Microsoft executive "rebuts" our research!

Ah, there is no feeling like seeing your name in the news when drinking your morning coffee... In this piece some Steve Riley, a senior security strategist at Microsoft, decided to "rebute" our recent Black Hat presentations research results.

Mr. Riley had been quoted by ZDnet as saying:

"Her [Joanna Rutkowska] insistence is that you can replace the hypervisor without anybody knowing... Our assertion is that this is incorrect," Riley told the audience. "First of all, to do these attacks you need to become administrator at the root. So that's going to be, on an appropriately configured machine, an exceedingly difficult thing to happen."

Apparently, Mr. Riley has never seen our Black Hat presentations (or slides at least) that he is referring to (oh, wait, that is the typical case with all our "refuters", how come?)...

First, we never said anything about replacing the hypervisor. I really have no idea how this idea was born in Mr. Riley's head? Replacing the hypervisor - that would indeed be insane for us to do!

Second, it is not true that the attacker needs to become an administrator "at the root" (he mean the root partition or administrative domain here I assume). The attack we presented in our second speech, that exploited a heap overflow in the Xen hypervisor FLASK module, could have been conducted from the unprivileged domain, as we demonstrated during the presentation.

Mr. Riley continues with his vision:

"Because you [the attacker] didn't subject your own replacement hypervisor through the thorough design review that ours did, I'll bet your hypervisor is probably not going to implement 100 percent of the functionality as the original one," Riley said. "There will be a gap or two and we will be able to detect that."

Well, if he only took the effort of looking into our slides, he would realize that, in case of XenBluePill, we were slipping it beneath (not replacing!) the original hypervisor, and then run the original one as nested. So, all the functionality of the original hypervisor was preserved.

Mr. Riley also shares some other ground breaking thoughts in this article, but I think we can leave them uncommented ;)

This situation is pretty funny actually - we have here the words and feelings of some Microsoft executive vs. our three technical presentations, all the code that we released for those presentations, and also a few of our demos. Yet, it's apparently still worth getting into the news and reporting what the feeling of Mr. Riley are...

Let me, however, write one more time, that I'm (still) not a Microsoft hater. There are many people at Microsoft that I respect: Brandon Baker, Neil Clift, the LSD guys, Mark Russinovich, and probably a few more that I just haven't had occasion to meet in person or maybe forgot about at the moment. It's thus even more sad that people like Mr. Riley are also associated with Microsoft, even more they are the face of Microsoft for the majority of people. Throwing a party in Vegas and Amsterdam once a year certainly is not enough to change the Microsoft's image in this case...

Interestingly, if Mr. Riley only attended our Xen 0wning Trilogy at Black Hat, then he would notice that we were actually very positive about Hyper-V. Of course, I pointed out that Xen 3.3 certainly has a more secure architecture right now, but I also said that I knew (from talking to some MS engineers from the virtualization group) that Hyper-V is going to implement similar features in the next version(s) and that this is very good. I also prized the fact it has only about 100k LOC (vs. about 300k LOC in Xen 3.3).

So, Mr. Senior Security Strategist, I suggest you do your homework more carefully next time before throwing mud at others and trying to negate the value of their work (and all the efforts of Microsoft's PR people).

On a separate note, I found it quite unprofessional that ZDNet's Liam Tung and Tom Espiner, the authors of the news, didn't ask me for a commentary before publishing this. Not to mention that they also misspelled Rafal's name and forgot to mention about Alex, the third co-author of the presentations.

Research Obfuscated

Update 07-Sept-2008: Four months later after writing his open letter to me (see below), Christofer Hoff experienced on his own difficult it is for one to control the press, making sure it correctly reports what you say. In this blog entry he describes how he was terribly misquoted by a report after his Black Hat presentation and he also explicitly admits that "[I] was essentially correct in [my] assertion during our last debate that you cannot control the press, despite best efforts." and that "[he] humbly submit[s] to [me] on that point." :)

This article has been brought to my attention recently. It’s an “Open Letter to Joanna Rutkowska”, by Christofer Hoff over at the “Rational Survivability” blog. I decided to spend time reading and answering this piece as 1) technorati.com reported the blog’s authority as above 100 which suggests it has a reasonable number of readers, and also 2) because I believe this is a good example of the social engineering techniques used by my opponents and I couldn’t refrain myself from not commenting about this. Besides I felt a bit flattered that some individual decided to write an “Open Letter” to me, sort of like if I was a prime minister or some other important person ;)

Let me now analyze the letter, point by point:

1. Fire rules! The first thing that Hoff accuses me of in his letter is myself being an irresponsible individual, not caring about safety of my audience (not a joke!):
   

   “As the room filled to over capacity before your talk began, you were upset and couldn't seem to understand why the conference organizers would not let people spill over from seats and sit on the floor and in the aisles to hear you speak. The fact that fire and safety codes prohibit packing a room beyond capacity was something you attributed to people being "...crazy in America." Go figure.”

   Dear Christofer, if you only read my recent blog post about this very specific incident, read thoroughly shall I say, you would notice this paragraph undoubtedly:
   

   “Interestingly it was perfectly ok for the additional people to stay in the room, provided they arranged for additional chairs for themselves. In other words it was fine for people to sit and block the main aisle, provided they sit on chairs, but they couldn’t stay and sit on the same aisle without having a chair (maybe a "certificated" chair also), as that would be against the fire regulations!”

   Conclusion: I was not so much picking upon the fire regulations that forced people to leave the room, but rather on the idiotic rule, that allowed those same people to stay in this very same room, provided they also had additional chairs with them.
   


2. Type I vs. Type II hypervisors confusion. Hoff then switches to the actual content of the presentation and writes this:
   

   “When I spoke to you at the end of your presentation and made sure that I understood correctly that you were referring specifically to type-2 hosted virtualization on specific Intel and AMD chipsets, you conceded that this was the case.”

   This simply is an incorrect statement! On the contrary, when describing the security implications of nested virtualization (which was the actual new thing I was presenting at the RSA), I explicitly gave an example of how this could be used to compromise type I hypervisors. Kindly refer to slides 85-90 of my presentation that can be downloaded here.
   
   I said that the code we posted on bluepillproject.org indeed targets type II hypervisors and the only reason for that being that it has been built on top of our New Blue Pill code that was designed as a Windows kernel driver.


3. Shit not giving. Mr. Hoff goes even further:
   

   “When I attempted to suggest that while really interesting and intriguing, your presentation was not only confusing to many people but also excluded somewhere north of 80% of how most adopters have deployed virtualization (type-1 "bare-metal" vs. type-2 hosted) as well as excluding the market-leading virtualization platform, your response (and I quote directly) was: I don't give a shit, I'm a researcher.”

   Now that was a hard blow! I understand that the usage of such a slang expression by an Eastern European female during an informal conversation with a native speaker must have made an impression on him! However, I couldn’t give such an answer to this very question, simply because of the reasons given in point #2 (see above).
   
   If I remember correctly, I indeed used this very American expression to answer somebody’s concern (undoubtedly our Christofer Hoff’s) that most of the type I hypervisors out there are based on monolithic hypervisor architecture, and not on the micro-hypervisor architecture (and that I should not try to convince people to switch to micro-hypervisor architecture). In that context it makes it more logical for me to use the “I’m a researcher” as an excuse for not caring so much that most people use monolithic based hypervisors. Obviously, the usage of micro-hypervisors would allow to better secure the whole VMM infrastructure. And I also said, that I don’t care what people are using today, because I try to help to build a product that would be secure in the future (Phoenix’s HyperCore).


4. No obfuscation postulate. Hoff then comes up with some postulates that:
   

   “[I], as a researcher who is also actively courting publicity for commercial gain and speaking at conferences like RSA which are less technical and more "executive" in nature, you have a responsibility to clarify and not obfuscate (intentionally or otherwise) the facts surrounding your research.”

   This postulate is cleverly constructed because it also contains an embedded accusation of me being a commercially motivated researcher. Well, I never tried to hide that fact, and the reason for this is very simple: I consider security research as my job, and one of the primary goals of any job is to… bring commercial gain to the individual doing the job.
   
   Second, I really don’t understand what Hoff means by asking me to not obfuscate my research?! Maybe he was just disappointed that the presentation was too technical for an average CISSP to understand it? But, well, this presentation was classified as “Advanced Technical”, which was displayed in the conference program. I still did my best so that, say 70% of the material, was understandable to an average IT people, but, come on, there always must be some deep technical meat in any non-keynote-presentation, at least this is my idea for how a conference should look like.


5. Commercially motivated. Hoff accuses me of presenting commercial product, i.e. the Phoenix’s HyperSpace, during my speech:
   

   “No less than five times during your presentation, you highlighted marketing material in the form of graphics from Phoenix, positioned their upcoming products and announced/credited both Phoenix and AMD as funding your research.”

   Well, let me tell you this – this was one of the main reasons why I decided to speak at the RSA – just to announce this very product that I try to help to secure. Why would that be wrong?
   
   BTW, I have no idea how Mr. Hoff concluded that AMD was founding my research. I never said that, nor did I have it in my slides. Needles to say, AMD has not been founding my research. NOTE: interestingly I consider this particular mistake by Hoff to be accidental – at least I don’t see how this could be connected to any PR campaign, in contrast to all the other incorrectness he made use of.


6. Independence. Hoff, for some reason, apparently known only to him, tries to argue that I’m not an “independent researcher”:
   

   “I think it's only fair to point out that given your performance, you're not only an "independent researcher" but more so an "independent contractor." Using the "I'm a researcher" excuse doesn't cut it.”

   “I know it's subtle and lots of folks are funded by third parties, but they also do a much better job of drawing the line than you do.”

   Well, I found this one to be particularly amusing, as, for at least several years now, I have not claimed I have been an independent researcher.


7. Final hit. You might have been wondering by now – why this gentleman, nah, I think “the guy” would fit better here, so why the guy decided to spent so much time to write all those points, all those quasi-arguments and why he made so many “mistakes”? Well he seems to give an answer right in this paragraph:
   

   “I care very much that your research as presented to the press and at conferences like RSA isn't only built to be understood by highly skilled technicians or researchers because the continued thrashing that they generate without recourse is doing more harm than good, quite frankly.”

   Aha, now all is clear. May I ask then, which virtualization vendor you write PR for? ;)

So, then Hoff quotes the Forbes article that was written after my presentation and accuses me that the article (written by some Forbes reporter) was too sensationalist. I definitely agree the article was very sensationalist (but correct) and when I saw the article I even got angry and even wanted to write a blog about it (but as the article was actually correct, I had no good arguments to use against it). And you know why I was so angry? Because I actually spent over 40 minutes with this very Forbes reporter in the RSA’s speaker’s lounge just after my speech, I spent that time on clarifying to that guy what my presentation was about and what it was not about and what was the main message of the presentation. Still, the reporter had his own vision of how to write about it (i.e. make it into a sensation) and I hardly, as it turned out, could do anything about it…

So, what was the main massage of my presentation? Interestingly Mr. Hoff forgot to mention that… Let me then remind it here (a curious reader might want to have a look at the the slide #96 in my presentation):

• Virtualization technology could be used to improve security on desktop systems


• However there are non-trivial challenges in making this all working well...


• ... and not to introduce security problems instead...

Additionally, the message I was trying to pass during the whole presentation was:

“Keep hypervisors simple, do not put drivers there, as otherwise we would get to the same point where we are with current OSes these days, i.e. no kernel security at all!”

Now I wonder, maybe Christofer Hoff doesn’t do PR for any VMM vendor, maybe he just didn’t listen carefully to my presentation. Maybe he’s just one of those many guys who always know in advance what they want to hear and selectively pick up only those facts that match their state of mind? Otherwise, why would he not realize that my presentation was actually a pro-virtualization one and needed no (false) counter-arguments?