this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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I still don't understand why Windows doesn't use .exe whitelisting instead of bothering with endless blacklists and heuristics and antiviruses.
On any given system there's a handful of legit .exe while out there there's like a billion malware .exe, and more created every minute.
Or at least switch to an explicit "executable" flag like on MacOS and Linux.
Because it makes it the easiest thing to spoof an .exe which enables attacks of which you will never get out of. A legit.exe vs a spoofed legit.exe will be the exact same in every way except the coding in spoofed fucks you.
Edit: you're trading security risk for security risk that makes it easier to hide. Not worth it.
Edit 2: their is nothing 100% secure MD5 and Sha1 are both spoofable. Checksums and anything is capable of being man in the middle. You people act like you just found something that can't be broken. This is the real world the moment you switch most black hatters and white hatters will switch too...
Not really, WDAC doesn't usually just look at the filename. It can look at the certificate it was signed by, or fallback to using hashes.
Windows has both WDAC and Applocker for allowlisting, not just for exes, but stuff such as powershell scripts and what drivers run in the kernel as well.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-control/windows-defender-application-control/
In it's strongest form (a signed WDAC policy) even admin access can't easily override it, and a well written policy can even enforce stuff such as downgrade protection (example: only allow firefox.exe signed by Mozilla at or above a certain version) which prevents an attacker from loading older versions of an executable.
The problem is that it's not so easy to use in practice - an installer will often drop loads of unsigned files. Tor Browser ironically enough is a prime example, and any WDAC policies allowing it have to fallback on hash rules, which are fragile and must be regenerated every update, or filepath rules which are not so robust.
Microsoft is trying to make allowlisting more accessible with Smart App Control, which runs WDAC under the hood. It does save the hassle of managing one's own policies (and also blocks certain filetypes like lnks commonly used for malware), but it is not very customizable.