Re: [SC-L] Interesting article on the adoption of Software Security
* Kenneth R. van Wyk: There's an interesting article out on Net-Security.org (see the full article at http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=697) that addresses why software development organizations adopt (or do not adopt) a Software Security development methodology. Check it out -- it's a good read, IMHO. | Although consuming between 5-15% of a project's overall budget, | organisations have learnt that the savings yielded by phased | security assessments far outweigh the costs of performing them. I don't think this is correct. The costs for fixing bugs is higher later in the product lifecycle (and the article cites confirming data), but these costs might never materialize. Only a fraction of all bugs are found, and the vendor doesn't even have to fix all those which have actually been discovered. I've never seen any hard evidence that investment into proactive measures during development (or call it increased software quality) pays off in the end, at least in the area of applications which are neither safety-critical nor regulated in some form or other. Only those companies that want you to pay dearly for their services publish claim after claim that those services actually save you money. My own experience suggests that a strong brand is far more significant in making purchasing decisions than defect rate, and a really good brand can enable a vendor to push critical security fixes back years, towards the next software development/deployment cycle, thus minimizing the costs. -- Current mail filters: many dial-up/DSL/cable modem hosts, and the following domains: bigpond.com, di-ve.com, fuorissimo.com, hotmail.com, jumpy.it, libero.it, netscape.net, postino.it, simplesnet.pt, spymac.com, tiscali.co.uk, tiscali.cz, tiscali.it, voila.fr, yahoo.com.
RE: [SC-L] opinion, ACM Queue: Buffer Overrun Madness
der Mouse (Maus surely?) wrote [snip] Well, actually, but for the world's addiction to sloppy coding. It's entirely possible to avoid buffer overflows in C; it just requires a little care in coding. C's major failing in this regard - and I don't actually consider it all that major - is that it doesn't provide any tools to help. It assumes that you the programmer know what you're doing, and the mismatch between that and the common reality is where the problem actually comes from. I dislike this commonly-used argument that essentially says you should only employ above average people who don't make mistakes. It is flawed on lots of levels. 1. On average ability over our industry is average! 2. Even brilliant, infallible programmers like me make mishtukes shummtimes. 3. Even if above average, non-sloppy programmers can avoid mistakes, the effort they spend doing so is a distraction from their real job of solving the problem the program is intended for. 4. The levels of mental abstraction needed to solve an application domain problem and to worry about operator precedence and buffer overflow are completely different; there is good evidence that humans don't work well at more than one abstraction level at a time. All that a better language will bring you in this regard is that it will (a) push the sloppiness into places the compiler can't check and (b) change the ways things break when confronted with input beyond the design underlying their code. This sounds like the Syrius Cybernetics defence (from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy); essentially you seem to be saying it is OK if all the deep and complex flaws in a product are completely obscured by all the shallow and obvious ones. You can't assume that the sloppy programmer in C /only/ introduces shallow errors. In practice, well designed languages can do much more than you claim. They can completely eliminate whole classes of error that currently exercise our attention, make sloppiness very hard to conceal and make it much easier to find any subtle errors that remain. Peter ** This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the system manager. The IT Department at Praxis Critical Systems can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED] This footnote also confirms that this email message has been swept by MIMEsweeper for the presence of computer viruses. www.mimesweeper.com ** This e-mail has been scanned for all viruses by Star Internet. The service is powered by MessageLabs. For more information on a proactive anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit: http://www.star.net.uk
Re: [SC-L] opinion, ACM Queue: Buffer Overrun Madness
At 9:11 AM -0400 6/9/04, Gary McGraw wrote: Language makes a huge difference, eapecially in the realm of bugs. So not using C and C++ is smart. Use Java or C# instead. Or Ada, or PL/I, or Pascal, or Eiffel, etc. There are _lots_ of choices out there.
[SC-L] Determina claims 100% protection against all buffer overflows
Startup Determina has released a product that they claim protects against 100% of all memory based attacks, including all types of buffer overflows, without any false positives, false negatives or noticeable overhead. This is appareantly based on work done by their CTO, Dr. Saman Amarasinghe, who is an Associate Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. If this is based on work from MIT I guess the research should be public, but I have trouble finding evidence that support these broad claims. Broad overview at http://www.determina.com/tech/memfirewall.asp More in-depth overview at http://www.determina.com/docs/Determina%20Memory%20Firewall%20Paper.pdf The paper gives some graphs about jump points and break instructions. I would guess that they have a rootkit that hooks all kernel and user space functions that deal with memory allocation and process creation. When a process is created they probably generate a map of all carry/jump/break instructions which they use to compare with once anything in the system tries to alter the process memory space through the system functions they are proxying. If anything tries to change the existing execution roadmap they just disregard that request for a process memory change. Regards Thor Larholm Senior Security Researcher PivX Solutions 24 Corporate Plaza #180 Newport Beach, CA 92660 http://www.pivx.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Stock symbol: (PIVX) Phone: +1 (949) 231-8496 PGP: 0x5A276569 6BB1 B77F CB62 0D3D 5A82 C65D E1A4 157C 5A27 6569 PivX defines a new genre in Desktop Security: Proactive Threat Mitigation. http://www.pivx.com/qwikfix
RE: [SC-L] opinion, ACM Queue: Buffer Overrun Madness
Sloppy coding can be done in any language, but C and C++ have 3 features that aggravate the problem: 1. The array=pointer idiom. Given a parameter which is an array, you can't ask at run-time how big the array is - you have to do extra work and pass the size in an additional parameter (whereas most languages pass the size of an array automatically as part of the array). So doing buffer overflow checks requires more than just inserting the check - you have to make sure that an extra array size parameter is passed all the way down the call stack. [C and C++ cannot be considered strongly typed, in part because of the lack of distinction between pointers and arrays]. 2. By permitting pointer arithmetic, C and C++ encourage you to pass a pointer into the middle of a buffer, rather than passing the [start of the] buffer and an index into it, which makes bounds checking even more tedious to do (you have to pass a pointer to one-past-the-end-of-the-array as well, and even then this is less useful than having an index and a limit). 3. The lack of automatic bounds checking. Of course, run-time bounds checking is by no means a complete solution, but it does at least prevent a buffer overflow being used as a security attack, turning it into a denial-of-service attack instead. Apart from the obvious solution of choosing another language, there are at least two ways to avoid these problems in C++: 1. Ban arrays (to quote Marshall Cline's C++ FAQ Lite, arrays are evil!). Use classes from the STL, or another template library instead. Arrays should be used only in the template library, where their use can be controlled. 2. If you really must have naked arrays, ban the use of indexing and arithmetic on naked pointers to arrays (i.e. if p is a pointer, then p[x], p+x, p-x, ++p and --p are all banned). Instead, refer to arrays using instances of a template class ArrayX that encapsulates both the pointer (an X*) and the limit (an unsigned int). Such an object needs only 2 words of storage (compared to 1 word for a naked pointer), so it can assigned and passed by value. You can provide an operator to return the value of the limit, and an indexing operator (with optional bounds checking). If you really must, you can even implement pointer arithmetic operators for the class which update the limit at the same time as updating the pointer. David Crocker Consultancy contracting for dependable software development www.eschertech.com
RE: [SC-L] opinion, ACM Queue: Buffer Overrun Madness
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on Wednesday, June 09, 2004 7:58 AM: Although I am in favor of languages that help prevent such nasties as input buffer overruns, this is an excellent point. A sloppy programmer will write sloppy code. Reminds me of an old saying that I heard years ago while studying mechanical engineering: a determined programmer can write a FORTRAN program in ANY language. :-) (Well, notwithstanding FORTRAN's built-in ability of handling complex numbers, but I digress...) Going back over some of my old FORTRAN code, I find that I was writing object-oriented code in FORTRAN. Going over other people's C++ code, I can see that they're trying to make it work like FORTRAN, or QuickBASIC, or something like that. I did some work recently on .NET Security, trying to come up with some examples that would demonstrate how you'd screw it up in code. It's certainly difficult to come up with bad examples that aren't needlessly bone-headed, but when you look at other people's code, you realise that an awful lot of programmers are bone-headed. Buffer overflows can happen in any language, no matter what those languages do to prevent them. Okay, that's a bold statement. I'd better back it up. If you have a string-handling library of any kind, someone's going to come up with a program design that builds a twenty character string for a person's name, putting first name in the first ten characters, and last name in the last ten characters. Eric Smith changes his first name to Navratilova, and he's suddenly listed by the program as Navratilovamith amith - buffer overflow. Sure, it doesn't overflow into the stack, but it overflows into important data. And if you want to go further into insanity, you can manufacture a case where character 11 being lower case causes unwanted code to be executed (no default condition in a 'case' statement, no good error handling, etc). IMHO, the bottom line is that there's no excuse for sloppiness and a strong language can only do so much to prevent the programmer from his/her own sloppiness. The first defence against unsecure coding is to hire and educate your developers in such a way as to exclude the unsecure coding practices. It's not the only defence - but it's the first you're going to need, because if you don't have that, you've got programmers who will flout security prevention measures _because_ they don't understand how to do it properly, or why they're being strong-armed in a particular direction. And on the topic of hiring better programmers, I'm now in my third week as [EMAIL PROTECTED] [But my personal address remains this one] Alun.
