Re: [SC-L] Re: Application Sandboxing, communication limiting, etc.

2004-03-14 Thread Crispin Cowan
-information.eveilbigcorp.com would report users-personal-information to Evil Big Corp's DNS server. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com Immunix 7.3 http://www.immunix.com/shop/ - # Copyright(c) Immunix Inc., 2004 # $Id

Re: [SC-L] Interesting article on the adoption of Software Security

2004-06-10 Thread Crispin Cowan
unless there is a very strong reason to do otherwise. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] opinion, ACM Queue: Buffer Overrun Madness

2004-06-11 Thread Crispin Cowan
* high security, high effort Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Interesting article on the adoption of Software Security

2004-06-11 Thread Crispin Cowan
the Pascal compiler easier to implement and port. The innovation in Java was to take this ugly kludge and market it as a feature :) Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Interesting article on the adoption of Software Security

2004-06-12 Thread Crispin Cowan
Andreas Saurwein wrote: Crispin Cowan wrote: However, where ever C made an arbitrary decision (either way is just as good) PL/M went the opposite direction from C, making it very annoying for a C programmer to use. Does that mean it did not make any decision at all? What was the outcome

Re: [SC-L] Education and security -- another perspective (was ACM Queue - Content)

2004-07-06 Thread Crispin Cowan
not overrunning buffers. Again, there's a lot of overlap. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML[EMAIL PROTECTED] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO

Re: [SC-L] Education and security -- another perspective (was ACM Queue - Content)

2004-07-09 Thread Crispin Cowan
COBOL, Pascal, PL/M, 68000 assembler, C, C++, FORTRAN, VAX assembler, Prolog, LISP, and Maple. Its not like this list needs to be short. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Education and security -- another perspective (was ACM Queue - Content)

2004-07-09 Thread Crispin Cowan
that a large, complex, and retrograde language with no industrial growth is a suitable subject for undergraduate education. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Programming languages used for security

2004-07-09 Thread Crispin Cowan
is that Hermes is among the sources that Java looted; some of the typestate checking features ended up in the Java bytecode checker. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Programming languages used for security

2004-07-09 Thread Crispin Cowan
and eliminating coding error. You will find exactly those arguments in the preface to the KR C book. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Programming languages used for security

2004-07-10 Thread Crispin Cowan
. * $C_OR_ASSEMBLER_ITS_REALLY_THE_SAME_THING is like a thermonuclear missile, in that it is fast and powerful, but if you are not careful, you can give yourself an ouchie :) Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Programming languages used for security

2004-07-12 Thread Crispin Cowan
David Crocker wrote: Crispin Cowan wrote: The above is the art of programming language design. Programs written in high-level languages are *precisely* specifications that result in the system generating the program, thereby saving time and eliminating coding error. You will find exactly those

Re: [SC-L] Programming languages -- the third rail of secure coding

2004-07-21 Thread Crispin Cowan
--- Michael S Hines [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Top security papers

2004-08-09 Thread Crispin Cowan
Matt Setzer wrote: It's been kind of quiet around here lately - hopefully just because everyone is off enjoying a well deserved summer (or winter, for those of you in the opposite hemisphere) break. In an effort to stir things up a bit, I thought I'd try to get some opinions about good

Re: [SC-L] Mobile phone OS security changing?

2005-04-06 Thread Crispin Cowan
could be designed either way; it would not surprise me to see phone set peole architecting a phone so that the keyboard is root. It is not exactly intuitive to treat a hand set as a multi-user platform. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http

Re: [SC-L] Theoretical question about vulnerabilities

2005-04-12 Thread Crispin Cowan
. But this still does not completely eliminate XSS, as you cannot a priori know about all the possible buffer overflows etc. of every client that will come to visit, and basic HTML still allows for some freaky stuff, e.g. very long labels. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Theoretical question about vulnerabilities

2005-04-12 Thread Crispin Cowan
, time-to-exploit depends on how intelligent the fuzzer is in terms of aiming at the victim program's data structures. There are many specialized fuzzers aimed at various kinds of applications, aimed at network stacks, aimed at IDS software, etc. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Theoretical question about vulnerabilities

2005-04-13 Thread Crispin Cowan
static type checking difficult. The last data I remember on Java is that turning array bounds checking on and off makes a 30% difference in performance. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Theoretical question about vulnerabilities

2005-04-13 Thread Crispin Cowan
. Disclaimer: I worked on Hermes as an intern at the IBM Watson lab waay back in 1991 and 1992. Hermes is my favorite type safe programming language, but given the dearth of implementations, applications, and programmers, that is of little practical interest :) Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http

Re: [SC-L] Theoretical question about vulnerabilities

2005-04-15 Thread Crispin Cowan
fault. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/ CTO, Immunix http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Why Software Will Continue to Be Vulnerable

2005-05-01 Thread Crispin Cowan
would have to position these moves as a security enhancement for the consumer, which AOL is doing with bundled antivirus service as advertised on TV. ISPs could also position a non-restricted account as an expert account and charge extra for it. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com

Re: [SC-L] Intel turning to hardware for rootkit detection

2005-12-14 Thread Crispin Cowan
at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com ___ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) SC-L@securecoding.org

Re: [SC-L] Bugs and flaws

2006-02-01 Thread Crispin Cowan
and architecture is just a continuous grey scale of degree. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Olympic Games: The Bi-Annual Festival of Corruption

Re: [SC-L] Bugs and flaws

2006-02-01 Thread Crispin Cowan
so as to *mask* flaws by avoiding single points of failure, doing things such as using 2 bolts (for tables) and using access controls to limit privilege escalation (for software). Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering

Re: [SC-L] Bugs and flaws

2006-02-02 Thread Crispin Cowan
IE to invoke WMF decoding without asking the user. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Olympic Games: The Bi-Annual Festival of Corruption

Re: [SC-L] Bugs and flaws

2006-02-03 Thread Crispin Cowan
is that the WMF API in particular is vulnerable to malicious content. None of which strikes me as surprising, but maybe that's just me :) Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Olympic Games

Re: [SC-L] Bugs and flaws

2006-02-07 Thread Crispin Cowan
/ *From:* [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Crispin Cowan *Sent:* Fri 2/3/2006 12:12 PM *To:* Gary McGraw *Cc:* Kenneth R. van Wyk; Secure Coding Mailing List *Subject:* Re: [SC-L] Bugs and flaws Gary McGraw wrote: To cycle this all back around to the original posting, lets

Re: [SC-L] RE: The role static analysis tools play in uncovering elements of design

2006-02-07 Thread Crispin Cowan
/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Olympic Games: The Bi-Annual Festival of Corruption

Re: [SC-L] Re: [Owasp-dotnet] RE: 4 Questions: Latest IE vulnerability, Firefox vs IE security, User vs Admin risk profile, and browsers coded in 100% Managed Verifiable code

2006-04-03 Thread Crispin Cowan
, and you will see the user(s) making the correct decision(s). Well, maybe. Users are notorious for not making the right decision. AppArmor lets the site admin create the policy and distribute it to users. Of course that assumes we are talking about Linux users :) Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D

[SC-L] Segments, eh Smithers?

2006-04-04 Thread Crispin Cowan
-L@securecoding.org List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell

Re: [SC-L] Re: [Owasp-dotnet] RE: 4 Questions: Latest IE vulnerability, Firefox vs IE security, User vs Admin risk profile, and browsers coded in 100% Managed Verifiable code

2006-04-05 Thread Crispin Cowan
for the Linux Kernel. Chris Wright, Crispin Cowan, Stephen Smalley, James Morris, and Greg Kroah-Hartman. Presented at the 11^th USENIX Security Symposium http://www.usenix.org/events/sec02/, San Francisco, CA, August 2002. PDF http://crispincowan.com/%7Ecrispin/lsm-usenix02.pdf. However

Re: [SC-L] Ajax one panel

2006-05-24 Thread Crispin Cowan
hearing the OSDI presentation that described implementing JavaOS in the past tense. So what was the real reason? Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com

Re: [SC-L] Dr. Dobb's | Quick-Kill Project Management | June 30, 2006

2006-07-15 Thread Crispin Cowan
to dispute. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Necessity is the mother of invention ... except for pure math ___ Secure Coding mailing

Re: [SC-L] Bumper sticker definition of secure software

2006-07-16 Thread Crispin Cowan
coming out of a discussion between him and I on a mailing list about 5 years ago. Reliable software does what it is supposed to do. Secure software does what it is supposed to do, and nothing else. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software E

Re: [SC-L] Bumper sticker definition of secure software

2006-07-17 Thread Crispin Cowan
mikeiscool wrote: On 7/17/06, Crispin Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Goertzel Karen wrote: I've been struggling for a while to synthesise a definition of secure software that is short and sweet, yet accurate and comprehensive. My favorite is by Ivan Arce, CTO of Core Software, coming out

Re: [SC-L] Bumper sticker definition of secure software

2006-07-17 Thread Crispin Cowan
mikeiscool wrote: On 7/17/06, Crispin Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: supposed to goes to intent. I don't know. I think there is a difference between this does what it's supposed to do and this has no design faults. That's all I was trying to highlight. The difference between supposed

[SC-L] NDSS CFP Due September 10th

2006-09-06 Thread Crispin Cowan
February 28th - March 2nd in San Diego. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Hack: adroit engineering solution to an unanticipated problem Hacker: one who is adroit at pounding

Re: [SC-L] re-writing college books - erm.. ahm...

2006-10-29 Thread Crispin Cowan
on, just not enough. To make it more, one would have to convince the people who are currently not doing it, or doing it badly, to do better, and they (by definition) are not listening. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software

Re: [SC-L] Why Shouldn't I use C++?

2006-11-02 Thread Crispin Cowan
Ben Corneau wrote: From time to time on this list, the recommendation is made to never user C++ when given a choice (most recently by Crispin Cowan in the re-writing college books thread). This is a recommendation I do not understand. Now, I'm not an expert C++ programmer or Java or C

Re: [SC-L] re-writing college books [was: Re: A banner year for software bugs | Tech News on ZDNet]

2006-11-03 Thread Crispin Cowan
. That is a case for C. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Hack: adroit engineering solution to an unanticipated problem Hacker: one who is adroit at pounding round pegs

Re: [SC-L] Could I use Java or c#? [was: Re: re-writing college books]

2006-11-09 Thread Crispin Cowan
Debugging with gdb http://gcc.gnu.org/java/gdb.html. * For C#: There is a Mono Debugger http://www.mono-project.com/Debugging, but it is not complete. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http

Re: [SC-L] Could I use Java or c#? [was: Re: re-writing college books]

2006-11-12 Thread Crispin Cowan
Al Eridani wrote: On 11/9/06, Crispin Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Prior to Java, resorting to compiling to byte code (e.g. P-code back in the Pascal days) was considered a lame kludge because the language developers couldn't be bothered to write a real compiler. Post-Java

Re: [SC-L] p-code was created for PLATFORM PORTABILITY

2006-11-13 Thread Crispin Cowan
David A. Wheeler wrote: On 11/9/06, Crispin Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Prior to Java, resorting to compiling to byte code (e.g. P-code back in the Pascal days) was considered a lame kludge because the language developers couldn't be bothered to write a real compiler. I believe

Re: [SC-L] Could I use Java or c#? [was: Re: re-writing college books]

2006-11-13 Thread Crispin Cowan
. True, but that doesn't mean runtime portability isn't a good thing to aim for. It means that compromising performance to obtain runtime portability that does not actually exist is a poor bargain. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin

Re: [SC-L] Could I use Java or c#? [was: Re: re-writing college books]

2006-11-14 Thread Crispin Cowan
Robin Sheat wrote: On Tuesday 14 November 2006 13:28, Crispin Cowan wrote: It means that compromising performance It's not necessarily a given that runtime performance is compromised. There are situations where Java is faster than C (I've tested this on trivial things). Here

Re: [SC-L] Compilers

2006-12-26 Thread Crispin Cowan
was widely popular. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Hacking is exploiting the gap between intent and implementation ___ Secure Coding

[SC-L] NDSS: Network and Distributed Systems Security

2007-02-13 Thread Crispin Cowan
Surface Analysis of RTM Windows Vista * Panel Red Teaming and Hacking Games: How Much Do They Really Help?, moderated by Crispin Cowan, with panelists: o John Viega, Kenshoto/Defcon CtF organizer o Rodney Thayer, member of a winning Kenshoto/Defcon CtF team o

Re: [SC-L] Economics of Software Vulnerabilities

2007-03-12 Thread Crispin Cowan
features, just gets punished in the market place. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com Hacking is exploiting the gap between intent and implementation

Re: [SC-L] Economics of Software Vulnerabilities

2007-03-19 Thread Crispin Cowan
in Vista had instead been put into features and ship-date, would it do better in the marketplace? Sure, that's heretical :) but it just might be true :( Crispin, now believes that users are fundamentally what holds back security -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin

Re: [SC-L] Economics of Software Vulnerabilities

2007-03-19 Thread Crispin Cowan
Ed Reed wrote: Crispin Cowan wrote: Crispin, now believes that users are fundamentally what holds back security I was once berated on stage by Jamie Lewis for sounding like I was placing the blame for poor security on customers themselves. Fight back harder. Jamie is wrong

Re: [SC-L] Harvard vs. von Neumann

2007-06-12 Thread Crispin Cowan
languages, say), then we would end up solving roughly 50% of the software security problem. The 50% being rather squishy, but yes this is true. Its only vaguely what I was talking about, really, but it is true. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin

Re: [SC-L] Harvard vs. von Neumann

2007-06-12 Thread Crispin Cowan
Steven M. Christey wrote: On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, Crispin Cowan wrote: Kind of. I'm saying that specification and implementation are relative to each other: at one level, a spec can say put an iterative loop here and implementation of a bunch of x86 instructions. I agree

Re: [SC-L] Insider threats and software

2007-08-28 Thread Crispin Cowan
/DLAbsToc.jsp?resourcePath=/dl/proceedings/toc=comp/proceedings/sp/2007/2848/00/2848toc.xmlDOI=10.1109/SP.2007.3 Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/ Director of Software Engineering http://novell.com AppArmor Chat: irc.oftc.net/#apparmor

Re: [SC-L] OWASP Publicity

2007-11-15 Thread Crispin Cowan
that approximate quality are always cheaper to achieve than actual quality. This is a very, very hard problem, and sad to say, but pitching articles articles on principles to executives won't solve it. Crispin -- Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://crispincowan.com/~crispin CEO, Mercenary