Clarity on Windows 10 iot-core over-air-update options? - windows-10-iot-core

I'd written my own over-air-update for previous version of iot-core (with or without iot-hub). The recent auto-update of iot-core (10.0.14393.67) broke it. Now, looking once again for clarity on this crucial (out-of-box feature on debian) capability, I am more confused than ever. Who can answer:
This post talks about updating firmware via the iot-hub. Is firmware my (uwp) iot-core app (e.g. background task) or not?
This post talks about oem deals from microsoft for iot-core commercialization (https://www.windowsforiotdevices.com/) which provide update capabilities. However, it is unclear about:
Is "option one" free? If not, what is the catch?
Are the update capabilities available in this "option one"
At best, we'd need a trade-off-set juxtaposition of the iot-hub vs. oem app-package-update scenarios since once a developer decides for one or the other paths, it is a major investment.
Update
What really matters here is clarity to companies/developers on the options and limitations regarding "over air updates" of:
Our Apps (Appx, headless, in our case. C#.) built in Visual Studio 2015.
The iot-core OS (automatic or scheduled...).
Ths iot-core OS WITH (or in conjunction with) our Apps.
These options, and their costs, are not clear. We are currently using the azure iot-hub (et. al.) and would like to leverage it as much as possible.
What happened, and what I am urgently trying to fix, is "3" above: I had an appx in the field and was using the /System32/oemcustomization.bat option to install new versions of my app via C:/windows/appinstall/...
This was working fine at all my remote sites for months. I was confident that all was stable. All of the sudden, my sites all wend offline. In my local laboratory, I could connect to my test systems where I noticed that Microsoft had done an automatic OS update of iot-core. There were breaking changes... and these changes are now of the nature that my previous over-air-update scheme no longer works even if I modify it -- there are security "fixes" that break my current approach and I see now way to salvage it yet.
Thus, what we really need from the PM is clarity on the above (1-3) items, and, at best, an complete, minimal example in C# for items 1-3.
Looking forward!

There appear to be two current solution streams here, both highly volatile/preview as far as I can see:
windows-store oem track: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/docs/store
iot-hub device management track: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/documentation/articles/iot-hub-device-management-device-jobs/

Related

Building a manual sandbox for malware analysis

I want to build a manual sandbox to analyze malwares on Windows systems. I mean a manual environment, not something automated like Cuckoo Sandbox.
There are many tools and I selected some of them, but I can't really see if each of this tool is worth it or not. Can you say me what you think and if these tools are useful for my sandbox?
First I consider some of them are unavoidables like IDA, winDBG, Wireshark, npcap, an HTTP Proxy like Fiddler, the Sysinternals suite, Volatility, maybe Foremost.
Then there are others tools I never really tried but which seems to be interesting. About static analysis, I have spotted the following tools and I would like to have an eventual feedback about it : Log-MD (a tool which look at the system using advanced Windows audit policies), Cerbero Profiler, Pestudio, Unpacker (it seems it is an automated tool to unpack binaries, seems faster but I am bit skeptical but I'm not a RE specialist, if you know this tool...), oledump.py by Didier Stevens (to identify various elements like heuristic patterns, IP, strings)...
About dynamic analysis, I noted Hook Analyzer (statically analyze elements with heuristic patterns and allow you to hook applications), Malheur (detect "malicious behavior"), ViperMonkey (detect VBA macro in Microsoft Office documents and emulate their behavior.
Do you have any recommandations about my setup and tools I could have forgotten? I want to analyze classic malicious elements (PE, PDF, various scripts, Office documents, ...).
About malware evasion, is there a risk a malware refuse to be analyzed while detecting RE and analysis tools?
Finally should I use Internet in the sandbox? Most of malwares today use C&C server and I see that some sandboxes are built with simulators like iNetSim but since the connection is not real, will I lost some information?
Thank's!
You might want to consider the SEE framework to build your analysis platform.
Its plugins based design will allow you to integrate scanning tools in a pretty flexible manner.
Bear in mind that lots of malware inspect the execution environment and, if any RE tool will be spotted, will refuse to run.
For what concerns the Internet connection, it depends on how much information you want to gather. It is indeed true that lots of malware communicate with C&C nowadays, yet they must ensure their persistence on the target machine.
Therefore, the injection mechanism will still be executed even if Internet connection is absent. My 2 cents on the matter is to run without Internet by default and activate it only when necessary.

Update of Bluemix run times or services. Will they always be backward compatible?

I've been playing with IBM Bluemix (liking it a lot so far) and we are considering to use it for production. What I'm not totally clear on is what happens when runtime environments or services get updated. I assume this happens quite frequently.
Will the new version be always backward compatible? If so, is this guaranteed somewhere in the terms of service?
What I am trying to avoid is to put production code on the platform and then having to update it constantly (or having it break) due to runtime or service updates.
Does anyone have any experience? Have past updates always been backward compatible?
Mark
While I don't believe there is a guarantee that the buildpacks will always be backwards compatible, you will always be able to select the previous buildpack version.
Try running a 'cf buildpacks' command and have a look at the buildpack names and version info encoded therein and think you'll see what I mean.
When buildpacks are updated they won't be used for your application until you restage it, so you have some control over when to pick up the updates as well. This gives you a chance to test it on non-production versions of the app.

Architectures to access Smart Card from a generic browser? Or: How to bridge the gap from browser to PC/SC stack? [closed]

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What are the existing client-side architectures to access a local Smart Card thru a PC/SC Smart Card reader (ISO 7816-3, ISO 14443) from a generic browser (connected to a server through http(s)), preferably from Javascript, with the minimum installation hassle for the end user? The server needs to be able to at least issue APDUs of its choice to the card (or perhaps delegate some of that to client-side code that it generates). I am assuming availability on the client side of a working PC/SC stack, complete with Smart Card reader. That's a reasonable assumption at least on Windows since XP, modern OS X and Unixes.
I have so far identified the following options:
Some custom ActiveX. That's what my existing application uses (we developed it in-house), deployment is quite easy for clients with IE once they get the clearance to install the ActiveX, but it does not match the "generic browser" requirement.
Update: ActiveX is supported mostly by the deprecated IE, including IE11; but not by Edge.
Some PC/SC browser extension using the Netscape Plugin API, which seems like a smooth extension of the above. The only ready-made one I located is SConnect (webarchive). It's no longer promoted (Update: thought still actively maintained and used late 2020 in at least one application), it's API documentation (webarchive) is no longer officially available, and it has strong ties to a particular Smart Card and reader vendor. The principle may be nice, but making such a plugin for every platform would be a lot of work.
Update: NPAPI support is dropped by many browsers, including Chrome and Firefox.
A Java Applet, running on top of Oracle's JVM (1.)6 or better, which comes with javax.smartcardio. That's fine from a functional point of view, well documented, I can live with the few known bugs, but I'm afraid of an irresistible downwards spiral regarding acceptance of Java-as-a-browser-extension.
[update, Feb 2021]: This answer considered the WebUSB API as a promising solution solution in 2015, then reported in 2019 that can't work or is abandoned. I made a question about it there.
Any other idea?
Also: is there some way to prevent abuse of whatever PC/SC interface the browser has by a rogue server (e.g. presenting 3 wrong PINs to block a card, just for the nastiness of it; or making some even more evil things).
The fact is that browsers can't talk to (cryptographic) smart cards for other purposes than establishing SSL.
You shall need additional code, executed by the browser, to access smart cards.
There are tens of custom and proprietary plugins (using all three options you mentioned) for various purposes (signing being the most popular, I guess) built because there is no standard or universally accepted way, at least in Europe and I 'm sure elsewhere as well.
Creating, distributing and maintaining your own shall be a blast, because browsers release every month or so and every new release changes sanboxing ir UI tricks, so you may need to adjust your code quite often.
And you probably would want to have GUI capabilities, at least for asking the permission of the user to access a card or some functionality on it.
For creating a multiple-platform, multiple browser plugin, something like firebreath could be used.
Personally, I don't believe that exposing PC/SC to the web is any good. PC/SC is by nature qute a low level protocol that when exposing this, you could as well expose block level access to your disk and hope that "applications on the web are mine only and they behave well" (this should answer your "Also"). At the same time a thin shim like SConnect is the easiest to create, for providing a javscript plugin.sendAPDU()-style code (or just wrap all the PC/SC API and let the javascript caller take care of the same level of details as in native PC/SC API use case).
Creating a plugin for this purpose is usually driven by acute current deficiencies.
Addressing the future (mobile etc) is another story, where things like W3C webcrypto and OpenMobile API will probably finally somehow create something that exposes client-side key containers to web applications. If your target with smart cards is cryptography, my suggestion is to avoid PC/SC and use platform services (CryptoAPI on Windows, Keychain on OSX, PKCS#11 on Linux)
Any kind of design has requirements. This all applies if you're thinking of using keys rather than arbitrary APDU-s. If your requirement is to send arbitrary APDU-s, do create a plugin and just go with it.
Update (8/2016): A new API for the Web called WebUSB API is being discussed. You can already use it with Chrome v54+.
This standard will be implemented in all major browsers and will replace the need for third-party applications or extensions for Smard Cards :-)
So the new answer is YES!
And the OSI-like architecture stack is:
PC/SC
CCID v1.1
WebUSB API
USB driver, i.e. libusb.
2019 Update: As #vlp commented, it seems that it doesn't work any in Chrome because they decided to block WebUSB for smartcards for some specious reasons :-(
Note: Google annonced that they will abandon Chrome Apps in 2017.
Previous anwser:
Now (2015) you can create a Google Chrome App, using the chrome.usb API.
Then you access the smartcard reader via its CCID-compliant interface.
It's not cross-browser but JavaScript programmable & cross-platform.
Anyway Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) is not supported any more by modern browsers. And Java applets are being dismissed by browser vendors.
I have just released a beta plugin addressing this problem.
This beta code is available here:
https://github.com/ubinity/webpcsc-firebreath
This plugin is based on the firebreath framework and has been beta-tested with Fireofx and Chrome under Linux/WinXP/Win7. Source code and extension pack are provided.
The basic idea is to provide a PCSLite API access and then develop a more friendly JS-api on top of this.
This plugin is under active development, so feel free to send any report and request.
For your first question I have little hope: either you are satisied with a very small subset of smart card functionality (like signing e-Mail or PDFs), then you may use some ready-made software (like PKCS), ideally maintained by the smart card company, or you want broader functionality and need to invest considerable effort on your own. Surely PCSC is the starting point to choose.
At least for your "also:" there is some hope.
1) Note, that some specifications (e.g. ICAO/German BSI TR-3110) request a method, where a PIN is not blocked, but uses a substantial amount of time as soon as the error counter hits 1 before replying. The final attempt must be enabled using a different command, otherwise no further comparison and error counter adjustment is done.
2) Simply protect the Verify command by requiring secure messaging. Sensitive applications use secure messaging for everything, so first step a session key is negtiated, which is second applied to all succeeding commands and responses. The effect would be, that the command is rejected due to incorrect MACs long before a comparison or modification of error counter is done.
There is another browser plugin similar to the one proposed by #cslashm available at http://github.com/cardid/WebCard. Is also open source and can be installed with "minimum installation hassle" as required in the original question. You can see an example of use visiting http://plugin.cardid.org
WebCard has been tested in IE 8 through 11, Chrome and Firefox in Windows and in Chrome and Safari in Mac OS X. Since is just a wrapper for PC/SC it requires in Mac OS X the installation of SmartCard Services from http://smartcardservices.macosforge.com
As chrome and firefox going to stop the support of NPAPI Plugin, there is no secure solution available to maintain the session for the smart card reading instead your certificate of the card have support for mutual ssl ,I answered for the similar question source,It might help
Its dirty, but if its acceptable / viable to install a bridge daemon/service on the client machine, then you can write a local bridge service (e.g. in python / pyscard) that exposes the smartcard via a REST interface, then have javascript in the browser that mediates between that local service (facade) and the remote server API.
Web Serial API (draft) can be used to communicate with a serial smart card reader from some browsers.
Buyer beware: This API is a draft and may be changed/abandoned at any time.
Speaking about Chrome, you can now use the Smart Card Connector app provided by Google which bundles the PC/SC-Lite port and the generic CCID driver.
The app itself works through the chrome.usb API, that was mentioned by the previous commenters.
So, instead of rewriting the whole stack (starting from the lowest level - raw USB), it's now possible for developers to code only the part that works on top of PC/SC API - which is exposed by the Connector app.
Clients,clients,clients...plugins,..JSApis..
Well..
For certain we know this : All browsers, when communicating to an Apache or IIS servers, are actually signing "something" when a https/SSL handshake process is needed.
For instance, a typical Apache configuration like this:
SSLVerifyClient require
SSLVerifyDepth 10
SSLOptions +FakeBasicAuth +StdEnvVars +ExportCertData +OptRenegotiate
Initiates a PIN pad pop up and the user must insert the smartcard pin to go on.
Well, my idea is : why not make the turn to the server, and tweak that behaviour, in order to upload a bytestream of stuff to sign something when a handshake is initiaded?
I have a setup where a smartcard reader is scanned to login a user. The PC/SC library work great on desktop. Somebody had mentioned to use
Emscripten (https://github.com/kripken/emscripten) compiler which compiles c++ into JavaScript code. But that didn't work well because some of the functions being used by PC/SC are only available server side.
After much research. I finally gave up on a client side solution, chrome web usb API also couldn't recognize the reader.
I then decided to give signalR a try and set up a hub on the PC connected to the smartcard reader and this approach worked out very well.

Can HTML5 communicate with peripherals like scanners and credit card readers?

My company writes software that installs on client machines to perform point-of-sale transactions. The software interfaces with a variety of external peripherals (receipt printers, bar code scanners, credit-card readers, etc). We do this with a WinForms app that we created in Visual Studio using the Microsoft OPOS library, which in turn communicates with our cloud server.
There are obvious inefficiencies in this model, primarily with updates. I'm researching other ways to communicate with these peripherals over the web, preferably via web browser. So far as I can tell, Java is one of the only technologies out there that can do what we're looking for (via applet), and I assume Adobe Flash can as well (via the Air platform). These are viable, but not preferable because we want to run our software on web-enabled mobile devices.
Does anybody have suggestions for other ways to communicate with external peripherals over the web?
UPDATE (Jan 16th, 2019): The Credential Management API has been announced. It's currently only supported on Chrome and Opera but it's looking promising. Google Developers wrote an article elaborating on the spec.
UPDATE (Dec 28th, 2016): Another couple years gone, and another update. This one will be more focused on two new developments than anything else. See the new "WebUSB & Web BlueTooth" section under "Full Device API". But the answer remains the same.
UPDATE (Nov 3rd, 2014): It's been just over two years since the original post was made, but the answer remains mostly the same for now. We are, however, closer to your original goal in several areas.
ORIGINAL ANSWER:
There would be a number of ways to go about this.
Background
The HTML5 specification has entered into the "Recommendation" state. This means that HTML5 is pretty much set for what it looks like. However, I will be using HTML5 in the same way that every marketing person in the world has decided is best. That is, I will not be talking about HTML. Well, I will, in so far as you will utilize it from an HTML page, but not really. What I'll actually be discussing is JavaScript (JS) and that's a horse of a different color. But for all intents and purposes, we're putting it all under the same heading as HTML5, which has been decided to mean "shiny and new" now.
Also, the items which I am discussing will vary in support. Some are very browser dependent projects (like Chromium specific implementations), and some are more standards driven projects that may not have browsers implementing or experimenting with them yet. I'll try to distinguish between the two as I go along.
Full Device API
Status: Incoming, but not ready
Being able to access devices from the browser is making slow but steady progress. Right now, many modern browsers have access to some of the more common devices like the camera or gamepads, but they are all high level APIs. Browser vendors, the standards groups, and lots of companies involved with the web are all trying to make webapps just as powerful as your local applications.
But the APIs you are looking for are still in progress and a ways off. For your particular case, and for the more general case of connecting your webapp to most devices, we're still a few years away from something we can use. If you want to see what awesome things are coming up in that field, here are just a select few items that may help you directly:
Web Near Field Communication (NFC) API
This one unfortunately may be dead in the water for now. But it looks like originally some folks at the W3C (mostly Intel it looks like) were looking at adding a NFC API to the web.
Media Capture Streams
The WebRTC group is working on programmatic access to media streams like the camera which would allow to integrate things like barcode scanning or other features. This has reached CR status and is available in browsers, but is less helpful on its own.
Web Bluetooth
If you had bluetooth capable tools, this API would help you connect with them from computers and devices that were able to listen and connect. The primary driver for this at the moment seems like it is the Chrome team, including an experimental implementation, but I wouldn't consider it anywhere ready to use yet (See "WebUSB & Web BlueTooth" section).
WebUSB
This would allow full access to low level USB information including listing devices and interacting with them. Same as Web BlueTooth, this seems to be current Chrome pet project, but I also wouldn't rely on it (See "WebUSB & Web BlueTooth" section).
Network Service Discovery
If you have other devices or items on the network which broadcast and use HTTP, this API would allow you to discover and interact with these services. No browser implementation, but it is in a working draft for the W3C.
Originally, Mozilla was pushing a number of these forward because of Boot2Gecko (or Firefox OS). However, with that project officially cancelled, we aren't seeing much progress from them in these areas now.
Members of the Chrome team, however, seem to have decided to dive in and start not only working towards these, but putting them live in browsers. Which leads us to...
WebUSB & Web BlueTooth
Like sausages, it's better to not know how Web Standards are made
-Abraham Lincoln (probably)
There's been a little bit of buzz in this area as it looks like the Chrome team snuck in these as experimental features and developed their own specification for it. Which is great! Just maybe not in the way that you were hoping for.
Each browser vendor and W3C contributor group has their own style and makes contributions towards the specs in their own way. The result is usually a fairly decent specification that the browsers have agreed upon. But getting from nothing to something is... messy. Real messy. And is quite a process a lot of times. It doesn't always result in a good spec (yeah, I'm talking about you Florian compromise...) but even when it does, it takes a while.
However, It seems like Google developed this version of the spec all on their own. And, in my experience, Google's approach to the specs is always a little... well... setting my personal opinions aside we'll say "gung-ho". They tend to just dive right into the deep end. And that seems to be what they've done here.
I highly doubt these specs or implementations will look anything like this when they become standards. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's part of the process. But I wouldn't go relying on this implementation or developing any code or products against it. This is an unprecedented feature on the web and all the browser vendors are gonna want a big say in this.
That said, this is actually good. One of the things Google often does (for better or worse) with situations like this is forces the conversation and it can push things along. And having a feature shipped in the browser, even an experimental feature, can turn up the heat on the demand for it. So we may see more progress in this area soon.
PhoneGap Apache Cordova. You know, for your phone
Status: Not fully featured and phone only
Apache Cordova, previously Adobe PhoneGap, is a way to write your program in HTML, CSS, and JS that allows you to access lower level functionality on things like phones, and compile across devices. This would be a way to implement your program, but it would be a phone application, not necessarily a desktop one. An option to consider, and something I figured I would mention.
Cordova implements a few of the above features already, but doesn't have some of the more powerful ones like NFC or BlueTooth.
The Native-App solution (for Windows 8)
Status: Possible, but OS specific and desktop app
Windows 8 offers the ability to build applications in HTML and JS. This would allow you to easily access lower level functionality on the OS via their API. From the looks of it, it is pretty extensive and you can do a lot. You mentioned cross OS support, however, and this obviously limits you to one OS.
It's so Flash-y!
Status: Dying/Dead, not possible as a web app
Flash won't have direct access to the system through the web. You could create an AIR application, but that will sort of defeat the purpose of having it web based. In addition, Flash support on mobile, and on the web it would seem, is on the decline.
NodeJS
Status: Can be a bit of a pain and only possible as a desktop app
NodeJS and JS applications have sort of been a hot topic the last couple years. I didn't discuss it in my original post because I felt it wasn't quite there yet. However, things have progressed and it is much closer to being ready for this sort of thing, and has the support and power of a growing user base. That said, for your particular case, I wouldn't recommend using it. It would have to be local on the users machine, and because of how NodeJS (and similar engines) are at the moment, it would require a lot of extra configuration and setup that would complicate things a bit.
So you could build an app using HTML, CSS and JS with NodeJS or similar engines and have low level access to what you need, but it has to be local, and it would take more work than I'm sure you want to do every time you'd like to install it for a customer.
... Now where was I?
So where does that leave us? Well, simple: if you want a single language/set of code as your code base, HTML/CSS/JS aren't a great option... yet. But they could be some day. For now, your options are limited to what you feel is best for your customer. Java is a stable option you listed, but obviously comes with its own drawbacks. As the web develops, I think we'll see a lot of really cool things coming out of the new functionality, but we've got a ways to go still.
More reading:
Brian.IO: Beyond HTML5
HTML5 Apps on Windows 8
Wikipedia list of projects built using JS
This is possible, but it would have to be done indirectly. In theory, you could write a socket-server in a low level language, which gets I/O, and sends the I/O through the socket (relaying, I guess). HTML5 uses WebSockets, or some equivalent to communicate with this socket-server.
Now it can be achieved with WebUSB API.
It is available in Chrome since version 54.
It is a W3C editor's draft so we can expect (hope) that it will be adopted by other browser vendors...
I've been thinking about this a lot lately... have a POS app mostly written in VB6, considering what to do next. HTML5 is an option and I was thinking I'd use VSPE to get the serial stuff into the JS.
http://www.eterlogic.com/Products.VSPE.html
Love this product! Works very well for getting serial traffic where you need it, so I think it would work well, at least as a proof-of-concept to get you going. You'll want to use a combination of "connector" types along with the "tcpclient" and "tcpserver".
Just for the record, a method that works well in 2016 (since chrome 26), but is to be withdrawn over the next 2 years is to deploy your html5 as a chrome app and use chrome.usb (or chrome.serial or chrome.bluetooth).
I am currently using chrome.usb and planning to migrate to a web app using WebUSB API (see Supersharp's answer), which I hope will be adopted by the time Google discontinue chrome apps 🤞.

What is the experience with Google 'Omaha' (their auto-update engine for Chrome)?

Google has open-sourced the auto update mechanism used in Google Chrome as Omaha.
It seems quite complicated and difficult to configure for anybody who isn't Google. What is the experience using Omaha in projects? Can it be recommended?
We use Omaha for our products. Initially there was quite a bit of work to change hardcoded URLs and strings. We also had to implement the server ourselves, because there was not yet an open source implementation. Today, I would use omaha-server.
There are no regrets with ditching our old client update solution and going with Omaha.
Perhaps, you can leverage the courgette algorithm, which is the update mechanism that is used in Google Chrome. It is really easy to use and apply to your infrastructure. Currently, it just works for Windows operating systems. Windows users of Chrome receive updates in small chunks, unlike Mac and Linux users who still receive the chunks in total size.
You can find the source code here in the Chromium SVN repository. It is a compression algorithm to apply small updates to Google Chrome instead of sending the whole distribution all the time. Rather than push the whole 10 MB to the user, you can push just the diff of the changes.
More information on how Courgette works can be found here and the official blog post about it here.
It works like this:
server:
hint = make_hint(original, update)
guess = make_guess(original, hint)
diff = bsdiff(concat(original, guess), update)
transmit hint, diff
client
receive hint, diff
guess = make_guess(original, hint)
update = bspatch(concat(original, guess), diff)
When you check out the source, you can compile it as an executable (right click compile in Visual Studio) and you can use the application in that form for testing:
Usage:
courgette -dis <executable_file> <binary_assembly_file>
courgette -asm <binary_assembly_file> <executable_file>
courgette -disadj <executable_file> <reference> <binary_assembly_file>
courgette -gen <v1> <v2> <patch>
courgette -apply <v1> <patch> <v2>
Or, you can include that within your application and do the updates from there. You can imitate the Omaha auto update environment by creating your own service that you periodically check and run Courgette.
I've been using Omaha in various projects since 2016. The projects had between a handful and millions of update clients. Target operating systems were mostly Windows, but also some Linux devices and (via Sparkle) macOS.
Omaha is difficult to set up because it requires you to edit Google's C++ implementation. You also need a corresponding server. The standard implementation is omaha-server and does not come from Google. However, in return it also supports Sparkle for automatic updates on Mac (hence why I mentioned Sparkle above).
While setting up the above components is difficult, once they are configured they are work extremely well. This is perhaps not surprising given that Google use Omaha to update millions (billions?) of devices.
To help others get started with Omaha, I wrote a tutorial that gives a quick overview of how it works.
UPDATE
Customizing google omaha isn't that easy espacialy if you have no knowledge about c++, python or com.
Updates aren't published that frequently
crystalnix/omaha is managed by the community and they try to merge the main repo into their's; additional features are implemented and basic things are fixed
google/omaha is more active and changes from google are added but not frequently
To implement manual updates in any language you can use the com classes
Resume
google omaha is still alive but in a lazy way
bugs are fixed but do not expect hotfixes
google omaha fits for windows client apps supported from windows vista and upwards
the server side I'm using supports also sparkle for crossplatform support
feedbacks and crashes are also supported on the server
feedbacks are sent with the google protocol buffers
crash handling is done with breakpad
I personaly would go for google omaha instead of implementing my own solution. However we will discuss this internal.
In the .NET world you might want to take a look at ClickOnce deployment.
An auto-update mechanism is something I'd personally code myself, and always have in the past. Unless you have a multi-gigabyte application and want to upload bits and pieces only, just rely on your own code/installer. That said, I've not looked at Google's open source library at all.. and didn't even know it existed. I can't imagine it offering anything superior to what you could code yourself, and with your own code you aren't bound by any licensing restrictions.