Privacy, Security Archive

Microsoft officials poured cold water on a published report that said its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB, code-named Palladium) project is being canned. "The project is continuing full steam ahead. It's alive and kicking and we're very excited about it. The vision has been refined over the last year but it's absolutely not true that it's being killed," MS product manager Mario Juarez said.

After a year of tackling the Windows security nightmare, Microsoft has killed its Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) project and later this year plans to detail a revised security plan for Longhorn, the next major version of Windows, company executives said. On Tuesday, Microsoft executives confirmed that NGSCB will be canned. The project, dreamed up with Intel in 2002, was once code-named Palladium.

The open source community has mastered many challenges and has been successful in numerous areas. However, there is one glaring weakness that needs to be remedied.

This paper was written by Ken Thompson around August 1984. Ken Thompson is the co-father of UNIX: "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."

Creating a popular new computing approach always seems to bring with it a familiar catch-22: security issues. And Web services is no exception.

Trusted Computing (TC) continues to be one of the most controversial technologies to come along in many years. Ross Anderson's (anti) TCPA FAQ, Lucky Green's apocalyptic DEFCON presentation, and sites such as notcpa.org and againsttcpa.com are full of predictions of online disaster if TC technology is allowed to go forward.

AMD's Athlon-64 (for PCs) and Opteron (for servers) will protect against buffer overflows when used with a new version of Windows XP. Intel plans similar features on next generation Pentium chips.

UK based security firm mi2g has analyzed 17,074 successful digital attacks against servers and networks. The results are a bit surprising. The BSD OSes (including FreeBSD and Mac OS X) proved to be the systems least likely to be successfully cracked, while Linux servers were the most vulnerable. Linux machines suffered 13,654 successful attacks, or 80% of the survey total. Windows based servers enjoyed a sharp decline in successful breaches, with only 2,005 attacks. "Read more" for our take.

Web surfers battling "spyware" face a new problem: So-called spyware-killing programs that install the same kind of unwanted advertising software they promise to erase. Though the companies that fail to disclose this practice are facing an outcry from consumers and watchdogs, there is little people can do to defend their systems, security firms say.

The first place many companies look for Apache support is their main distribution provider, most commonly Red Hat or SuSE. As open source grows, the need for support grows, and this new need has led to the development of a new support option: third-party vendors who manage or patch software. Flaws raise red flag on Linux security but many users remain confident about the security of the open-source environment notices ComputerWorld.

A handful of recent online attacks on free and open-source software servers has open-source developers looking over their shoulders.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Tuesday defended his company's efforts to secure its software and fend off open-source rivals.

A high-profile digital civil liberties group is criticizing a component of the "trusted computing" technology promoted by Microsoft, IBM and other tech companies, calling the feature a threat to computer users.

A company is maketing a product called Lover Spy, which allows the customer to send a "greeting" to an acquaintance. That greeting contains a hidden application that installs itself on the victim's computer and reports back information on that person's online activities. It's intended to be a way for jealous lovers to keep tabs on their partner. It's a remote version of the old "install a keystroke logger on your boyfriend" trick. It's also probably illegal in the United States.