-private-key-on-smartcard support. They also mention support for a “full volume encryption” feature (AFAIK, unrelated to EFS) that would work on systems with TPM v1.2 chips. I assume the TPM software dictates how keys are managed, but until there’s any information on whether non-smartcard CSPs are supported, I can only speculate how “enforcing” TPM storage could possibly work. At this point, I believe the “enforce smartcard” option in Windows Vista EFS is a simple checkbox, so it’s probably hard-coded to look for smartcard CSPs only.

I had a quick look around the Internet for current details on leveraging a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chip for encrypting files on disk – here’s what I learned on my first pass:

  • There’s very little mention of which version of the TPM spec is supported on most PCs in the market today – or at least, that information is not easy to uncover. So far the only mention I’ve found on Dell & Toshiba’s sites is “v1.2” for certain Optiplex models, and v1.1 Infineon chips in the Toshiba Tecra M4 & Latitude systems you mentioned.
  • So far I don’t know if there are any significant differences between v1.1 & v1.2 TPM chips in terms of support from the CSPs, and what application scenarios are/are not supported by each version. Maybe the differences are negligible, maybe there’s an order of magnitude more possibilities once you have v1.2. [Or maybe that just happens to be what the “full volume encryption” team was willing to test, even if v1.1 would have been just as good for this scenario.]
  • Seems like every PC vendor has some models shipping with TPM chips – IBM/Lenovo (Atmel), Toshiba (Infineon), HP, Dell. Good news for us.
  • Seems like there’s only a small number of application + CSP suites out there so far that enable TPM in XP:
  • Some suites leverage particular application APIs that require third party plug-ins (e.g. Dell/Wave)
  • Others (e.g. Toshiba’s suite) “support” EFS features – I don’t know what this means, as the documentation I’ve seen is too vague to be sure:
    • Does it merely leverage the DRA public key to provide a recovery path for the Personal Secure Drive (encrypted virtual drive)?
    • Does it encrypt the contents of the user’s profile with keys protected by the TPM?
    • Does it somehow provide a redirection layer so that the RSA files in the user’s profile are actually encrypted by TPM-protected keys before the Windows CSPs drop the files on disk?

This is fascinating, and a lot more than I expected to turn up. It seems that TPM has finally started to catch on with the PC vendors – I was shocked to see that pretty much all the major PC vendors had TPM-enabled PCs. It’s not that I didn’t expect this to happen, but that since I hadn’t heard any of my customers asking me about this so far, I assumed it was still “on the horizon” (like “the year of the PKI” is still just a year or two away, for the tenth year in a row).

I’m going to devote some serious research into the state of TPM-enabled data encryption, and over the next few posts I’ll be putting up my findings and opinions on where I think TPM-enabled encryption fits into the kinds of solutions I normally recommend.

Watch for it.

Trusted Computing Best Practices, the TNC spec, and Microsoft’s involvement – hypocritcal?

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Below are excerpts from Bruce Schneier’s “Schneier on Security” blog, asserting that Microsoft is making an effort to prevent the TCG’s software-only spec for TPM apply to Windows Vista before its release:

In May, the Trusted Computing Group published a best practices document: “Design, Implementation, and Usage Principles for TPM-Based Platforms.” Written for users and implementers of TCG technology, the document tries to draw a line between good uses and bad uses of this technology.

[…]

Meanwhile, the TCG built a purely software version of the specification: Trusted Network Connect (TNC). Basically, it’s a TCG system without a TPM.

The best practices document doesn’t apply to TNC, because Microsoft (as a member of the TCG board of directors) blocked it. The excuse is that the document hadn’t been written with software-only applications in mind, so it shouldn’t apply to software-only TCG systems.

This is absurd. The document outlines best practices for how the system is used. There’s nothing in it about how the system works internally. There’s nothing unique to hardware-based systems, nothing that would be different for software-only systems. You can go through the document yourself and replace all references to “TPM” or “hardware” with “software” (or, better yet, “hardware or software”) in five minutes. There are about a dozen changes, and none of them make any meaningful difference.


If true, this feels to me like some form of hypocrisy, at least at a company level. Microsoft took a decidedly different stance on the use of the “no execute” (NX) feature of the latest generation of CPUs from Intel and AMD, and in an ideal world I’d expect them to do the same here.

In the release of Windows XP’s Service Pack 2 (SP2), they implemented changes to the OS that would enable it to assert the “no execute” flag on any and all processes running on the system – if a process attempted to execute a “page” that was previously considered a data page (i.e. non-executable code), then the OS could immediately halt the program and alert the user. The intent is to prevent things like “buffer overruns” from being able to successfully circumvent a program’s intended purpose and ultimately cause the program to do something the attacker wishes (usually a malicious attack on the OS, its programs, or the user’s data). Worms and viruses have had a field day with this kind of attack for years, and Microsoft and the CPU vendors finally got around to implementing an idea that had kicked around the security community for quite a while.

So far so good. However, while this feature was intended to work with the cooperation of software and hardware, it left most of the existing base of XP users (those without NX-capable CPUs) up the creek. So Microsoft decided to implement a subset of those ideas on any computer running Windows XP SP2. This is a software-only implementation of NX – not perfect, not foolproof, and definitely not as strong as the hardware-backed NX you get with the NX-capable CPUs, but a major leap forward from the “buffer overrun friendly” versions of Windows that have preceded it.

And actually, it seems to work pretty well. I’ve enabled the NX feature on all the computers I touch, and seen it catch a number of programs that were (in most cases accidently) caught doing the very things that NX is set to trap. It doesn’t interfere with the stable, mature applications I’m running, and it hasn’t yet prevented me from doing anything really important. Mostly, it’s trapped this behaviour in the third-party “shareware” type apps that are nice to have. [Hopefully I’ve been able to help the developers of these apps by sending them the crash dumps from these apps. When I am notified by XP SP2 that an app was caught by NX, I’ll trace through the dialogs that tell me where the dump files are located – indicated as the “technical information” that would be submitted to Microsoft through the Error Reporting feature – I’ll find the dump folder, Zip up a copy, and email that Zip file to the ISV who developed the app. Microsoft probably does this as well for apps that often show up in their error reporting queues, but I figure it can’t hurt to make sure anyway. Hint: I don’t have one on my system right now – the folder is deleted once it’s uploaded to Microsoft’s error reporting site – but the crash dump files will be written to your %temp% folder, with a folder name conaining “WER”, and the major files will have the extension “.hdmp” and “.mdmp”. The files compress quite well.]

So here’s my concern: if Microsoft’s Windows division was comfortable with taking a hardware-assisted feature like NX and implementing it as a “software-only” feature, wouldn’t it seem hypocritical to resist applying a software-only spec for TPM to the premier OS next on the horizon? I know I’m being naive here, but it seems like Microsoft would be in a near-ideal position to apply TNC to Vista. They’ve been working on the formerly code-named “Palladium” technology for ages now – or at least talking about it in the press. As well, they’ve apparently been involved with the TCG and the development of these documents for quite a while now, and presumably had at least some level of influence over their content (though probably not a dominant hand in them, given the number of other players with just as much at stake here).

So I wonder aloud: what possible benefit does Microsoft gain from Vista “escaping” the confines of the TNC spec? I would guess it’s because, at this late stage in the development of Windows Vista (they just passed Beta 1), there aren’t a lot of fundamental changes to the OS that could be introduced – without significant risk of delaying the release of Vista AGAIN. [How many scheduling delays now, and how many valuable features REMOVED to keep the schedule from slipping further?]

Perhaps there are other just as innocent explanations as well, e.g.:

  • They’ve been trying to get the TNC spec worked into Vista all along, but at the same time as they decided to pull the “Palladium” features out of Vista, they also had to decide whether to further delay Vista (and continue to stabilize the TNC components) or take the TNC components out of Vista and stabilize the Vista ship schedule.
  • The TNC spec may have taken a late change that drastically altered the requirements for Vista, and the Vista team couldn’t add the major code change without resetting the Vista development milestones.
  • There are plans to add TNC into Vista post-RTM – not unlike the way that many significant features were added to XP via SP2.

It would certainly help quell a potential firestorm of controversy if Microsoft got out ahead of Schneier’s allegations and discussed their plans for TNC implementation in Windows, and what prevents them from incorporating the spec in Vista before it ships. Despite the nefarious personality that some would like to attribute to every action from Microsoft, I’ve found that the people I’ve met and with whom I’ve worked there really do have the best of intentions at heart.

National Standard for Data Security? It’s about freakin’ time

Published on by paranoidmikeLeave a comment

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,103558,00.html?source=NLT_AM&nid=103558

I predict this will be a watershed moment in terms of focus on security of DATA, and (thankfully) take the primacy away from perimeter, network and host security (which in my opinion has consumed an inordinate share of attention, leaving the ONLY UNIQUE [information security] AND IRREPLACEABLE ASSET EACH ORGANIZATION HAS – their data – to languish in insecure obscurity. Let’s hope this helps get those infosec security audit & remediation efforts refocused on the ASSETS, not on the IMPACT, part of the threat analysis equation.

Not to underestimate the efforts this will kick off, I believe those truly interested in securing the privacy and confidentiality of their customers’ data (credit cards, PII and other privacy-occluded data) will have to spend considerable effort on:

  • re-examining their business process data flows, and the processes for assuring the security of the data at all stages (and throughout the process) in its storage, processing and transmission
  • cryptography and key management – not just in implementing “encryption”, but in ensuring that the implemented encryption isn’t just an obfuscation step – that the encryption provides real security benefit against the expected (and likely) threats
  • backup and recovery processes, to ensure data is handled in “archived” form just as securely as in “live” form
  • ensuring they have good reasons to collect any and all data from or about their customers, and having solid justification for storing any of that data (whether short- or long-term).