No More Blue Fridays
brendangregg.com
brendangregg.com
This doesn’t seem grounded in reality. If you follow the link to the “hooks” that Windows eBPF makes available [1], it’s just for incoming packets and socket operations. IOW, MS is expecting you to use the Berkeley Packet Filter for packet filtering. Not for filtering I/O, or object creation/use, or any of the other million places a driver like Crowdstrike’s hooks into the NT kernel.
In addition, they need to be in the kernel in order to monitor all the other 3rd party garbage running in kernel-space. ELAM (early-launch anti-malware) loads anti-malware drivers first so they can monitor everything that other drivers do. I highly doubt this is available to eBPF.
If Microsoft intends eBPF to be used to replace kernel-space anti-malware drivers, they have a long, long way to go.
[1]: https://microsoft.github.io/ebpf-for-windows/ebpf__structs_8...
Internally, Microsoft is running more and more workloads on Linux and externally, I've had .Net team tell me more than once that Linux is preferred environment for .Net. SQL Server team continues to push hard for Linux compatibility with every release.
EDIT: Windows Desktop gets more love because they clearly see that as important market. I'm talking more Windows Server.
But yeah, kernel features are few and far between.
Off the top of my head, limiting myself to just NT kernel stuff: WSL and Hyper-V, pseudo-terminals, condvars, WDDM, DWM, elevated privilege programs on the same desktop, font driver isolation, and limiting access to win32k for sandboxing.
Off the top of my head, built-in bluetooth support, an OS-level volume mixer, and more support for a wider variety of class-compliant devices. I'm sure there are a lot more, and if you actually care about the answer, I don't think it would be hard to find.
If it could, Then XP would just be Windows 11. What's the objection here.
Not that I strongly care much one way or another.
Modern crypto ciphersuites that aren't utterly broken? Your best options for symmetric crypto with XP are 3DES (officially retired by NIST as of this year) and RC4 (prohibited in TLS as of RFC 7465).
(And if you think 3DES isn't totally broken by itself, you're right... except for the part where the ciphersuite in question is in CBC mode and is vulnerable to BEAST. Thanks, mandated ciphersuites.)
XP->Vista alone brought a bunch of huge changes that massively improved security (UAC), capability (64 bit desktops), and future-proofing (UEFI) among many many other things.
Some helpful Wikipedia editors have answered this question in excessive detail, so I'm just going to link those for more info. Also I'm going to start with what XP changed from 2003 both because it makes a good comparison and I'd argue 2000/NT 5.0 is the root of the modern Windows era. Your next sentence after the quote implies you probably won't have a problem with that.
* XP/2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_XP
* 2003R2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003#Windows_Se...
* Vista: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista
* 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008#Features
* 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7
* 2008R2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008_R2#New_fea...
* 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8
* 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2012#Features
* 8.1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8.1#New_and_changed_fe...
* 2012R2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2012_R2#Feature...
* 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10
* 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2016#Features
* 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2019#Features
* 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2022#Features
* 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_11
* 2025: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
Obviously some of this will be "fluff" and that's up to your own personal definitions, but to act like there haven't been significant changes in every major revision is just nonsense.
My point is the vast majority of this stuff is either "fluff" or cosmetic changes or random things that 99% of users don't use OR they are security and bug patches. HN users are not typical, so I'm sure some of the Windows updates are very important for people like us.
Maybe to Microsoft this is a significant rewrite: "The Calculator has been completely rewritten in C# and includes several new features." (Just picked at random.) Ok, but like why? Who cares? What was wrong with the last calculator? Absolutely nothing. Also who even uses Windows calculator instead of Excel or their phone? Was calculator rewritten to justify an FTE somewhere at Microsoft?
I'm not trying to troll, but I am trying to be contrarian. I honestly feel like a majority of desktop users don't really think too hard about their OS. None of the existing OSes should be significantly rewritten unless they are just completely flawed. Like say Apple decides to ditch the microkernel or Linux goes to Rust. Most people need stability and security, not new calculator features or different button shading. I'm singling out Microsoft for being the only one that rent seeks for superfluous changes. Apple is notoriously bad about wasting users time with constant updates for dumb stuff, but at least it's free, except for the cost of time while your computer slowly reboots and updates.
There are costs to it, in the form of architectural baggage and slower iteration, but what windows brings to the table is a deck swept mostly clear of footguns. That can give you a different form of robustness.
But SQL Server is in the unique position of being able to optimize Windows for their own needs. So they shouldn't have this kind of problem.
When NTFS came out it was way better than anything on Linux. Heck even in 2006 NTFS was better.
But Linux keeps getting new file systems while Windows keeps NTFS.
And no, it didn't perform better at NT4, XP, or Win7 times.
I don't think they'd ever admit that filesystem performance was an issue (though we all know it is; NTFS is over 30 years old!).
ext2, which is forwards compatible with ext3 and ext4, is slightly older than NTFS
A lot of the weirdly bad performance comes from all of the machinery that Windows wraps around file access for things like filter drivers. As long as you don't, say, indiscriminately follow every CreateFile() with a CloseHandle() and instead treat handle closure like garbage collection, you can actually eke out pretty good performance.
That all said, yeah, Windows containers are less than great for what I'd argue is one strikingly glaring flaw: Docker container images are built from smss.exe upward. That makes them not immediately portable between ntoskrnl.exe releases.
It's kinda funny that the DB that was once a fork of Sybase that was ported to Windows is trying to make its way back to Unix.
They do have rigorous tests (WHQL), it's just Crowdstrike decided that was too burdensome for their frequent updates, and decided to inject code from config files (thus bypassing the control).
The fault here is entirely with Crowdstrike.
Just to use an analogy: Imagine people do their banking on JavaScript websites with Google Chrome, but if they use Microsoft Edge it says "JavaScript isn't supported, please download and run this .EXE". I'm not sure we'd be asking "if" Microsoft would support JavaScript (or eBPF), but "when."
Also this problem of too much software running in the kernel in an unbounded manner has long existed. Why should Microsoft suddenly invest in solving it on Windows?
Everything's gotta be different in Windows land. Otherwise, migrating off of Windows land would be too easy!
In case you were wondering what Microsoft refused to implement with its Kerberos implementation it's the DNS records. Instead of following the standard (they wrote!) they decided that all Windows clients will use AD's Global Catalog to figure out which KDC to talk to (e.g. which one is "local" or closest to the client). Since nothing but Windows uses the Global Catalog they effectively locked out other platforms from being able to integrate with Windows Kerberos implementation as effectively (it'll still work, just extremely inefficiently as the clients won't know which KDC is local so you either have to hard-code them into the krb5.conf on every single device/server/endpoint and hope for the best or DNS-and-pray you don't get a Domain Controller/KDC that's on an ISDN line in some other country).
In the case of security scanners that run in the kernel, we learned this weekend that a market need exists. The mainstream media blamed Crowdstrike's bugs on "Windows". Microsoft would likely like to wash its hands of future events of this class. Linux-like eBPF is a path forward for them that allows people to run the software they want (work-slowers like Crowdstrike) while isolating their reputation from this software.
Note: I’m not a Windows dev so I can’t speak to specifics of anything like your Kerberos example. I just don’t believe MS is full of evil engineers, nor that Satya Nadella visits cubicles to promote lock-in practices.
Ever heard of something called “money”?
> I think it’s more likely that sometimes for a feature to play well with other existing parts of the Windows ecosystem, compromises are made to the standards-compliance.
So you're basically saying that you're too young to remember the “good” old days of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, right...?
Of course, the target area of macOS is much smaller than Windows, but it is absolutely possible to kick all code, malware and parasitic security services alike, from accessing the kernel.
The safest kernel is the one that cannot be touched at runtime.
Can you expand what you mean here? Because depending on the application you are running, you will need at least talk with some APIs to get privileged access?
Some things (FUSE) are still annoying though.
That should get much easier in macOS Sequoia with FSKit.
Apple's closed ecosystem is entirely different. They'll change architectures on a whim and users will go with the flow (myself included).
At my previous job they used to use Macs to control scientific instrumentation that needed a data acquisition card. Eventually most of the newer product lines moved over to Windows but one that was used in a validated FDA regulated environment stayed on the Mac. Over time supporting that got harder and harder: they managed through the PowerPC to Intel transition but eventually the Macs with PCIe slots went away. I think they looked at putting the PCIe card in a Thunderbolt enclosure. But the bigger problem is guaranteeing supply of a specific computer for a reasonable amount of time. Very difficult to do these days with Macs.
Given how long it takes to validate in a GxP environment, and the cost, this makes sense.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/03/prioritizing-sec...
Microsoft is a big boat. It takes a long time to turn if the captain orders it. But the captain has ordered it. I expect the sacrosanct nature of back compat to eventually die. Windows will never turn into the moving target that macOS is, but I expect a lot of old stuff to just stop working, when security concerns dictate they should be removed.
If they can continue to avoid commercial repercussions for failing to provide a stable and secure system, then society should begin to hold them to account and force them to.
I’m not necessarily advocating for eBPF here, either. If they want to get there through some “proprietary” means, so be it. Apple is doing much the same on their end by locking down kexts and providing APIs for user mode system extensions instead. If MS wants to do this with some kind of .net-based solution (or some other fever dream out of MSR) then cool. The only caveat would seem to be that they are under a number of “consent decree” type agreements that would require that their own extensions be implemented on a level playing field.
So what. Windows Defender shouldn’t be in the kernel any more than CrowdStrike. Add an API. If that means being able to send eBPF type “programs” into kernel space, cool. If that means some user mode APIs, cool.
But lock it down already.
They have a long way to fall, but I'm not sure that if I'm a regulator I look at that and say there needs to be some kind of intervention by society apart from what market forces are gradually doing anyway.
In Windows 9x anti-malware would just run arbitrary code in the kernel that hooked whatever it wanted. In Windows XP a lot of these things got proper interfaces (like the file system filter drivers to facilitate scanning files before they are accessed, later replaced by minifilters), and the 64 bit edition of XP introduced PatchGuard [1] to prevent drivers from modifying Microsoft's kernel code. Additionally Microsoft is requiring ever more static and dynamic analysis to allow drivers to be signed (and thus easily deployed).
This is a very leaky security barrier. Instead of a hardware-enforced barrier like the kernel-userspace barrier it's an effort to get software running at the same protection level to behave. PatchGuard is a cat-and-mouse game Microsoft is always loosing, and the analysis mostly helps against memory bugs but can't catch everything. But MS has invested a lot of work over the years in attempts to make this path work. So expecting future actions isn't unreasonable.
They haven't yet gone as far as Apple in banning third-party kernel-mode code entirely, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's coming.
I'm not saying I'd run it (I would not), just that I can see why they have a lot of kernel-resident code.
What would you run instead, or is there a different way of thinking about the problem it addresses that obviates the need?
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/22/windows_crowdstrike_k...
Or is the article referring to something else?
I see no reason why the EU should object to Microsoft's adoption of eBPF as long as MS Defender simply uses the same API that is available to all competitors.
[1] Here is the original text: https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/39...
[2] See section 4, paragraph 20.
Mind you, it looks like after 20-ish years Windows still supports loading legacy filter drivers. Given the considerable work that goes into getting even a simple filesystem minifilter driver working reliably, it's safe to assume that we'd be looking at a similarly protracted transition period.
As to the performance, I don't think the raw infrastructure to support minifilters is the major performance hit. The work the drivers themselves end up doing tends to be the bigger hit in my experience.
Some background for the curious:
https://www.osr.com/nt-insider/2019-issue1/the-state-of-wind...
I think the part I specifically dispute is the only negative outcome is wasted CPU cycles. That's likely the case for the class of bug, but there are plenty of failure modes where a bad ruleset could badly brick a system and make it hard to recover.
That's not to say eBPF based security modules isn't the right choice for many vendors, just that let's understand what risks they do and do not avoid, and what part of the failure chain they particularly address.
Microsoft has been working on eBPF for a few years at least.
https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2021/05/10/making-ebpf...
https://lwn.net/Articles/857215/
If you're really concerned, they have discussions and communication channels where you're invited to air your concerns. They're listed on their github:
https://github.com/microsoft/ebpf-for-windows
Who knows, maybe they already have answers to your concerns. If not, they can address them there.
Also your statement is sometimes not true, although I certainly sympathise in the mainline case. In some contexts you really do need to keep on trucking. The first example to spring to mind is "the guidance computers on an automated Mars lander"; the round-trip to Earth is simply too long to defer responsibility in that case. If you shut down then you will crash, but if you do your best from a corrupted state then you merely probably crash, which is presumably better.
If you attempt to load an eBPF program that the verifier rejects, the syscall to load it fails with EINVAL or E2BIG. What your user-space program then does is up to you, of course.
3rd party hooking into kernel is 3rd party responsibility. It is like equipping your car with LPG - THAT hooks into engine (kernel). And When I had a faulty gas pressure sensor then my car actually halted (BSOD if you will) instead of automatically failing over to gasoline as it is by design.
You can argue that car had no means to continue execution but kernel has, however invalid kernel state can cause more corruption down the road. Or as parent even points out - carry out lethal doses of something.
I think until we discover a technology that forces commercial software vendors to employ functioning QA departments none of this will really solve anything.
If the failed system is a security module, I think that's absolutely correct. If the system runs, without the security module, well, that's like forgetting to pack condoms on Shore Leave. You'll likely be bringing something back to the ship with you.
Someone needs to be testing the module, and the enclosing system, to make sure it doesn't cause problems.
I suspect that it got a great deal of automated unit testing, but maybe not so much fuzz and monkey (especially "Chaos Monkey"-style) testing.
It's a fuzzy, monkey-filled world out there...
Updates would require the caller to call different functions which means putting the responsibility in the hands of the caller, where it should be, instead of on whoever has a side channel to tamper with the kernel.
You end up with the work-perfectly-or-not-at-all behavior that you're after because if the function that goes with the indicated hash is not present, you can't call it, and if it is present you can't call it in any way besides how it was intended
Furthermore, the reaction to a malformed state need not be "ignore". It could disable restricted user login; or turn off the screen.
If the worry is that this is viable to abuse by malware, well, if the malware can already rewrite the on-disk files for the AV, I wonder whether it's really a good idea to trust the system itself to be able to deal with that. It'd probably be safer to just report that up the security foodchain, and potentially let some external system take measures such as disable or restrict network access. Better yet, such measures don't even require the same capabilities to intervene in the system, merely to observe - which makes the AV system less likely to serve as a malware vector itself or to cause bugs like this.
eBPF is fantastic, and it can be used for many purposes and improve a lot of things, but this is IMO overselling it. Assuming that BPF itself it free of bugs, it’s still a rather large sprawl of kernel hooks, and those hooks invoke eBPF code, which can call right back into the kernel. Here’s a list:
https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/bpf-helpers.7.html
bpf_probe_read_kernel() is particularly heavily used, and it is not safe. It tries fairly hard not to OOPS or crash, but it is definitely not perfect.
The rest of that list contains plenty of this that will easily take down a system, even if it doesn’t actually oops or panic in the process.
And, of course, any tool that detects userspace “malicious behavior” and stops it can start calling everything malicious, and the computer becomes unusable.
Meanwhile, eBPF has no real security model on the userspace side. Actual attachment of an eBPF program goes through the bpf() syscall, not through sensibly permissioned operations on the underlying kernel objects being attached to, and there is nothing whatsoever that confines eBPF to, say, a container that uses it. (See bpf_probe_read_kernel() -- it's fundamentally able to read all kernel memory.)
So, IMO, most of the benefit of eBPF over ordinary kernel C code is that eBPF is kind of like writing code in a safe language with a limited unsafe API surface. It's a huge improvement for this sort of work, but it is not perfect by any means.
> The verifier is rigorous -- the Linux implementation has over 20,000 lines of code
The verifier is absurdly complex. I'd rather see something based on formal methods than 20kLOC of hand-written logic.
Doing this from bpf assumes that all "allowed" addresses are side-effect-free and will either succeed or cleanly fault. Off the top of my head, MMIO space (including, oddities like the APIC page on CPUs that still have that) and TDX memory are not in this category.
Isn’t one of the purposes of an OS to police software? I get that this has to do with the OS itself, but what does watching the watchers accomplish other than adding a layer which must then be watched?
Why not reduce complexity instead of naively trusting that the new complexity will be better long term?
Old way: Load kernel driver, hook into bazillions of system calls (doing whatever it is you want to do), pray you don't screw anything up (otherwise you can get a panic though not necessarily--Linux is quite robust).
eBPF way: Just ask eBPF to tell you what you want by giving it some eBPF-specific instructions.
There's a rundown on how it works here: https://ebpf.io/what-is-ebpf/
> …via a very picky sandbox…
When the eBPF is a CrowdStrike mechanism, and eBPF is “picky,” it is clearly “watching the watchers.”
> There are other ways to reduce risks during software deployment that can be employed as well: canary testing, staged rollouts, and "resilience engineering" in general
You don't need a new technology to implement basic industry-standard quality control
My impression is that the WebAssembly verifier is much simpler.
If microsoft includes a hardcoded whitelist that covers some essentials needed for recovery that could make a bug in such a tool easier to fix, but could still cause effective downtimes (system running but unusuable) until such a fix is delivered.
> eBPF, which is immune to such crashes.
Unless of course there is a bug in eBPF (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/7068083) @brendangregg and the kernel panics/ BSoDs anyway which you mention later in the article of course.
“Many eyes” is a bit dubious in general but the Linux kernel is pretty much the best case for it being true.
Assuming every security critical system will be on a recent enough kernel to support this...
https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/oracle-linux-and-bpf
$ cat /etc/redhat-release /etc/oracle-release /proc/version
Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.10 (Ootpa)
Oracle Linux Server release 8.10
Linux version 5.15.0-203.146.5.1.el8uek.x86_64 (mockbuild@host-100-100-224-48) (gcc (GCC) 11.2.1 20220127 (Red Hat 11.2.1-9.2.0.1), GNU ld version 2.36.1-4.0.1.el8_6) #2 SMP Thu Feb 8 17:14:39 PST 2024I reckon Red Hat may duplicate upstreams behavior by RHEL10.
Crowdstrike knows the computers they're running on, it is trivial to implement a system where only few designated computers download and install the update and report metrics before the update controller decides to push it to next set.
"Mitigation" is dealing with an outage/breakage after it occurs, to reduce the impact or get system healthy again.
You're talking about "prevention" which keeps it from happening at all.
Canarying is generic approach to prevention, and should not be skipped.
Avoiding the risk entirely (eBPF) would also help prevent outage, but I think we're deluding ourselves to say it "solves" the problem once and for all; systems will still go down due to bad deploys.
> In the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates, even those updates that involve kernel code.
Come on. Computers will continue to crash in the future, even when using eBPF. I am quite certain.
I expect it can be solved within some limited contexts, but those contexts are not useful, at least not at the level of "generic kernel code".
So BPF introduced a very limited bytecode, which is complex enough that it can express long filters with lots of and/or/brackets - but which is limited enough it's easy to check the program terminates and is crash-free. It's still quite limited - prior to ~2019, all loops had to be fully unrolled at compile time as the checker didn't support loops.
It turned out that, although limited, this worked pretty well for filtering packets - so later, when people wanted a way to filter all system calls they realised they could extend the battle-tested BPF system.
Nobody is claiming to have solved the halting problem.
> In the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates, even those updates that involve kernel code. In the future, these updates will push eBPF code.
What you are claiming is completely different. A kind of "firewall" for syscalls. But updates to drivers and software must contain code and data. The author is not talking about updates to the firewall between drivers and the kernel, they talk about updating drivers themselves. It literally says "updates that involve kernel code". Will the kernel only consist of eBPF filtering bytecode? How could that possibly work?
- Douglas Adams
"This doesn't mean that eBPF has solved nothing, substituting a vendor's bug for its own. Fixing these bugs in eBPF means fixing these bugs for all eBPF vendors, and more quickly improving the security of everyone."
Which is exactly what I'm asking about. If eBPF has some inherent advantage, why did it fail in precisely the same way alreay?
Back compat seems to be such a shibboleth in the Windows world, but comes at an incredible price. The reasons cited all seem to boil down to keeping some imagined customers' obscure LOB app running for decades. But that seems like an excuse to me. Surely Microsoft would like to shake out the last diehards running some VB5 app on a patched up PC in a factory. Isn't it more beneficial to everyone to start sunsetting acres of ancient NT code and approaches and streamline the entire attack surface?
1. Compliance: everyone affected by this bug has auditors. Once safer alternatives are available, the standards like CIS, PCI, etc. will be updated to say you should use the new interface, and every enterprise IT department will have pressure to switch to eBPF tools. We saw this with BootLocker: storage encryption used to be a pain, people resisted it, but over time it became universal because the cost of swimming upstream was too high.
2. Signing. Microsoft can start requiring more proof of need and restrictions for signing drivers. They have to be careful to avoid the appearance of favoritism but after this debacle that’s a LOT easier. I would bet some engineer is working on a draft of mandatory fault handling and testing proof requirements for critical kernel drivers now and I would not be surprised to see it include a timeframe for adopting memory-safe languages.
If your code somehow still relies on some buggy behaviour to work, then MS shouldn't do anything to preserve that anymore - apparently they used to, but I'm not so sure nowadays.
However 'ancient NT' code should probably still function just fine since the Win32 API hasn't changed much for a while, and MS don't actively deprecate function calls (unlike Apple who seem to do it a bit on a whim recently). I would put this down to the API being pretty well designed in the first place.
This is obviously not true. It might be the worst it can do, by itself, to the currently running kernel. It's not the worst it can do to the machine or its user(s).
There are infinite harmful things an eBPF program can do. As can programs solely in user-space. There is a specific class of vulnerabilities being mitigated by moving code from kernel to BPF. That does not mean that eBPF programs are in general safe.
It's a move in the right direction but it probably won't fully mitigate issues like this for another 5+ years.
I take issue with that. Kernel programming was not to blame; looking up addresses from a file and accessing those memory locations without any validation is. The same technique would yield the same result at any Ring.
All of the service interruptions would have been just "computer temporarily not protected by crowdstrike agent". Not the same thing at all.
When various apps running the world are crashing, unable to execute because malware protection is failing, there is no difference.
Significant and often far worse. It would leave the machine running unprotected.
Yes, the kernel is fine and is not to blame. But running basically a rootkit controlled by a third party indeed is to blame.
That's still an outage for those key systems.
Surely that bars CrowdStrike's check for unprovably bounded vulnerabilities.
"eBPF is a technology that can run programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel. It is the successor to the Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF, with the "e" originally meaning "extended") filtering mechanism in Linux and is also used in non-networking parts of the Linux kernel as well."
Given all its restrictions, I doubt something complex like a graphics driver would be possible. But then, I know nothing about graphics driver programming.
I think this undersells how annoying it is. There's a bit of an impedance mismatch. Typically you write code in C and compile it with clang to eBPF bytecode, which is then checked by the kernel's eBPF verifier. But in some cases clang is smart enough to optimize away bounds checks, but the eBPF verifier isn't smart enough to realize the bound checks aren't needed. This requires manual hacking to trick clang into not optimizing things in a way that will confuse the verifier, and sometimes you just can't get the C code to work and need to write things in eBPF bytecode by hand using inline assembly. All of these problems are massively compounded if you need to support several different kernel versions. At least with the Rust borrow checker there is a clearly defined set of rules you can follow.
If you think you know a way to crash the Linux kernel by loading and running an eBPF program, you should report a bug.
"BPF originally stood for Berkeley Packet Filter, but now that eBPF (extended BPF) can do so much more than packet filtering, the acronym no longer makes sense. eBPF is now considered a standalone term that doesn’t stand for anything."
How about Microsoft's large government and commercial customers make it a requirement that MS does not develop a single new feature for the next two fucking years or however long it takes to go through the entirety of the Windows+Office+Exchange code base and to make sure there are no security issues in there?
We don't need ads in the start menu, we don't need telemetry, we don't need desktop Outlook becoming a rotten slow and useless web app, we don't need AI, we certainly don't need Recall. We need an OS environment that doesn't need a Patch Tuesday where we have to check if the update doesn't break half the canary machines.
And while MS is at that they can also take the goddamn time and rework the entire configuration stack. I swear to god, it drives me nuts. There's stuff that's only accessible via the registry (and there is no comprehensive documentation showing exactly what any key in the registry can do - large parts of that are MS-internal!), there's stuff only accessible via GPO, there's stuff hidden in CPLs dating back to Windows 3.11, and there's stuff in Windows' newest UI/settings framework.
Sandboxes are safe, but are ultimately virtual machines, and virtual machines can be made to live in a world that's not real.
Are they saying that device drivers should be written in eBPF?
Or maybe their drivers should expose an eBPF API?
I assume some driver code still needs to reside in the actual kernel.
> If your company is paying for commercial software that includes kernel drivers or kernel modules, you can make eBPF a requirement.
Windows soon, may still be atleast a year ahead. Would that be a fair statement? atleast being the operating keyword here.
Specifically in the context of network security software, for eBPF programs to be portable across windows/linux, we would need MSFT to add a lot more hooks and expose internal kernel stucts. Hopefully via a common libbpf definition. Otherwise, I fear, having two versions of the same product, across two OSs would mean more secuirty and quality issues.
I guess the point I am trying to make is, we would get there, but we are more than a few years away. I would love to see something like cilium on vanilla windows for a Software defined Company Wide network. We can then start building enterprise network secutiry into it. Baby steps!
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btw, your talks and blog posts about bpftools is godsent!
Here I am using the term "EDR". Until this CrowdStrike debacle I'd never heard it.
Only tells how seriously you should take my opinions.
> eBPF (no longer an acronym) […]
Any reason why the official acronym was done away with?
1) Is CrowdStrike Falcon using eBPF for their Linux offering?
2) Would the faulty patch update get caught by the eBPF verifier?
Oh I'm sure they'll find a way.
Which is odd, given there’s been a bunch of kernel privesc bugs using eBPF…
I'm still waiting on my flying car...
100% BS. Even if they don't "crash" they will "stop functioning as intended" which is just the same. It's absolutely disgusting how this industry is now using this one outage as a talking point to further their totalitarian agenda.
It reminds me of how Google went after adblockers with their new extension model that also promised more "security". It's time we realised what they're really trying to do. In fact, I wonder whether this outage was not accidental after all.
And of course QA.
I was unaffected, but was fielding calls from customers.
My update Tuesday is the week after, so in-between MS and my updates, I am very suspicious of everything.
I was also unaffected by 22H2, and spent time fielding calls.
For instance, why not find a subset of your customers that are low risk, push it out to them, and see what happens? Or perhaps have your own fleet of example installations to run things on first. None of which depends on any specific technology.
Repeat that a few times to understand the repercussions.
If I were the customers and I found out that I was used as test subject, how would I feel?
Are you telling me the cybersecurity scene is special and shouldn’t follow best practices for software deployment?
If customers found out that some are getting roll out faster than the others, essentially splitting the group into 2, there will be a need for customer opt-in/opt-out.
If everyone is opting-out because of Friday, your Canary deployment becomes meaningless.
Any proof that other Cybersecurity vendors do Canary deployment for their AV definition? :)
PS: not to say that the company should test more internally...
If this is just how they roll with regular definition updates, then their deployment practices are garbage and this kind of large scale disaster was inevitable.
You can guess, but you cannot be 100% sure.
What if the targeted canary deployments are Employees desktops that are OFFLINE during the time of rollout?
>I’m out of the loop if this crowdstrike update was such a scenario where best practices for software deployment were worth bypassing.
I did post a question: what about other Cybersecurity vendors? Do you think they do canary deployment on their AV definitions?
Here's more context to understand Cybersecurity: https://radixweb.com/blog/what-is-mean-time-to-detect
Cybersecurity companies participate in Sec evaluation annually that evaluates (measure) and grade their performance. That grade is an input for Organizations to select vendors outside their own metrics/measurements.
I don't know if MTTD is included in the contract/SLA. If it does, you got some answer as to why certain decision is made.
It's definitely interesting to see Software developers of HN giving out their 2c for a niche Cybersecurity industry.
I worked in the cyber security space for a decent chunk of my career, and the most frustrating part was cyber security engineers thinking their problems were unique and being completely unaware of the lessons software engineering teams have already learned.
Yes, you need to tune your canary deployment groups to be large and diverse enough to give a reliable indicator of deployment failure, while still keeping them small enough that they achieve their purpose of limiting blast radius.
Again, if you follow industry best practices for software deployment, this is already something that should be considered. This is a relatively solved problem -- this is not new.
> I did post a question: what about other Cybersecurity vendors? Do you think they do canary deployment on their AV definitions?
I think that question is being asked right now by every company using Crowdstrike — what vendors are actually doing proper release engineering and how fast can we switch to them so that this never happens to us again?
You have to ask the customer if they're okay with that citing "our software might failed and brick your machine".
I'd like to see any Sales and Marketing folks say that ;)
> I think that question is being asked right now by every company using Crowdstrike — what vendors are actually doing proper release engineering and how fast can we switch to them so that this never happens to us again?
Uber valid question and this BSOD incident might be a turning point for customers to pay up more for their IT infrastructure.
It's like: previously Cybersecurity vendors are shy to ask customers to setup Canary systems because that's just "one-more-thing-to-do". After BSOD: customers will smarten up and do it without being asked and to the point where they would ask Vendors to _support_ that type of deployment (unless they continue to be cheap and lazy).
I think you’re still missing the point of Canary deployments. The question your sales team should ask is “would you like a 5% chance of a bug harming your system, or a 100% chance?”
> It's like: previously Cybersecurity vendors are shy to ask customers to setup Canary systems because that's just "one-more-thing-to-do"
You should by shy because it is not your customer’s job to set up canary deployments. Crowdstrike owns the software and the deployment process. They should be deploying to a subset of machines, measuring the results, and deciding whether to roll forward or roll back. It is not the customers job to implement good release engineering controls for Crowdstrike (although after this debacle you may well see customers try).
What I find it hard is those in Software that suggested to roll it to a few customers first because this isn't cloud deployment doing A/B test when it comes to Virus Definition.
Customers must know what's going on when it comes to virus definition and the implication of them whether they're being part of the rollout group or not.
No, I’m talking about external deployment to customers. They clearly also had a massive failure in their internal processes too, since a bug this egregious should never make it to the release stage. But that is not what I am talking about right now.
> What I find it hard is those in Software that suggested to roll it to a few customers first because this isn't cloud deployment doing A/B test when it comes to Virus Definition.
I don’t care what you’re releasing to customers— application binary, configuration change, virus definition, etc, if it has the chance of doing this much damage it must be deployed in a controlled, phased way. You cannot 100% one-shot deploy any change that has the potential to boot-loop a massive amount of systems like this. This current process is unacceptable.
> Customers must know what's going on when it comes to virus definition and the implication of them whether they're being part of the rollout group or not.
Who says they don’t have to know? Telling your customers that an update is planned and giving them a time window for their update seems reasonable to me.
* 0day is happening
* Cybersecurity vendors preparing virus definition
* Vendors send update => new virus definition is about to go down in 1 hour, get ready.
Folks are asleep, nobody reads it?
Let's say now let's do Canary: let's deploy to a few customers (this is unclear how this started: should this be opt-in? opt-out?)
Some customers got it, others... who knows, unclear what the processes are here.
Between here and there, 0day exploited customers because AV defn is not there. What now?
I'm not sure how this plays out tbh.
In reality, every business has relationships that it values more than others. If I wasn't paying a lot for it, and if I was running something that wasn't critical (like my side project) then why not? You can price according to what level of service you want to provide.
Honestly, the most generous excuse I can think of is that CS were informed of some sort of vulnerability that would have profound consequences immediately, and that necessitated a YOLO push. But even that doesn't seem too likely.
But the appeal-to-authority evidence that the article presents is not.
"-- the Linux implementation has over 20,000 lines of code -- with contributions from industry (e.g., Meta, Isovalent, Google) and academia (e.g., Rutgers University, University of Washington). The safety this provides is a key benefit of eBPF, along with heightened security and lower resource usage."
> If the verifier finds any unsafe code, the program is rejected and not executed. The verifier is rigorous -- the Linux implementation has over 20,000 lines of code [0] -- with contributions from industry (e.g., Meta, Isovalent, Google) and academia (e.g., Rutgers University, University of Washington).
[0] links to https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/bpf/ver... which has this interesting comment at the top:
/* bpf_check() is a static code analyzer that walks eBPF program
* instruction by instruction and updates register/stack state.
* All paths of conditional branches are analyzed until 'bpf_exit' insn.
*
* The first pass is depth-first-search to check that the program is a DAG.
* It rejects the following programs:
* - larger than BPF_MAXINSNS insns
* - if loop is present (detected via back-edge)
...
I rather expect useful or needed code would be rejected due to "not-sure-it-halts", and then people will use some kind of exception or not use the verifier at all, and then we are back to square one.
However, the claim "in the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates, even those updates that involve kernel code" must be false. There is no way it is true. Whatever Cilium is, I cannot believe it generally prevents kernel crashes.
Also, although this isn't the case now, it's possible to imagine that the verifier could be relaxed to allow a Turing-complete subset of C that supports infinite loops while still rejecting sources of UB/crashes like dereferencing an invalid pointer. I suspect from reading this post that that is the future Mr. Gregg has in mind.
> Whatever Cilium is, I cannot believe it generally prevents kernel crashes.
It doesn't magically prevent all kernel crashes from unrelated code. But what we can say is that Cilium itself can't crash the kernel unless there are bugs in the eBPF verifier.
This is just such a naive view. "We can prevent programs from crashing by just taking care to stop them when they do bad things". Well, sure, that's why you have a kernel and userland. But it turns out, some things need to run in the kernel. Or "just deny permission". Then it turns out some programs need to run as admin. And so on.
There is a generality in the halting problem, and saying "we'll just kill long runing programs" just misses the point entirely.
Likely what will happen is that you will kill useful long-running programs, then an exception mechanism will be invented so some programs will not be killed, because they need to run longer, then one of those programs will go into an infinite loop despite all your mechanisms preventing it. Just like the crowdstrike driver managed to bring down the OS despite all the work that is supposed to prevent the entire computer crashing if a single program tries something stupid.
Linux and windows are completely monolithic kernels; the crowdstrike agent isn't running in a sandbox and has complete unfettered access to the entire kernel address space. There is no separate "the kernel" to detect when the agent does something wrong; once a kernel module is loaded, IT IS the kernel.
Lots of people have indeed realized this is undesirable and that there should be a sandboxed way to run kernel code such that bugs in it can't cause arbitrarily bad undefined behavior. Thus they invented eBPF. That's precisely what eBPF is.
I don't know whether it's literally true that someday you will be able to write all possibly useful kernel-mode code in eBPF. But the spirit of the claim is true: there's a huge amount of useful software that could be written in eBPF today on Linux instead of as kernel modules, and this includes crowdstrike. Thus Windows supporting eBPF, and crowdstrike choosing to use it, would have solved this problem. That set of software will increase as the eBPF verifier is enhanced to accept a wider variety of programs.
Just like you can write pretty much any useful program in JavaScript today -- a sandboxed language.
You're also correct that due to the halting problem, we'll either have to accept that eBPF will never be Turing complete, OR accept that some eBPF programs will never halt and deal with the issues in other ways. Just like Chrome's JavaScript engine has to do. I don't really view this as a fundamentally unsolvable issue with the nature of eBPF.
They wouldn't say it was "over 20,000 lines" in that case. And 20,000 lines of C is far too big to audit.
The halting problem is only unsolvable in the general case. You cannot prove that any arbitrary piece of code will stop, but you can prove that specific types of code will stop and reject anything that you're unable to prove. The trivial case is "no jumps"—if your code executes strictly linearly and is itself finite then you know it will terminate. More advanced cases can also be proven, like a loop over a very specific bound, as long as you can place constraints on how the code can be structured.
As an example, take a look at Dafny, which places a lot of restrictions on loops [0], only allowing the subset that it can effectively analyze.
[0] https://ece.uwaterloo.ca/~agurfink/stqam/rise4fun-Dafny/#h25
A trivial example[1]:
int main() {
while (true) {}
int x = foo();
return x;
}
I feel like the halting problem is incredibly widely misunderstood to be similar to be about "ANY program" when it really talks about "ALL programs".
[1]: In C++, this is undefined behavior technically, but C and most other programming languages define the behavior of this (or equivalent) function.
[2]: Fun relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1266/
Nit: In many languages, doesn't this depend on what foo() does? e.g:
foo() {
exit(0);
}but there are always sets of programs for which it is clearly possible to guarantee their termination
e.g. the program `return 1+1;` is guaranteed to halt
e.g. given program like `while condition(&mut state) { ... }` with where `condition()` is guaranteed to halt but otherwise unknown is not guaranteed to halt, but if you turn it into `for _ in 0..1000 { if !condition(&mut state) { break; } ... }` then it is guaranteed to halt after at most 1000 iterations
or in other words eBPF only accepts programs which it can proof will halt in at most maxins "instruction" (through it's more strict then my example, i.e. you would need to unroll the for-loop to make it pass validation)
the thing with programs which are provable halting is that they tend to also not be very convenient to write and/or quite limited in what you can do with them, i.e. they are not suitable as general purpose programming languages at all
Crowdstrike screwed the pooch here, yes. But after a couple of days I feel like I haven’t read enough blog posts and articles that crap on Microsoft. It’s their job to build a secure operating system, instead they deliver Windows and because they themselves cannot secure windows, they ship defender… and we use tools like falcon like a bandaid for Microsofts bad security practices
eBPF let's you prevent things too. seccomp filters can block syscalls.
The bigger problem is the performance you mentioned in 1. Crowdstrike's linux agent can work using eBPF instead of a kernel module, and will fall back to that if the current kernel version is more recent than the agent supports. But... then it uses up a lot more CPU.