microsoft.privacy.issue.txt

`Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 21:55:22 -0600 (MDT)  
From: cult hero <[email protected]>  
To: InfoSec News <[email protected]>  
Subject: [ISN] Everywhere your MAC address shows up   
  
  
  
Forwarded From: <anonymous>  
  
MICROSOFT'S HEAVY HAND IN THE COOKIE JAR   
A special report from YEOW - Barry Simon.   
  
See the Woody's Office Watch discussion and details on the Office 97  
privacy problem. Issues 4.11 and 4.12  
  
Because of the important Internet Explorer 5 coverage some regular WWW  
features have been held over to the next issue.   
  
We reported earlier on the brouhaha over the inclusion of hardware IDs in  
the Pentium III chip and privacy advocates' concerns about it. Turns out  
many of us already have hardware IDs on our systems since all Ethernet  
cards have a MAC (stands for 'Media Access Control', whatever that  
means!), a six byte ID number that networks need to be sure to properly  
direct network packets. Of course, the Pentium III ID's are more serious  
since many home systems don't (yet) have network cards and the biggest  
privacy concerns are in the consumer space.  
  
Due to wonderful sleuthing by Richard Smith of PharLap (who earlier  
located the April Fool's Bug discussed in WWW issue 2.2), the world has  
discovered a number of places that Microsoft has been using these MACs -  
in Windows 98 IDs, in Office 97 documents and in the microsoft.com  
cookies. And privacy concerns result from all these uses.   
  
To understand the issues, try a few experiments. First, you'll need your  
MAC assuming you have an Ethernet adapter. With Windows 9x, run the  
program winipcfg from the Run box. It should load with a dropdown that  
says 'PPP Adapter'. Change the dropdown to the name of your hardware  
adapter. The Adapter Address field will say something like  
00-70-06-9A-8E-43. That's your MAC. Each byte is presented as two hex  
digits (0 through 9 or A-F) for a 12 character ASCII string which is what  
Microsoft uses. With Windows NT, run instead winmsd, go to the Network  
tab and pick Transports and you'll get the MAC.   
  
For the next experiment, you'll need to look at a Word 97 document in text  
mode. You can't do this with Word. If you have Quick View Plus (plain  
Quick View won't do), open a Word doc in QVP, go to the View menu and pick  
View as Text. Or make a small Word doc, save it and rename it to a .txt  
extension and open it in Notepad. Now search for the string PID. You  
should find _PID_ GUID and shortly afterwards, a long hex string inside  
braces such as {F96EB3B9-C9F1-11D2-95EB-0060089BB2DA}. Those 12 hex digits  
at the end will be your MAC. Yup, every Word doc, every Excel spreadsheet  
and every Power Point presentation is branded with an identifier showing  
the PC it came from. If your boss has a Word memo you sent her and a copy  
of the anonymous whistle blowing attachment you sent to the Feds, she  
could determine they were made on the same machine. (Of course, if you  
aren't careful, the document includes an author name and if any  
corrections were made, it may say who made the corrections. Within the  
next few days, Microsoft expects to post a white paper on all the  
'metadata'; embedded in Office documents).   
  
To run the next experiments, you'll need Windows 98, so I'll tell you what  
happens so you can follow along in any event. In your Windows directory,  
you'll find a file called reginfo.txt. Open it in Notepad and look for a  
line called HWID; it ends with your MAC. This file is created when you  
install Windows and is transmitted to Microsoft when you register. And  
here's the clincher: even if you check the box not to send hardware  
information, this data is sent. And it's even worse - the data collection  
code is in an ActiveX control that can be used by any Internet site out  
there. Pharlap has a demo to illustrate this: go there and it displays  
your MAC on screen. Any site knowing of this control could track MACs of  
all Windows 98 visitors to their sites. There is also a demo and  
discussion at Windows Magazine. By the way, this ActiveX control is also  
in the Windows 2000 beta so if Microsoft hadn't been found out, NT users  
would have been hit next.   
  
Next, go to your cookies directory and open the text file whose name ends  
with microsoft.txt (it probably has a username@ in front where username is  
your login name). In it you'll find a string called GUID that includes  
your MAC (GUID, by the way, is short for Global Unique Identifier). This  
cookie is sent to www.microsoft.com every time you visit that site. You  
may have realized they were making a cookie when you registered at their  
site but I bet you didn't realize they were adding hardware information  
without your permission. (Actually the Win98 Registration Wizard made the  
cookie before you went to the Microsoft site.)   
  
You might want to search your Registry for your MAC as a string. I found  
mine numerous times - two in suspicious places viz a viz Microsoft. It's  
part of a key for Media Player called Client ID (is this passed on to the  
Media Player servers?) and as part of a key HKCU\Identities that seems to  
be connected with Outlook Express 5.0.   
  
There is certainly plenty here for the paranoid. Microsoft is collecting  
and storing in its databases unique hardware information. That  
information brands your documents, and is always sent on when you access  
Microsoft's site. One has to consider the possibility that Microsoft is  
keeping some master database tracking all sorts of interactions based on  
your MAC. And one has to allow the possibility that the MAC will be  
encoded in the information that is sent by the Office Registration Wizard  
in Office 2000.   
  
Microsoft has reacted vigorously to the developments in this story. They  
have two customer letters ( here and here) on their site in which they  
promise to remove the hardware ID part of the registration wizard in a  
Win98 upgrade. They also promise to delete 'any hardware ID information  
that may have been inadvertently gathered without the customer having  
chosen to provide Microsoft with this information.' Tools have already  
been posted to remove branding from Office applications and from  
already-created docs and there is a promise that branding will be removed  
>from the final version of Office 2000.   
  
Beyond these actions, there has been a full court spin operation. Some MS  
representatives have (unwisely in my opinion) attempted to minimize the  
issue. There have been claims that the doc branding was a part of a  
feature, never implement, intended solely to help network administrators.   
There has been harping on the fact that the MAC only identifies a machine  
but not an individual - true but not of much comfort in many cases. We've  
been told that Windows 98 sending a HWID even if you said not to send  
hardware information was a bug, not a feature - an inadvertent programming  
error. There's been no new statement about the use of MACs in cookies  
which I find most disturbing.   
  
We've been told by Microsoft representatives that the Office 2000  
Registration Wizard doesn't collect MACs or anything like a MAC. Indeed,  
they claim that while the Office CD serial number can be reconstructed  
>from the 16 byte code sent by the wizard, the hardware info does not allow  
reconstruction. In particular, if the different CDs were used on the same  
machine, they'd be unable to tell that the codes came from the same  
machine.   
  
  
_____  
  
The problem with the Microsoft position is that the company has so little  
credibility and there is too much of a pattern here. We pride ourselves  
on taking a middle road on Microsoft at Woody's newsletters. We don't  
hesitate to put their feet to the fire but, on the other hand, we don't  
take the position that Microsoft is the root of all evil and everything  
they say and do is two faced. That said, Woody's middle name isn't Polly  
and mine isn't Anna. Microsoft has amply demonstrated that it is company  
policy to, er, shade the truth when doing so serves a perceived business  
purpose. We see it in the leaked disinformation about Windows 2000  
shipping this fall, we've seen it in their previous reactions to  
accusations and we saw it too often in the testimony at the DOJ trial.   
  
That means one has to take skeptically every statement that Microsoft has  
made about the MAC problem. I'm inclined to believe that branding of  
Office documents wasn't part of a plot to link together our entire lives  
in Microsoft's databases. But I'm insulted that they try to bat their  
eyelashes and claim to us that the sending of the HWID even when you told  
them not to send hardware info was an inadvertent error. And I'm  
concerned that we have no way of knowing that they've kept their promise  
to remove hardware IDs from their internal databases. Indeed, my  
presumption is that they will not.   
  
I worry that Microsoft is tucking all sorts of things into the holes they  
aren't discussing. While they have said they'll stop using HWID, they  
have also said they'll continue to use the MSID number which is created by  
the Windows 98 Registration wizard. And, guess what? As discovered by  
Peter Siering at the German publication C'T Magazine, the registration  
wizard also creates a Microsoft cookie that includes MSID. So even after  
the apologies and changes, it seems Microsoft will be quite capable of  
tracking us and linking online visits to registration information.  
  
It's interesting about credibility. There was also an Intel slip reported  
recently that they claimed was inadvertent. Apparently some mobile  
Pentium II's shipped with hardware IDs even though these were only  
announced for Pentium III's. Intel's explanation is that they experimented  
with this feature in the manufacturing process for the mobile Pentium II  
but it was supposed to be disabled before shipping. One line  
inadvertently didn't do the disabling. Intel's credibility is such that  
I'm willing to accept their claim of inadvertence here.   
  
-o-  
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