Google posts Windows 8.1 vulnerability after 90 days

http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/02/google-posts-unpatched-microsoft-bug/

by mmorris • 12 years ago

40 31 12 years ago

dang2• 12 years ago

Url changed from http://www.pcworld.com/article/2864312/google-discloses-unpa..., which points to this.

cheald4• 12 years ago

This story is surprisingly hostile to Google. A 90-day window after which the bug is published is about as responsible as responsible disclosure gets. The headline really rubs me the wrong way, as though Google raced to publish this vulnerability to spite Microsoft.

Not talking about the bug doesn't mean it's not there, but talking about it sure makes people aware that they should perhaps take extra precautions until Microsoft patches the bug. The attitude that "you're giving info to the evil hackers and now we're all unsafe!11" is the very essence of the fallacy of security by obscurity - your ignorance of a bug is not guarantee of others' ignorance of it. Pinning blame on Google for putting us all at risk is the exact wrong response; Microsoft is at blame for taking more than three months to fix a critical security bug, which has been there for even longer.

This sentiment is very visible in the comment section - the story's suggestion that Google did something wrong here, and the torrent of clueless commenters raging about how evil Google is being is disheartening, to say the least. I wonder how much of that is a result of the story's tone.

giovannibajo13• 12 years ago

On the other hand, project zero publishes kiddies-ready exploits for their vulnerabilities, which is a very questionable practice for vulnerabilities which are still in the wild. Even if patches were available, it would be far better to wait for most devices to be patched before releasing a full exploit. They did this with iOS and now with Windows. We are now waiting for such useful ready-to-use exploits for major Android versions as well.

thirsteh• 12 years ago

The problem with not doing this is you're just leaving the hole open, and when vendors haven't bothered to respond before the deadline there's very little chance that they will do anything at all if it passes and there's no consequence. If details of the vulnerability are published, the vendor will have to patch it or openly admit they don't care about a significant risk to their business (note that the risk was there all along.)

Sorry, but this is on the vendors. Saying Google shouldn't release details is like saying the public shouldn't be informed of a dangerous flaw in a car model's brake system until the manufacturer has decided whether to launch a new model and what the marketing plan for it should be.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

Even if patches were available, it would be far better to wait for most devices to be patched before releasing a full exploit.

The practice of a firm 90-day release schedule increases the probability that vendors will fix patches and take steps to assure that they are deployed to most devices within that period. But that only works if the practice is firm.

yourad_io2• 12 years ago

AFAICT, the project zero team is about hunting down bugs and disclosing them responsibly.[1] They occasionally do write-ups on the project zero blog, after the vuln has gone public, but without actually giving out "kiddies-ready expoits", i.e. exploit source.

But even if they did, that still isn't a "questionable practice" - if the full details of the exploit are public, you'd barely need a writeup to connect the dots.

Even if patches were available, it would be far better to wait for most devices to be patched before releasing a full exploit.

So, for router exploits (say), that would be Infinity? If the manufacturer doesn't care, or the update ecosystem is broken (or nonexistent), nobody is more secure because someone did a writeup about a vuln that everyone (..interested) knows about.

Most exploits, however complex their discovery process may have been, end up as "send these bytes in this order" - they are usually very simple to duplicate once you know where the bodies are buried.

[1] As the GP says, 90 days is responsible disclosure.

cheald4• 12 years ago

Metasploit does the same thing, and we've managed to not have the internet implode yet.

Yours is the standard argument against any form of disclosure. I'm not discounting it, because no disclosure has its merits, but responsible disclosure satisfies both an ethical imperative (you can't let people believe they're secure if you know otherwise) and provides pressure on vendors to fix their software, when the vendor might otherwise deem it not worth the time or money to fix the issue, which leaves their customers vulnerable.

The basic idea behind disclosure is "we might not be the first people to find this, and we definitely won't be the last, so let's remove all doubt and rob the bad guys of the element of surprise". Responsible disclosure is intended to permit responsible vendors to fix the issue before wide publication, but an uncooperative vendor doesn't mitigate the reality that the bug exists and will eventually be found by someone less benevolent.

Oletros• 12 years ago

On the other hand, project zero publishes kiddies-ready exploits for their vulnerabilities

I suppose that you will provide sources for that, don't you?

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

TheVerge took the same approach:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/2/7481069/google-publishes-wi...

Disappointing. Microsoft has no real argument here, other than perhaps allowing the NSA to use the bug for longer [1]. This is why the NSA has no need for real Windows backdoors. There are plenty of vulnerabilities such as these in Windows that allow privilege escalation or remote execution that are being discovered all the time. All Microsoft has to do is sit back for a few months on them, wait until another one appears, so NSA can start using that one and then fix the old one. "Everyone" wins.

Google gave everyone (only a few big companies actually - everyone else got the "full disclosure" deal) only a week after discovering Heartbleed, and Microsoft is whining about 3 months being too little? Give me a break.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-14/u-s-agencies-said-t...

lawnchair_larry• 12 years ago

What a terrible linkbait headline.

dang2• 12 years ago

We edited the title in an attempt to make it more neutral.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

Why isn't the source's headline "Microsoft fails to patch privilege-escalation vulnerability within 3 months"?

btian• 12 years ago

Because that would cause Microsoft to shift their advertising budget elsewhere.

Just being practical.

mcintyre19942• 12 years ago

It is important to note that for a would-be attacker to potentially exploit a system, they would first need to have valid logon credentials and be able to log on locally to a targeted machine.

Are Microsoft downplaying or is this genuinely quite minor? The article discusses a disgruntled employee and since all their money comes from Enterprise presumably disgruntled employee can cause major damage is a pretty huge problem?

scarmig2• 12 years ago

A not-particularly informed take:

It means that every user effectively has root privileges. Which means that every user can eavesdrop on other users, view their saved data and files (unless encrypted on disk), intercept their network communications, impersonate them, steal their passwords (system, application, external web sites).

How bad that is depends on your particular use case. But for pretty much any setup where security is a concern or there's any sensitive data at stake, this is a very serious issue.

mcintyre19942• 12 years ago

This is pretty much how I was interpreting it. For context I did an internship at a bank, I had access to a computer and login credentials, but not admin access. I get the feeling that this would be a hair on fire problem there if like you said it'd mean me effectively having root.

jenscow2• 12 years ago

However, in the case of Windows, this issue isn't that much severe as it would be on a unix-like, for example.

With the set up of Windows servers I've seen, only the admin logs in anyway. It's not really used as a "multi-user" system per-se, where you get different users logging in at the same time. It does happen, but it's not common.

cheald4• 12 years ago

This is a big issue in enterprise deployments. Consider, for example, the Sony hack - this is the kind of issue that allows a savvy low-level employee to wreak havoc on their employer, because once you can get root on a machine inside a corporate network, all kinds of doors open.

This isn't a remote root code execution bug, but it shouldn't be taken lightly, either. The exact environments where this bug would be applicable (locked-down) are the environments that could suffer severe damage because of an escalation issue.

The thing is, though, local privilege escalation isn't new, and it isn't novel. This is one in a long string of many, many similar bugs across most every major platform. It's completely unremarkable except for the reluctance on MS's part to patch it in a reasonable timeframe.

orbifold• 12 years ago

You can combine such a privilege escalation with an USB virus, social engineering, etc. to get remote root access to a machine and eventually all machines of a network.

Siecje• 12 years ago

This is going to be more common when Windows 7 is no longer supported 2015-01-13.

tshtf• 12 years ago

Extended support for Windows 7 SP1 ends in 2020.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle

_delirium• 12 years ago

Windows 7 has security support through January 2020 [1]. What's ending this month is "mainstream support", which seems to mean new features, phone support, etc. [2]

[1] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle

[2] See point 6 at http://support2.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

DominikD• 12 years ago

It's more nuanced than article or commenters on HN want it to be. If there's a constant communication channel between companies and there's a reason to believe that patch can't be created in 90 days, sticking to deadlines seems to prioritize the wrong things.

On the other hand if MS wasn't responsive enough and upfront about the time it'd take to patch and reasons for that, then sure, 90 days seems more than needed leeway for Microsoft. But I don't know how things worked and I've seen enough to assume that both scenarios are possible.

doe88• 12 years ago

I think the initial principle of the disclosure policy is good, it is intended to put a bit of pressure on bad vendors to fix their bugs. That said I don't think we can classify MS as a bad vendor. They fix lot of critical issues every years, they certainly have their own internal teams working on security issues, they're responsibles.

Vendors with a quite good track record should be allowed to have some slip ups. You cannot compare a vendor who doesn't fix anything on time with one that usually fix issues promptly but occasionally shows a delay on a report. The process should take that into account. I think the binary handling by Google on this one is not very well thought-out.

Google posts Windows 8.1 vulnerability after 90 days

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