No Backdoor in Vista

mytrip wrote to mention a C|Net article stating that Vista will not have a security backdoor after all. From the article: "'The suggestion is that we are working with governments to create a back door so that they can always access BitLocker-encrypted data,' Niels Ferguson, a developer and cryptographer at Microsoft, wrote Thursday on a corporate blog. 'Over my dead body,' he wrote in his post titled Back-door nonsense."

Re:is it possible to have no backdoors?

[DarkIye]

Well, according to Webopedia [webopedia.com] (not a resource I normally use but it's the only one I could really get a nice succinct definition for, Wikipedia being too long), a backdoor is:

...written by the programmer who creates the code for the program.

Wikipedia agrees, apparently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor [wikipedia.org]

Re:Credibility

[Paradise Pete]

I don't understand what makes that man to put his own words in the risk if he must know that he is not the only one that decides...

Here's what he actually wrote:

"Over my dead body.
Well, maybe not literally---I'm not ready to be a martyr quite yet---but certainly not in any product I work on."

I love the backdoor in MacOS X - it has its use

[dirkx]

MacOS X, with filefault*, creates a backdoor by means of a certificate. If you then safe the RSA key pair from your Keychain on a separate machine - you yourself or corperate IT can then be easily ensured access in case of some-one beeing hit by a bus; or in case of a total OS crash.
Dw.

Ad *) Or manually

# on a safe machine
openssl req -new -x509 -out backup.cer -outform DER -nodes
cp privkey.pem backup.cer /safeplace
srm privkey.pem
# copy public cert to laptop or wherever..
hdiutil create -encryption -type SPARSE -fs HFS+ -volname secure -size 5G -certificate backup.cer sec

Details

[truthsearch]

Here are more details on the NSA keys in Windows [msversus.org]:

For at least Windows 95 OSR2, 98, NT, and 2000 Microsoft has included a secret cryptographic key owned by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). It's most likely that the NSA's key exists within Windows so U.S. government users of Windows can run classified cryptosystems on their computers. But it has been kept secret and it does provide the potential for abuse. "According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system 'is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system.'" Users of Windows outside the U.S. should be especially concerned that the U.S. government can possibly gain security control over their computers. Users within the U.S. should also be concerned that Microsoft has provided the government with a secret back door that they can exploit. (Campbell, Duncan. "How NSA access was built into Windows [heise.de]." Heise Online 4 Sept 1999)

Re:You're right!

[nahdude812]

Well, you can take this one guy's word for it in the case of Windows.

Or in the case of OSS you can take the word of the hundreds of developers who want to audit the code themselves (and for something this important, there'll be hundreds of them), where it only takes one person to throw a red flag on bugtraq, and suddenly there's thousands if not tens of thousands of them looking over this code.

Also you could, if you had an especially vested interest, hire some developers to look over it. Say, perhaps, several independant parties including overseas operations. This is a lot better option than the closed source model where you're pretty much limited to decompiling the code (illegal here in these U.S, and still very hard for even a seasoned developer to figure out) or simply trusting the word of this one guy who maybe didn't notice the back door already present, or simply wasn't motivated to look very hard, or maybe has a family member being threatened in some way by the NSA, who knows.

Source code is no panacea here

[cpghost]

Gnupg is open source, so you can verify there are no backdoors

Yes, absolutely. If you're going to use encryption semi-seriously or even professionally, you have no choice but to use open source crypto libraries and apps!

But source code alone is no panacea here: you (or anyone skilled enough -- a.k.a. the community) could discover obvious backdoors, but what about backdoors in some crypto algorithms themselves? Having the source code for this won't help you much. Nothing could really prevent the NSA [nsa.gov] from working with a crypto implementer to slightly weaken an algorithm, so they could decrypt stuff with less effort than usual. Unless you were a very talented cryptographer, you won't notice the difference.

Re:What else would he say?

[LO0G]

Why am I replying to an AC? I have no idea, but...

Do you even know what BitLocker is? It's full drive encryption - basically they encrypt all the data on the hard disk using a key in the TPM.

It's not about DRM, and can't be used for DRM.

DRM's about ensuring that you can't INTENTIONALLY give your data to someone else. BitLocker is about ensuring that you can't ACCIDENTALLY give your data to someone else.

On a BitLocker encrypted system, if you can boot the system, you can access your hard disk without any difficulties whatsoever.

BitLocker is all about making sure that if you accidentally leave your laptop in the back seat of a cab, the bad guys can't get at the data on the hard disk.

Which, in turn can save your company millions of dollars in fines if the data on your laptop happens to contain customer data.

Re:Why would they wait?

[MSZ]

So, you never heard of the likes of KeyGhost [keyghost.com]...

How often do you check that keyboard cable of yours, by the way?

Re:I love the backdoor in MacOS X - it has its use

[sootman]

Or, you could just use the Master Password.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/filevault/ [apple.com]