I'm glad Microsoft did the conference call with Gibson but I too am worried by what Gibon reports they said. Which is less noticable: a trojan that never brings *any* dialogue box to the users attention or one that is trying to creating a facade around why you need to install some apparently secure/signed driver.

Microsoft's programmers say that you could just write your own low-level raw sockets driver, but Gibson is right in saying that WinXP is suppose to have all this 'secure driver signing' stuff for your protection (of course it has *nothing* to do with controlling the market or anything like that monopoly? what monopoly?) For MS engineers to say that a would-be hacker could just get a certificate is avoiding the issue. Yes, Unix systems have them too but they are least always enforce some security policies regarding their use. WinXP home/personal-use oriented editions will not have normal authentication and thus the system will be always logged in as Administrator/root equivilent access. GeonĪs Gibson wrote, raw sockets on Unix platforms are generally only usable by users with root level privileges. I'm interested in hearing what our resident OpenForum security experts think of Gibson's claims. After reading Gibson's arguments, and those of his opponents, I am not entirely sure what to think of them. Thread on Windows XP and raw socket support in the OpenForum's Software Colloquium. The story's also been covered in the New York Times, and there's a The Register has critisized Gibson's arguments, and Bruce Schneier has weighed in on the debate in his 'Crypto-Gram' newsletter. MS has a page where it responds to Gibson. Gibson has an article on Denial of Service with WindowsXP, an account of his conference call about the issue with Microsoft, and the now-famous description of a DDoS attack on grc.com.

Gibson argues that the raw socket support will make it far easier for malicious hackers to launch untraceable and more powerful denial of service attacks, and cause other mischief. John Kaniarz wrote in with word of Steve Gibson's controversial pages on Internet security, specifically the threat that (Gibson argues) Microsoft's inclusion of full 'raw socket' support in Windows XP presents to Internet security.

Target is protected err 0 winject