Our younger colleagues can be forgiven for viewing Microsoft as a benign company. Those of us who have been around for a while remember the old days and we haven’t forgotten or forgiven. Despite their efforts to appear a friendly and responsible member of our community, there has been plenty of evidence that the tiger hasn’t changed its stripes.
The latest bit of evidence is a report by a security researcher that Microsoft secretly built a backdoor into BitLocker, its full disk encryption system. I find the evidence a little ambiguous but the exploit definitely exists and has been verified independently. The question is whether the exploit is a bug or a purposeful backdoor.
The researcher—who uses the handle “Nightmare-Eclipse”—has an adversarial history with Microsoft but insists that he can think of no reason for the code in question to exist except to provide a backdoor. It’s hard to know what to think. On the one hand there’s Microsoft’s previous bad behavior and antipathy to any software company not named Microsoft, and especially to the free software movement. On the other hand, it may be that Nightmare-Eclipse, having found a legitimate exploit is allowing his dislike of Microsoft to impute bad motives to the company.
It is, I think, hard to see what the upside of installing such a backdoor would be for Microsoft. The exploit was almost certain to become known and what, exactly, would they expect to gain from it that would be worth the bad publicity?
The uncertainty is what makes it red meat. Both the Microsoft haters and supporters can grab onto part of the story and claim victory for their point of view.