Using Binary Diffing to Discover Windows Kernel Memory Disclosure Bugs

EDIT - grammar fix.

And on top of that you have the telemetry, endless horror stories of forced restarts for updates, updates resetting settings and/or degrading performance (which took 5 months to resolve in the case of the Creators Update: https://betanews.com/2017/09/11/windows-10-game-performance-...)...7 works like clockwork, with no bullshit.

People still ride motorcycles, many times more dangerous, which proves that (IMHO fortunately) safety/security is NOT the only thing that everyone cares about.

The general authoritarianism in the comments here, and implication that everyone always and only wants "more secure", while neglecting all the other factors, is a bit unsettling...

As the old saying goes, "Those who sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither."

One direct implication of this fact, for programs which must be constantly updated to fix their security flaws, is that because the only semblance of trust and security you can obtain in using this software comes from its popularity and reputation (because these things generally mean a large amount of resources can be spent auditing and testing ("many eyes make all bugs shallow"), and because a large userbase means that any bugs found will be more valuable and more difficult to find, and thus less likely to be used against people who are not profitable to be hacked, which is most people), viably forking large projects becomes impossible without a similar or proportional amount of resources to the original project. Without that, having confidence in the new project becomes much more difficult, because you cannot receive an assurance that bugs found in the original project will be fixed in the fork, and because bugs found in the fork might be easier to find (because of less thorough testing, because of fewer resources) and so of less value, and so have a higher chance of ending up in the hands of low-level skiddies who might use them even less responsibly than e.g. the NSA (who has never directly installed ransomware on anyone's computer, that I know of). None of this of course is mentioning the effect this culture of fear and mistrust (and its basis in reality) has on computer users who truly are valuable targets, and must use computers to do their job knowing full well that they are a mire of both intentional and unintentional security vulnerabilities and that somewhere out there exists a string of exploits that can be used to exfiltrate their IP address and send them straight to the gulags.

Another cost of this unfortunate facet of computer programming is that for programs which cannot be directly updated (for example, their source code is not available), modifying them so that they are closer to a version with clearly-defined semantics is extremely difficult, involves specialized skills which are not possessed by most programmers, and generally just doesn't happen very often. Although one could also make this an argument in favor of source code availability, in any case this is a very common occurrence.

So, I don't think at all that the problem is this culture of foolishly thinking that we actually know how to write programs - the problem is that we can't. The solution then, at least in the long term, is learning how to write complete programs that do not require constant adjustments in order to ensure clearly defined semantics, not to just figure out how to stay afloat better in this horrifying quagmire of shifting quicksand that we've built the foundations of computer software on.

Now add "offline" to your list and i'd agree. Every online node is a potential threat not to just the direct victim but to potentially anyone else on the net.

I’d say most users would care if all their Excel documents got encrypted by some ransomware. Backups help, but they’re not a silver bullet, and the type of unsophisticated user you’re depicting probably doesn’t have them anyway.

Aside from that - does that casual web browsing include anyone checking their email? If so, now the attacker can probably get full access to their email account(s). Even a purely automated attack can send spam or scams to the user’s contacts, which is bad, though arguably not the end of the world. If a human attacker is targeting the user individually, they can do much worse - starting with using the email account as a stepping stone to all their other accounts, and limited only by their imagination. I suppose that most users aren’t likely to be targeted in that way, but you never know.

Not meant to be a criticism, I'm just curious what specific issues you were having that you articulate as bricking.

> Microsoft has responded to claims that its Windows 10 Enterprise operating system ignores user preferences in Group Policy with the advice that, basically, it does and you shouldn't meddle with it.

> On Monday, we revealed that a security researcher had used a packet sniffer to show that many settings designed to prevent access to the internet were being ignored with connections to a range of third-party servers

https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3010547/microsoft-...

That’s because this is a bad idea for almost all users: it increases the odds of updates not being installed or people having problems due to an untested combination of updates which wouldn’t have happened if they’d installed everything.

Similarly, if Windows Defender does have a notable performance issue beyond what’s typical for AV as a class, the right way to avoid it is to install a separate AV rather than running an Internet-connected system without it.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/74xc2z/windows_an...