What about Vista?

[moniker]

has anybody looked at the new protection schemes. for example those ment to prevent rootkits from having a way in?

I can't really find many docs on this. Looks intresting though

[detten]

Microsoft is trying to present vista as the most secure OS ever made.
To prove their point they asked on the blackhat hackers conference to try to hack vista.
An article on slashdot stated that the vista machine was hacked within a day. Still they were not able to get root access if the user logged in was a restricted user. So, its still somewhat unclear how vista is able to secure itself. I can imagine many blackhats are not interested in revealing possible holes in such early beta stage of vista...

[Soul12]

there will always be holes...belive xp was souposed to be secure aswell ?
but maby they gave it more thought this time...perhaps i should try out the beta... and have a little look but one things is pretty sure them guys at m$ sure aint reversers/hackers

[tanatos]

true ... true

[moniker]

yeah i heard about the black hat convention.

"Hacked by a `girl` in 1 day" (no disrespect to the fine lady)
using virtualisation software i believe

nah I'm sure M$ will have screwed up some bits, and have tried to cover it up with nothing some nice closed source obfuscation.

But it surely should be possible to prevent a rogue binary to get into the kernel. And ... Cryptography works.. no bugs in that.

The latest i heard was by symantec, saying that you could just patch the processes that are doing the check...


I do wonder what the black hats have up their sleeves, when/If Longhorn euh Vista ever hits the shelves.

[BoR0]

What about it? It'll have included a 3D version of Solitaire.

Hehe, just kidding. Just another obsolete OS by M$. That's all

[moniker]

yeah i can also tell you what won't be in it WinFS


(They had to throw all that code out because it was too bad, another funny little fact)

and opengl will be running on top of DirectX instead of directly on the hardware.

But from a reverse engineering standpoint i guess it is indeed too soon. I'll wait and see

[detten]

WinFS was supposed to be a database driven filesystem. At least that would be an innovation. As moniker said they indeed dropped that. Now its merely a wrapper around NTFS. They not only dropped the idea for Vista but also dropped it for all future versions of their filesystem.

I am examining vista for some weeks now for my work, and I have to say I am not enjoying it. It is very slow compared to XP and there are very little drivers for common hardware yet. (One of the pc's I tested with had an intel gfx, and since there are no drivers yet, you can kiss goodbye the 'aqua'-look.)
The only true improvement I think is that the soundcore is completely rewritten, and should give us a much lower delay and be almost glitch free. On the other hand, not having sndvol32.exe is very weird

Overall, what I think is most annoying is all the pop-ups. For example, if you are logged in with an administrator account, you get warning messageboxes for everything you do concerning configuration or running applications. Is that how security issues are dealt with? How innovative :p

For reversers little is going to change I think.
The changes for reversers will come from Visual studio 2005 I think.
Not only is it now harder to load altered system dll's, also patching is more work since manifest files are used by default. (This requires generating new hashes with a new private/public keypair) But this might be a subject for another thread

[thorpe]