Microsoft States Full TCP/IP Too Dangerous

daria42 writes "To fully implement the TCP/IP protocol in Windows XP would make creating denial of service attacks 'entirely too trivial', Microsoft has claimed. The company was responding to claims by Nmap author and well-known security expert Fyodor that by repeatedly disabling the ability to send TCP/IP packets via the 'raw sockets' avenue, Microsoft was asking the security community to 'pick their poison': either cripple their operating system or leave it open to hackers. Admitting that a recent security patch had intentionally disabled a community-developed workaround to Microsoft's TCP/IP changes - which were first implemented in Windows XP Service Pack 2 - the company claimed it had received little negative feedback on the issue."

News Flash: Butter is good on toast!

News Flash: Butter is good on toast!

From the Article:

"Supporting packet sends from simple user-mode raw sockets makes it entirely too trivial for compromised systems under control of hackers to launch massive distributed denial of service attacks," Microsoft warned in a statement to ZDNet Australia .

Interesting that M$ sees fit to lecture us on the dangers of raw sockets now, given their prior stand on the issue. [grc.com]

Re:News Flash: Butter is good on toast!

Let's give MS some credit here, I think even they've come to realize that Gibson was right and raw sockets for users was a mistake. The fact of the matter is that they fixed the issue by taking away raw sockets, and now they have to defend that position.

Re:Steve "Ahab" Gibson

Funny...if Steve's views were so discredited, why does M$ agree with him now?

Re:Steve "Ahab" Gibson

Microsoft agrees with him because this is an easier excuse than trying to fix Windows so not everyone website's active-X control has admin privileges.

The real solution to the problem isn't breaking networking functionality depending on if you bought the cheap or expensive version of the OS.

The real solution would be to restrict raw sockets to require Administrator/root privileges, and make it harder for the averages Outlook attachment to get root privileges.

Microsoft, on the other hand, sees this as an excuse to not fix Outlook and Internet Explorer, and instead sell more of the expensive version.

Baby, meet bathwater.

To fully implement the TCP/IP protocol in Windows XP would make creating denial of service attacks 'entirely too trivial'

This is because XP is not designed right, not because the TCP/IP protocol is wrong. (just to be clear)

The quote [seclists.org] from Fyodor is:
"Pick your poison: Install MS05-019 and cripple your OS, or ignore the hotfix and remain vulnerable to remote code execution and DoS."

It's like... we just... can't... win.

Fyodor goes on to say...

"Nmap has not supported dialup nor any other non-ethernet connections
on Windows since this silly limitation was added. The new TCP
connection limit also substantially degrades connect() scan. Nmap
users should avoid thinking that all platforms are supported equally.
If you have any choice, run Nmap on Linux, Mac OS X, Open/FreeBSD, or
Solaris rather than Windows. Nmap will run faster and more reliably.
Or you can try convincing MS to fix their TCP stack. Good luck with
that."

The answer, my friend, is to drop Microsoft.

Baby, meet bathwater.

Re:Baby, meet bathwater.

Or perhaps if you are going to write apps that require such low level network access, you should be using a packet driver (or whatever the mechanism is in windows) to do that.

The same can be said for any access to hardware that could be considered unnecessary for typical applications or 'harmful' to the hardware (harmful in the sense that it is 'harmful' to the network and your connection).

I think what MS has done is quite acceptable, given the number of trojans uot there that are DoS'ing and spamming like crazy. Trojans that are on the systems often because of user stupidity rather than an insecure OS. As long as it is possible to actually write such a 'driver' (I think there is a different name for it, but I can't remmeber).

Re:Baby, meet bathwater.

After walking throught he MS articles and stuff, I came across this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897656/ [microsoft.com]

Quoted from there is basically. If you want to use hand-crafted TCP/UDP packets over a raw IP connection, you must enable the Internet Connection Firewall.

At least, this is for SP1, I don't know if you can get away with this in SP2.

Re:Baby, meet bathwater.

Quoted from there is basically. If you want to use hand-crafted TCP/UDP packets over a raw IP connection, you must enable the Internet Connection Firewall.

I was about to reply pointing out that you had obviously meant to say, "disable the Firewall".

Then I read the Knowledgebase article.

God, that's retarded. The firewall doesn't do jack shit to block outgoing traffic anyway. Why the hell should it be safer to allow raw sockets when it's on?

Hammer, meet nail.

This is because XP is not designed right, not because the TCP/IP protocol is wrong. (just to be clear)

You nailed it.

Microsoft is clearly trying to shift the blame from their dain-bramaged design to TCP/IP. How many other operating systems are there that do (more or less) fully implement TCP/IP, including raw sockets? It's almost universal.

Oh well. I guess Microsoft knows the neighborhood is safer with a crippled lunatic than healthy one.

Re:Hammer, meet nail.

The brain damaged part has nothing to do with TCP/IP, because their implementation has nothing to do with security.

Seriously? You really think it's their brain damaged TCP/IP implementation that's at fault? Think again. It may be bad, but giving every program access to raw sockets is a bit silly considering how easy it is to get programs into Windows. But this is a good move, a better one would to have been to make it so it's not as simple to get untrusted programs running in Windows but I digress.

Re:Hammer, meet nail.

I think you misunderstood the GP post. It's XP in general that's brain-damaged, not the XP TCP/IP stack.

Microsoft is trying to blame the design of TCP/IP instead of the design of Windows. Everybody else makes it work; why can't they?

Re:Baby, meet bathwater.

No justification whatsoever for your cliam of XP not designed right.

While this is correct, providing such justification would be like providing justification for a claim that Pintos weren't designed right and had a tendency to blow up.

There might be some who have missed that, but it's still common knowledge that doesn't bear repeating every damned time the issue comes up. I suppose we could all attach standard disclaimer files to all of our posts, but they would take up two or three library of congresses to only cover the most common of the bases.

Follow one of the links provided in subsequent posts to Steve "Foaming at the Mouth" Gibson's site to get a rundown on the issues. Note that Steve will cheer this move by MS because flaws in the OS design make it necessary.

The core issue being that XP Home Edition runs apps in administrator mode, giving all apps, like a trojan, full access to raw sockets. Most home users that use Pro are still silly enough to run in admin mode as well. But hey, at least it's hardened against trojans, eh?

Easy to infect with malicious code, malicious code runs with full privileges. That's bad design.

. . .i do think they should make available as a download or on CD a TCP/IP pack that does support raw sockets.

A patch to restore what a patch took out. That alone should clue you in that something braindead is going on.

Please note that only "desktop" versions of XP are affected, so all you have to do is buy a server product from MS.

Or install BSD for free.

KFG

Re:Baby, meet bathwater.

...DDoS remote sites take advantage of the limitations of IPv4 (mostly the ease of forging your source IP address) to hide the true sources of the attack.

Which could be all but eliminated if ISPs would implement access lists in their routers to drop packets with source addresses other than those assigned to the downstream networks.

Problem solved without relying on OS vendors or end users to implement anything at all.

Ulterior motives

It's quite obvious that Microsoft has other motives for doing this as this really doesn't do anything to improve security. As was quoted in the article, Fyodor correctly points out that Windows (AFAIK) is the only operating system to put such restrictions on raw sockets and it certainly has not helped their dismal security.

Of course, there's always the possibility of ignorance...

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by
stupidity.

but I really have to doubt that Microsoft is quite this dumb. They've got a lot of really tallented people working there so you have to think that someone would have thought about this. Then again, they have demonstrated a supreme lack of understanding when it comes to security so who knows.

Re:Ulterior motives

If they locked down raw sockets and made it available only to administrators or root users, that would solve it.

Gibson points out that other operating systems do this, while Windows doesn't. The problem lies there, not in the inclusion of raw sockets API.

Re:Ulterior motives

Except everyony does their daily work signed on as administrator (by everone I mean the majority of average users). Maybe a desktop OS for the masses *should* be crippled in some ways, to protect people from themselves. And people who need a full featured OS can use something else (a seperate version of Windows, or whatever).

Correct URL

For the truth about Mr Gibson, look here [grcsucks.com]

Re:Ulterior motives

Then again, they have demonstrated a supreme lack of understanding when it comes to security so who knows.

Actually, I think we're seeing the maturation of a "corral the wagons" paranoia in Microsoft's culture. Lacking the ability to push any serious innovation internally (let's be serious, most of Microsoft's innovations during the past 20 years were brought in through acquisitions or copycat development ala VMS for NT, liberal borrowing from OS/2, Apple and Mach, etc). Now that antitrust severely limits acquisition growth, Microsoft is facing the same threat that broke Worldcom. Unable to make significant acquisitions, unable to meet growth internally, and now unable to cook the books like Worldcom, Microsoft's certain to get very defensive as the pressures heat up.

I thought I saw the beginnings of this phenomenon in 1998 at the IPv6 summit, where Microsoft's techs at the conference were explaining their implementation at first with great pride, only to be somewhat ashamed at how much they hadn't followed the specification very well, had numerous bugs and compatibility issues, and were clearly well behind everyone else. Nearly every other operating system had a much more mature implementation. (How long did that IPv6 stack remain a beta too?)

Amazingly, Microsoft is now attempting to patent IPv6 [zdnet.com] through a copy-cat specification (as was discussed on slashdot [slashdot.org]). Somehow it's not amusing when the kid who was not very successful in his participation in the group assignment decides to take exclusive credit for the group's effort.

So now Microsoft is blaming IPv4's engineering (when just like IPv6, everyone else seemed to understand and master the assignment EXCEPT Microsoft)?

As a teacher of mine once said to perpetual underachievers in class: Perhaps you might consider a career in food service instead?

A wise decision

Of course nobody needs raw sockets, and after all no other operating system supports them. I mean, it's not as if OpenBSD, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, the various Linux flavours support it. It would be too dangerous.

No, Microsoft... none of those support raw sockets. Oh, wait... they all do. The problem is not raw sockets, the problem are the holes in the OS in the first place. If your OS doesn't run services that can be hacked, or if the applications don't allow to execute untrusted code there is no problem. Avoiding raw sockets is treating the symptoms, not the cause.

Re:A wise decision

On UNIX-like systems, creating a RAW socket can only be done by the superuser. Putting a similar restriction on Windows (substitute Administrator for superuser) would provide no benefit, since Windows is designed in such a way that most users run as an Administrator. Depressingly, the RunAs service has been around for many years now, completely eliminating the need to run as an Administrator. Unfortunately, the lack of a decent UI for this service has prevented its widespread use.

Re:A wise decision

How do you modify the registry without logging out the local user?

runas /user:Administrator@domain regedit.exe

How do you add printers to the machine without logging out the user?

runas /user:Administrator@domain "C:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe"
Click View, Explorer Bar, go to printers control panel, add printer...

Yes, you're right, there are some things you still can't do using runas, but not many. Be creative.

Re:A wise decision

Set my girlfriend up with a non-admin account. So, I end up having to install all her software for her... except at the time, things like ICQ simply wouldn't run right, even when installed by admin and ran as user. Many of those have changed, many haven't. Still too many dumb apps and games that won't run with anything less, even if you did manage to install them.

What I really need, is a firefox theme that looks like IE, and a desktop theme that looks like XP. She'd never know the difference. (and when wine fails to run the dumb shareware games she tries to install, I'd be like "They must not have programmed them very well, I can't make them work!".)

Re:A wise decision

runas /user:Administrator@domain "C:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe"

So you run internet explorer to add a printer. And I thought adding a printer to OS/2 was unintuitive...

Re:Ha!

It isn't "almost crippled."

Ordinary users on Unix are subject to even worse limitations (which is, in fact, why ping among other utilities runs setuid root).

Has anyone found that this makes Unix unusable for them? For that matter, outside of DDoS, connection hijacking, and abusing smtp servers to cover your tracks when spamming, is there ever any need for an application programmer to falsify a source address? Doing so means you won't get a reply from whatever you're trying to do.

All that said, I imagine if MS actually put some effort into fixing the security issues with their flagship product in the first place, so it didn't get hacked (hint: disable activex by default, along with integrated vb scripting in outlook), then there'd be no hacked machines to be used in attacks.

They picked C

Cripple the OS, and leave it open to hackers!

In Redmond, this is what they call a win win.

//no Karma Bonus for that one... ;)

Core Routers

This is just part of the push to get the core internet routers cut over to NetBEUI well in advance of any ipV6 rollout. If Microsoft can manage that, the internet will be theirs again, just like when they initially built it between Steve, Bill and Woz's offices back in the early seventies.

Scary thing is, from what I've been reading Oracle will go along with this. And they can tell the future!!

Microsoft's Real Plans

Why embrace and extend? All they really need to do is support the evil bit [rfc-editor.org].

But of course, being Microsoft, you're probably right. They'll make their own implementation of the evil bit, patent it, and charge royalties to others who want to support their new "EDDP" protocol (Evil Data Detection Protocol).

Not to mention that IIS, Exchange, IE, and Outlook will grow to require use of EDDP during transfers of data, locking Mozilla, Apple, Linux, and others from accessing much of the internet.

Finally, John C. Dvorak [dvorak.org] will boldly claim that EDDP is the wave of the future, and Apple, Linux, and Mozilla are clearly inferior for not supporting what is clearly a web standard, because if Microsoft says it is, it MUST be.

Re:Going back on their word

Cringely never gets more than about 50% correct in his articles. In this case he calls it "raw tcp/ip sockets". Wrong. Raw sockets access IP, so you can forge tcp packets in a DOS attack. Every OS allows access to TCP/IP. How else would your browser work?

He then proposes a secure ID system. Gee. Maybe if every connection to the network had a unique 32-bit number that could be traced somehow? Maybe there could be a world-wide database connecting names and administrative information to these numbers? If only that were possible. Thanks, Bob.

Responding to Steve Gibson

Microsoft is just responding to Steve Gibson [grc.com], of Gibson Research, who has hounded them for making raw sockets accessible to all programs in the past.

Re:Responding to Steve Gibson

Technically, you are right... But Gibson's claim is that by not providing easy access to raw sockets, it becomes much harder to engineer viruses or other malware to produce successful attacks. He never claims it's impossible--in fact, he claims that the user can reimplement raw socket support--but reimplementing raw sockets is significantly more difficult than using an existing API. And considering that a large majority of viruses and malware is due to 5cr1p7 k1dd135, and not real hackers, this helps. Remember, this doesn't make Windows secure, it's just one step to make it less harmful... and that's Gibson's claim. It's one piece of the puzzle (that's mostly empty at this point).

I remember...

Steve Gibson's crusade [grc.com] againts Windows raw socket capabilities. Did Microsoft listen, and now is being criticised for doing that?

raw sockets+MS?!

are they kidding?

if you are mucking with protocols by using raw sockets, are you really going to be coding it on a windows platform? i can imagine a worm or trojan doing it perhaps - in a ddos scenario - but since when has raw sockets become the red-headed stepchild implicated in this?

My TCP/IP

Maybe Microsoft is right. Protocols are dangerous.

Wouldn't it be safer if we all just had a My TCP/IP folder?

Re:My TCP/IP

If they implement the full protocols, everyone could have your TCP/IP folder :)

Privileges anyone?

I can't believe this issue of Windows security is so difficult to understand. You read all these articles about viruses and trojans but people keep failing to mention the obvious - you must never casually run Windows with Administrator privileges.

It's because so many people are used to doing this by default, and so many third party apps demand Admin privileges, that Windows security is a nightmare.

There's more to the Windows security picture of course (insecure services as well) but you can prevent so many problems just by avoiding that Admin account. It's quite normal to have raw sockets via root/Administrator privileges. The problem is that all windows users (and any software they download) are Admins.

Re:Privileges anyone?

The default users get Administrator priviledges because many popular programs simply refuse to work correcty with limited rights. Over the top of my head, Winamp 5 and Trillian 3.1 are guilty of this. Sure, you can workaround by giving write access to everyone for those folders, but it's crazy.

FMEA

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis... I would love to see that done on windows. Maybe find the problem itself rather than work around it and leave the faulires in there. Bad by design.

Another note from Bill Gates

Dear MS Employees, We have started the FUD about TCP/IP. Now press forward with MS/IP. Once we release it we'll charge everyone a fee to use it because we know it will be more secure than TCP/IP. After all, it comes from Microsoft. With Love, Bill

So when...

So, they're going to re-disable raw sockets? I'd suggest that the IP implementation on SP2 is broken already. For example - when will you be able to send more than 8K in a single packet using a Java Socket on Windows XP Service Pack 2?

String sString = "Some string more than 8K";
Socket client;
PrintWriter sock_out;
try
{
client = new Socket (InetAddress.getByName
("127.0.0.1"), 5678);
sock_out = new PrintWriter
(client.getOutputStream(), true);
sock_out.flush();
sock_out.println (sString);
sock_out.close();
client.close();
}
catch (EOFException eof)
{

}
catch (IOException e)
{

}

Try it yourself - see if you can receive more than 8K in a recv() call in Windows XP SP2. You can't.
If you do the same on Linux or OS X, you can. On Windows XP SP1, you can.

Thanks, Microsoft.

Re:So when...

Why are you relying on such things? A TCP conection is a continuous stream of bytes, not a bunch of separate packets. There has never been any guarantee that send()s and recv()s would match up 1:1, even if they are less that 8k. If you are relying on this behavior, you need to fix your design.

Re:So when...

Because XPSP2 recv Buffers are limited to 8KB.
Every OS has a size for those buffers, you have just discovered the XPSP2 size, congratulations.

Every other OS has a limit on that buffer, and I guess for every OS it is configurable in some way (in Windows there is some remote key in the registry).

this wont make a bit of difference...

...since the admin can always write packets (in frames)directly to the layer 2 driver. all they are doing is breaking the BSD sockets API - security through obscurity? right....

I agree...

If you can't have a secure OS, the OS should be less vulnerable to being abused. So in effect, use Linux or other OS's if you need to use raw sockets.

Replacement

As soon as I saw this, it made me rememeber this article [pbs.org] by Cringely (written in August 2001) which discusses the "problem" of raw sockets.

From it:

According to these programmers, Microsoft wants to replace TCP/IP with a proprietary protocol -- a protocol owned by Microsoft -- that it will tout as being more secure. Actually, the new protocol would likely be TCP/IP with some of the reserved fields used as pointers to proprietary extensions, quite similar to Vines IP, if you remember that product from Banyan Systems. I'll call it TCP/MS.

How do you push for the acceptance of a new protocol? First, make the old one unworkable by placing millions of exploitable TCP/IP stacks out on the Net, ready-to-use by any teenage sociopath. When the Net slows or crashes, the blame would not be assigned to Microsoft. Then ship the new protocol with every new copy of Windows, and install it with every Windows Update over the Internet. Zero to 100 million copies could happen in less than a year, and that year could be prior to the new protocol even being announced. It could be shipping right now.

Food for thought.

The Metro of netoworking protocols

Yes, the path becomes clear...

Abandon the industry standard for VMs (Java) and roll your own (.Net).

Abandon the industry standard for portable documents (PDF) and roll your own (Metro).

Abandon the industry standard for networking (TCP/IP) and roll your own (???).

Each sounds more improbable than the last. Yet the first one has happened, the second is going to happen, and thus the third seems much less improbable than it would have otherwise.

I Can't Believe It...

I am actually going to side with Microsoft on this one. It is not as if they removed raw sockets, but rather restricted access to them. Let's consider who needs raw sockets, mostly advanced users. Advanced users are going to have an Administrator or root account on the Windows machine and therefore should have access to raw sockets, no? There is almost no reason for the average user to have raw sockets. They do create a real risk of bad network behavior and I imagine if someone were to create TCP/IP today instead of 30 years ago when the Internet was a much smaller, nicer place, raw sockets would not be part of the spec.

As an aside, I think I'm going to take the rest of the day off, agreeing with Microsoft is mentally jarring. It has to make you question existence just a little and also make you a touch ill.

Erm, cough, cough, excuse me...

I run Linux and UNIX with my "insecure" full TCP/IP stack. My UNIX-y machines have an IP address, subnet mask, gateway, etc. etc. These machines do not get worms or viruses.

I run Windows 2000 with my "secure" limited TCP/IP stack. My Windows machine has an IP address, subnet mask, gateway, etc. etc. This machine would get virii if I didn't run a virus checker, firewall, etc.

There is one difference between the two scenarios above - the operating system!

Yes, my UNIX-y boxes are subject to attacks from the Internet but not random attacks like viri and worms.

An attack on my UNIX-y boxes comes from a single, person or script trying to get into my box and trying to (probably) buffer overflow a specific application daemon like FTP, Telnet, etc (not that I run either of these on the Internet anyway!)

So let's not blame it on the "TCP/IP" stack because all attacks are as a result of attacking applications that use the stack, not the stack itself.

We'll also remind ourselves here that UNIX was built around TCP/IP 25 years ago whereas MS refused to believe TCP/IP existed until 15 years ago after Windows 3.11 came out and they had to write a limited stack to install into Windows.

Re:Erm, cough, cough, excuse me...

You seem to have an inability to read my posting correctly so I'll simplify it for you.

Putting DDoS-type attacks aside, compromising a system, whether UNIX, Windows, whatever, involves attacking an application, not the stack. Therefore, whether you have a full or limited IP stack makes no difference to security - it's about what applications you're running.

If you honestly believe security is about accepting you'll be broken into but just mitigating the results of it, then it's you without the clue, my friend.

You don't run a virus scanner and never got a virus? Fine, I can believe that but then tell the whole story - you probably don't run Outlook for your email or, if you do, you're really careful about who you open emails from; you probably don't use IE and you've probably got your head screwed on properly when it comes to not downloading stuff from certain places on the Internet.

However, when most Windows users are "without-clue" Joe Sixpacks, raw-sockets and mitigation mean nothing, it's the vulnerabilities of the apps they run that are the problem.

How about you and I take a Joe Sixpack user each, put one in front of your fully secured Windows boxes and I put one in front of a fully secured Linux box? You set him up IE and Outlook, I'll give him Firefox and Thunderbird and we leave them both to it. Tell me, who's going to rife with spyware and one or two viruses after a week or two?

Like I said, it's the applications and nothing to do with lame excuses about stacks.

Translation

Translation: Our OS is a dog and we need to neuter it to keep it under control.

Not that this will solve anything, no raw sockets? I don't need no raw sockets, I have 48 billion bogus dns lookups!

Consider the Source

Okay, the company with a baffling amount of security holes [microsoft.com] is giving advice on computer security. That is about as absurd as, say, the company with worst software quality giving us advice on how to develop quality software [microsoft.com].

To quote Ted Kennedy, "Hello? Hello?!!"
Some days, life is just a little too weird to take.

MS Windows Server 2003 also has buggy TCP/IP

I wrote an article about a very serious problem related to Windows Server 2003 TCP/IP.

Here's a quote : "Trying to set up a Windows Media streaming server to stream high-quality videos, I came across what I can now call a TCP/IP bug in Windows Server 2003 (Standard Edition). In some (not unusual) situations, the server simply cannot use all available bandwidth between itself and the client.
[...]
Eventually, I came to accept the idea that Windows Server 2003, an OS designed for server tasks, is not able to fill a 2Mbit/s ADSL connection. Yes I know it sounds incredible but I've been looking without success for another conclusion for the past 3 months."

Read the full technical explanation and see what Microsoft has to say about it : Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Buggy TCP/IP ? [dariospagnolo.org]

Bad Logic

People who are saying the "average" user doesn't "need" raw sockets while saying that the hacker who does will use another OS ANYWAY are obviously missing the point.

Why bother disabling something that's part of a standard when it will have no effect on either the average user or the hacker?

MS is saying here that if the "average" user had raw sockets, they could program DoS code? I don't think that's gonna happen.

All disabling sockets has done is inconvenience nmap users - who just happen to be sys admins running security scans on their networks from their workstations.

Maybe MS doesn't want them to be able to run nmap? Like maybe they might find out how insecure their systems are?

Something is wrong, alright

The various BSD flavours support raw sockets. So does Solaris, and even Linux for that matter.

The difference with the Unix-like systems is that ordinary users don't get to poke about with dangerous stuff.

The real point is that Windows software has for too long depended on the assumption that the user has full unfettered access to every resource on the computer -- an assumption which had to cease to be true when Windows became network-aware, because in a networked environment some things are properly restricted. Yet for the best part of ten years, Windows continued to run without privilege separation; and application programmers took advantage of that, creating code which turned out to be fundamentally broken.

Face it, the bathwater is minging and the baby is dead -- there is nothing worth saving in the whole sorry mess. Whether bad water killed the baby, the dead baby made the water worse, or the two are unconnected, isn't really important right now. What is important is to get rid of them both, scrub out the bathtub and start again.

Of course, if you're going to switch to a new version of Windows -- which would have to be totally incompatible with all that sloppily-written software needing root access for no good reason -- then that would be about as big a change as switching to some other operating system. That must worry Microsoft .....

Security is an Illusion (and a bolt-on hack)

What's the fuss? So RAW sockets aren't available in user mode. That will keep infected PC's from DDoS'ing the universe (temporarily), until the virus/spyware writers exploit holes in the O/S to escalate their priveledges.

MS is just temporarily making exploiting a machine harder, but it will ultimately be futile and lead to even more nefarious and hostile virus/worm/spyware applications. This is a bandaid at best.

Windows is architected so poorly from a security standpoint, that it's probably time to just start over. Security in Windows has always been a "bolt-on" hack. And just remember, no matter what you do, Security is an Illusion.

Is it time for developers at SlashDot provide an interface similar to GMAIL so that I don't have to put HTML tags in my comments?

Oh my god, this has been debated since 2000

I remember "Steve Gibson" was bashed and debunked for talking about raw sockets in 2000 or 2001.

There is a short audio file from Rob Rosenberg from where he repeadingly laughs at his claims.

By the way, wasn't Gibsons site defaced today by Fluffy Bunny?

http://www.farook.org/arc20010701.htm [farook.org]

http://www.vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=335&page=4 [vmyths.com]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/12/security_g eek_developing_winxp_raw/ [theregister.co.uk]

and so on. Is there anything new that has happened in the last 4 years?

The problem lies somewhere else

In a system which grants admin priviledges to every user of course raw sockets can be dangerous. But the problem is less raw sockets, the problem is more the system itself which uses it.

Pushing more people towards Linux

I work for a company that sells a high-end network security scanning product. We have been dealing with this XP issue now for almost 2 years, and we are not the only ones who have complained to Microsoft. We have pushed our complaints as far through the channels as we can. Microsoft isn't listening.

Their response is: buy Windows Server 2003 if you want raw sockets. We asked them if there was any guarantee that they would not break the raw sockets feature in 2003, and they would not give us that guarantee. Besides, Windows Server 2003 ships with a lot of stuff we would have to disable to make the box even remotely secure.

Our CEO even registered a complaint with Microsoft, saying "We pay to use your software and you are hurting our business and hurting our customers and costing us money with this change. And you have heard our complaints and you are ignoring them." Microsoft responded that they would pass our criticism up the chain, and that's the last we heard.

That's why it irritates me to read in the article that Microsoft has had "little negative feedback" on this issue. I'm sure we're not the only paying customer of Microsoft that has been affected. And they are not telling the truth when they say that "the only thing affected by this change is fingerprinting software": port scanning is affected too.

So we have started recommending that our customers use the Linux version of our product. Now Microsoft is losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue per quarter just from our company.

If the virus gets into the kernel...

It also pointed out that "writing and installing kernel-mode code is vastly more complicated" than using an existing raw socket feature,

Yeh, that's why the majority of people doing this use an widely available rootkit or equivalent to do it for them.

and that if malware did make it into the kernel of a Windows machine, the user would have more serious concerns than just SYN attacks launched from their machines.

"If malware can execute code on a Windows machine, the user has more serious concerns than just SYN attacks launched from their machines. That's why Windows doesn't bother trying to close local exploits."

Windows is much more secure

With any TCP/IP, I've found that by just unplugging the ethernet cable, a windows desktop can be just as secure as an OpenBSD Server.

Lack of negative feedback != no problems

the company claimed it had received little negative feedback on the issue.

In other news, a noted chemical manufacturer was found to have been dumping toxic waste products into a nearby water supply for years. In their defense, company spokesmen claims they had received little negative on the issue.

Local police have been caught on camera beating up suspected felons. When cornered on the issue, they responded by saying that there had been little negative feedback on the issue -- at least, from anyone who mattered.

In a press conference today, Bush defended his administration's handling of the war on terrorism by saying that they had little negative feedback on the issue. (Possibly because they had suppressed their own report on the issue; outside sources indicate that terrorist activity around the world is four times worse than in the previous year.)

There, three possible responses to the negative feedback defense. Pick your favorite, I need a drink after this.

so, put an ACL on it?

...and disable the feature by default for all accounts, including admin.

I mean, on other occasions you hear them blather about Windows' totally stellar, fine-grained security architecture, and now they want to prevent Joe Average user from accidentally using raw sockets by, uh, removing the feature altogether?

Re:So now

Umm, while I'm not siding with Microsoft on the issue, I also think that yours is a ridiculous statement.

Microsoft is not deciding what you can do on your computer. They are deciding what you can do with a product they sell. It's a free market - if their product doesn't do what you want, buy (or download for free in many cases) a product that does.