Leaked cables suggest China Access to Microsoft source used for cyber attacks

I wanted to give you a non-anonymous +1 on this. Your point about the level playing field is a great one.

My preference is obviously to just avoid the black boxes where I can, but it's not particularly surprising to think that the true color of the box is the inverse of the color of the hat.

Good comment about the level playing field. Open source doesn't essentially make the code more secure. But if Random Joe Hacker discovers an exploit, there is a big chance he'll brag about it, report it, or at least it eventually makes its way to the developers. On the other hand, if the source code is restricted to governments and security agencies, discovered exploitable bugs will be made part of some country' arsenal of "cyber weapons". They will neither get fixed nor reported. That's very scary. Open source doesn't fully solve this problem (agencies can still discover 'secret' bugs), but at least Joe Hacker has the same chance of finding them. This increases the chance they will actually be fixed significantly...

The funny part of this is that a good chunk of the vanguard of vulnerability researchers aren't even bothering to piece through basic blocks anymore; they just capture a small library of inputs and throw bit-flipped variants of them at the target, like particles from a neutron gun, until something blows up.

Why bother with the source code when you can find vulnerabilities with dumb fuzzer farms?

(Hey, Cody, build one of those for us!)

I always assumed Windows binaries are heavily obfuscated, is that not the case?

I might say "control flow graphs" instead of "assembly". Not to be pedantic, but to dispel the notion that reversers are literally reading every opcode in the program.

Being able to read source is not the same as open source. (That's where the term `free software' and it's conotations are useful.)

The question is then if that particular 'organization' has a large enough number (let's say 50? or 100?) highly skilled exploit developers.

I have no problem to believe that a country of that size, regardless of its technical sophistication overall, can produce without much effort an institute like that.

Don't forget that 'professional exploit developer' was a concept largely unknown until well into the 2000's. That never stopped a whole slew of exploits to appear since the mid 1990's, many of the early ones from the bedrooms of at best amateur security aficionados.

The dangers in giving a select few organizations access to the Windows source is far, far outweighed by the benefits. Should evil people have access to the Windows source? Probably not, but the fact is that if you give it to some people, some of them are going to be bad.