Nope.
I resisted replying on this yesterday, but today got a note via the IP list (where the gods hang out) which didn’t one-box, so I quote from it:
From: Rich Kulawiec
Date: May 21, 2024 at 23:41:54 GMT+9
To: Dave Farber
Subject: Microsoft plans the mother of all backdoors
…
The moment this exists, every applicable government agency on this planet
will not only want, but will demand access to it. And whether by open
political processes or backroom chicanery: they’ll get it.
So will every organized hacking operation and/or ransomware gang.
Microsoft isn’t building a feature: they’re deploying a target – moreoever,
a target that they have no possible chance of defending given the enormous
political, financial, technical, and human resources that will be used
against it.
I’ll take some further speculative steps (of the sort that get me branded as irretrievably paranoid on year 1, but prophetic at year 10).
- The feature won’t have an off switch (that does anything) because the use-case is too easy to sell as a spying feature, just like you can’t really “switch off” your cell phone location information.
- Access will be granted to “the good guys” (like India) as a matter of course for market maintenance, no politics required.
- The keys to this have already leaked to China, either by breached emails or simply via a less-than-thoroughly vetted employee. My bet in on the latter as a continuing threat, given how well the SolarWinds attack worked.
- This will eventually lead to an uncomfortably large number of “misconfigured” computers (p→1 as t→5 years (?) <∞) spewing important Western industrial and national secrets to adversaries in a way that will cause massive embarrassment but no real change.
I’ll go one step further:
- I think it’s likely that we know about this only because it was too controversial as a spying feature to be put into Windows without some employee blowing the whistle.
