What does the MS Secure Boot Issue teach us about key escrow?
Nothing.
No, seriously. Articles like “Microsoft Secure Boot key debacle causes security panic” and “Bungling Microsoft singlehandedly proves that golden backdoor keys are a terrible idea” draw on words in an advisory to say that this is all about golden keys and secure boot. This post is not intended to attack anyone; researchers, journalists or Microsoft, but to address a rather inflammatory claim that’s being repeated.
Based on my read of a advisory copy (which I made because I cannot read words on an animated background (yes, I’m a grumpy old man (who uses too many parentheticals (especially when I’m sick)))), this is a nice discovery of an authorization failure.
What they found is:
The “supplemental” policy contains new elements, for the merging conditions. These conditions are (well, at one time) unchecked by bootmgr when loading a legacy policy. And bootmgr of win10 v1511 and earlier certainly doesn’t know about them. To those bootmgrs, it has just loaded in a perfectly valid, signed policy. The “supplemental” policy does NOT contain a DeviceID. And, because they were meant to be merged into a base policy, they don’t contain any BCD rules either, which means that if they are loaded, you can enable testsigning.
That’s a fine discovery and a nice vuln. There are ways Microsoft might have designed this better, I’m going to leave those for another day.
Where the post goes off the rails, in my view, is this:
About the FBI: are you reading this? If you are, then this is a perfect real world example about why your idea of backdooring cryptosystems with a “secure golden key” is very bad! Smarter people than me have been telling this to you for so long, it seems you have your fingers in your ears. You seriously don’t understand still? Microsoft implemented a “secure golden key” system.[1] And the golden keys got released from MS own stupidity.[2] Now, what happens if you tell everyone to make a “secure golden key” system? [3] (Bracketed numbers added – Adam)
So, [1], no they did not. [2] No it didn’t. [3] Even a stopped clock …
You could design a system in which there’s a master key, and accidentally release that key. Based on the advisory, Microsoft has not done that. (I have not talked to anyone at MS about this issue; I might have talked to people about the overall design, but don’t recall having done so.) What this is is an authorization system with a design flaw. As far as I can tell, no keys have been released.
Look, there are excellent reasons to not design a “golden key” system. I talked about them at a fundamental engineering level in my threat modeling book, and posted the excerpt in “Threat Modeling Crypto Back Doors.”
The typical way the phrase “golden key” is used (albiet fuzzily) is that there is a golden key which unlocks communications. That is a bad idea. This is not that, and we as engineers or advocates should not undercut our position on that bad idea by referring to this research as if it really impacts on that “debate.”
Who is the author of this post?