Microsoft Refutes Windows 'Back Door' Claim
The charges were raised last week by Steve Gibson, security researcher best known for his ShieldsUp Web site, in a podcast. A transcript of that podcast is available here.
Although Gibson presented no proof of the indictment -- he said that without access to Windows' source code, it would be impossible to prove, or disprove, his charge -- he said that any other explanation just didn't make sense.
"This was not a mistake. This is not buggy code. This was put into Windows by someone," Gibson said in the podcast Thursday. Gibson went on to hypothesize that Microsoft created this back door as a way to add code to users' machines whenever it wanted to.
"For example, if Microsoft was worried that for some reason in the future they might have cause to get visitors to their website [sic] to execute code, even if ActiveX is turned off, even if security is up full, even if firewalls are on, basically if Microsoft wanted a short circuit, a means to get code run in a Windows machine by visiting their website [sic], they have had that ability, and this code gave it to them," Gibson said.
"I don't see any way that this was not something that someone in Microsoft deliberately put into Windows," he concluded.
A Microsoft official denied the allegation in an entry on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog written late Friday. Program manager Stephen Toulouse wrote a detailed explanation of the "SetAbortProc" function's vulnerability, and said that the flaw was an inadvertent bug, not coding by design.
"There's been some speculation that you can only trigger this by using an incorrect size in your metafile record and that this trigger was somehow intentional. That speculation is wrong on both counts," wrote Toulouse. Gibson said that one reason he began thinking that the WMF vulnerability was a back door was because he could exploit the flaw only with a metafile record of an incorrect size.
But Toulouse rejected that claim. "The vulnerability can be triggered with correct or incorrect size values," said Toulouse, who said that Gibson's experience likely resulted from putting the SetAbortProc record as the last record in the metafile.
Toulouse also acknowledged that the bug was introduced into Windows during a time when the security situation didn't include hackers using malicious image files to exploit vulnerabilities. "This was a different time in the security landscape and these metafile records were all completely trusted by the OS," he said. "When it was introduced, the SetAbortProc functionality served an important function."
SetAbortProc, the vulnerable function in the graphics rendering engine (GDI), preceded the Windows Metafile format, said Toulouse, another reason why Gibson's charges don't add up. (SetAbortProc's duty is to allow for print jobs to be canceled.)
Most other security experts rejected Gibson's back-door theory.
"[There's] lots of old code hanging around Windows," said Richard Stiennon, director of threat research for Boulder, Colo.-based anti-spyware vendor Webroot. "Mr. Gibson is being spooked by ghosts of the past."