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…but its only for the US Government.  An article from Wired highlights details of an agreement between the US Air Force and Microsoft, in which they’ve created a custom, secure version of Windows XP that’s specialized for the US Air Force’s environment.  The efforts were not viewed favorably by IT administrators, but the cost saving is estimated to be $100 million over a 5 year period.

This bothers me on a couple of levels:
1.) If patching was an issue, why couldn’t the Air Force’s IT management standardize, lock down and solve the issue patching procedures on its own?  Perhaps going to Microsoft directly was a cost saver over having the IT department spend time and resources (and money) to remap the processes on their own.

2.) The US Air Force is using Windows, and not just Windows, but XP.   I understand that the world runs on this software, but hearing the sentence “secure version of Windows XP” is an oxymoron to anyone that’s had any real experience with operating systems in general.  There is too much legacy code in the Windows kernel.  I would be willing to bet money that Microsoft did NOT rewrite with kernel from scratch just for the Air Force.

Seeing this news reminded me of Steve Gibson‘s latest Security Now podcast.  In it, he discussed Windows’ place in secure environments.

“It (the Windows kernel) has not yet been rewritten from scratch.  In fact what Microsoft has done, unfortunately, is they have made decisions over time which they felt were warranted then, but which negatively impacted the stability of the system. There was once – the original design of NT was, remember, it was a multi-API kernel. You could run POSIX, and you could run 16-bit Windows and 32-bit Windows. It sort of had this plug-in architecture. It was sort of a microkernel approach. And, gee, we need more performance. So let’s move GDI into the kernel. Oh, shoot.  Now that means that a buffer overflow displaying a JPG is a kernel overflow rather than out in the user space where it can’t do any damage. And so you could see the decisions Microsoft has made over time for expedience sake have ended up having dramatic security implications.”

He goes on to say “I understand that software is difficult to create. I don’t blame ever, ever, Microsoft for having bugs. I blame their policies. I blame them for the things they deliberately do, like putting scripting in email, like once having scripting in Windows metafiles, apparently on purpose. And those sorts of policy decisions, or moving GDI, the Graphics Device Interface, into the kernel. That’s what you do not do. And Microsoft does it over and over and over due to a lack of respect for the consequences of these things.  Anywhere that you absolutely need security and reliability, that’s not Windows. There is a whole separate class of industrial-strength operating systems that consumers have never used… They may not do all the things that we want (or be compatible the way we want it to be).  But those operating systems are what you want running your ATM at your local bank and the nuclear reactor in the next county. That’s what you want, not Windows.”

And the US Airforce chooses Windows as it’s primary OS.  When information security is paramount, government and high security organizations seem to have this bad habit of choosing an OS with proven stability and security issues over other non-commercial and commercial software.

There are better operating systems out there for these types of applications.

On a separate and off topic note – in this same Security Now podcast came a story of a TD Canada Trust ATM that had apparently been found sitting at a Windows XP logon screen.  This took me by surprise.  I was briefly hired by TD at their Easybank call centre some 4 years ago.  All their call center computer systems and software were running on Unix.   Hearing that the ATM machines had not followed suit in this fashion is a disappointment.

It raises the question, how secure do you feel with your money in ATMs running Windows?