Re: noise levels and hack-Microsoft

["R. J. Harvey" <harveyrj@vt.edu>]

At 10:47 AM 1/18/96 -0500, you wrote:
>
>"R. J. Harvey" writes:
>> At 10:20 AM 1/18/96 -0500, Perry wrote:
>> >
>> >Posts on windows registration wizards, gun control, unemployment,
>>           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>    Well, I'm sure you're correct on most of those,
>> but the post on Microsoft using ENCRYPTED databases
>> of competitor programs as part of its plan to surreptitiously
>
>Actually, the database isn't encrypted -- its plaintext -- and the
>wizard isn't surreptitious and tells you everything its doing and lets
>you stop it if you like. In short, the topic has no cryptography
>or security relevance *AT ALL*.
>
   I don't mean to sound argumentative, but I'm wondering if you 
actually read the article cited earlier today by the person you were 
criticizing for 'noise.'  To quote from Andrew Schulman, the author 
of the piece he referenced, and a person who has more than a little 
credibility on such topics, 

        REGWIZ.EXE in turn loads a dynamic-link library,
        \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\PRODINV.DLL. This is the "Product 
        Inventory DLL," normally used for compliance checking of 
        upgrades to Microsoft Office programs such as WinWord.
        (In fact, PRODINV.DLL's internal module name is "COMPLINC," 
        for "compliance checking.") Of course, when you buy the 
        upgrade edition of something like WinWord, there needs to 
        be a mechanism to check that in fact you really are upgrading 
        from some previous word processor -- be it a previous version 
        of WinWord, or a competitor's word processor, such as AmiPro 
        or WordPerfect.  So there's an encrypted database (the reasons 
                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        for this encryption are discussed below) inside PRODINV of about 
        100 products, 

        ...

        At this point, it was trivial to locate the beginning and end 
        of the buffer, and write it to disk. (Recall that the database 
        is stored on disk in encrypted form; this is why a search of 
                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        the entire hard disk did not find it.) 
        
        ...

        The database is encrypted because otherwise it would be trivial 
        to fool this "wizard" (hmm...; examination of RegWiz/ProdInv 
        shows it to be anything but wizardly) simply by creating an 
        appropriately-sized file with the appropriate name in the 
        appropriate subdirectory.

   Although I haven't personally verified the above, I'm quite
confident that Schulman is correct here.  Of perhaps greater
relevance to this list, the final passage cited above should
provide a potentially very interesting "project" for those
list-readers who are interested in the "hack Microsoft" project.
Schulman got at the cleartext by looking at the program in
a debugger, AFTER it had decrypted the database and loaded its
contents into memory; he didn't try to crack the encryption
method itself.
  My point is, if the crypto used here is as poor
as has been seen in the password area, and somebody were
to come up with a way to fool this "compliance checking"
protocol (which would defeat BOTH the "voluntary" registration
function and the potentially much more interesting reduced-
price product upgrading authentication mechanism), I think
that might constitute very poor PR for Micro$oft, as well
as a highly crypto-relevant issue.  That is, a hell of a
lot more people might exploit a flaw like that in order to 
falsely qualify for cheap upgrades than would ever be involved 
in exploiting the password cache problem.
   For those who missed it, and who care, the URL is 
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/examples/windows/win95.update/regwiz.html

rj