If you patch a security vulnerability, who’s fault is the vulnerability? If the OS didn’t suck, why does it need a 90 billion dollar operation to unfuck it?
Crowdstrike completely screwed the pooch with this deploy but ideally, Windows wouldn’t get crashed by a bas 3rd party software update. Although, the crashes may be by design in a way. If you don’t want your machine running without the security software running, and if the security software is buggy and won’t start up, maybe the safest thing is to not start up?
CrowdStrike also supports Linux and if they fucked up a Windows patch, they could very well fuck up a linux one too. If they ever pushed a broken update on Linux endpoints, it could very well cause a kernel panic.
Yeah, it’s a crowd strike issue. The software is essentially a kernel module, and a borked kernel module will have a lot of opportunities to ruin stuff, regardless of the OS.
Ideally, you want your failure mode to be configurable, since things like hospitals would often rather a failure with the security system keep the medical record access available. :/. If they’re to the point of touching system files, you’re pretty close to “game over” for most security contexts unfortunately. Some fun things you can do with hardware encryption modules for some cases, but at that point you’re limiting damage more than preventing a breach.
Architecture wise, the windows hybrid kernel model is potentially more stable in the face of the “bad kernel module” sort of thing since a driver or module can fail without taking out the rest of the system. In practice… Not usually since your video card shiting the bed is gonna ruin your day regardless.
Because it isn’t. Their Linux sensor also uses a kernel driver, which means they could have just as easily caused a looping kernel panic on every Linux device it’s installed on.
Security operations being one of the things that is often best done at the kernel level because of the need to monitor network and file operations in a way you can’t in user mode.
Also, it’s less about “their” drivers and more about what a kernel module can do.
Saying “there’s no way to know” doesn’t fit, because we do know that a malformed kernel module can destabilize a linux or mac system.
“Malformed file” isn’t a programming defect or something you can fix by having a better API.
Having the data exposed to userspace via an API would avoid having to have a kernel module at all… Which when malformed wouldn’t compromise the kernel.
I mean, sure. But typically operating systems don’t expose that type of information to user space, instead providing a kernel interface with user mode configuration.
It’s why they use the same basic approach on mac and Linux.
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