full-disclosure - Re: [Dailydave] Linux's unofficial security-through-coverup policy

Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:57:57 -0400
From: Dave Aitel <dave@...unityinc.com>
To: Brad Spengler <spender@...ecurity.net>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk, Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu,
	dailydave@...ts.immunitysec.com
Subject: Re: [Dailydave] Linux's
 unofficial	security-through-coverup policy

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I think what Brad and the Pax Team are saying here is that:
1. We hold Linux to a higher standard than a company - we expect the 
term "open source" to apply to more than just the source code.
2. For that reason, the community finds it discomforting when kernel 
maintainers know that a patch has a serious security ramification and 
essentially lie about it by neglecting to put that into the patch 
comments. That's the sort of behavior we expect from a large commercial 
entity.
3. This only hurts end users, because the hackers already know about it.

If the kernel maintainers had read the Microsoft team's SDL book, they'd 
probably be more up to speed on these things. :>

- -dave

Brad Spengler wrote:
| Valdis,
|
| Please try to stay consistent with your own arguments.  If you defeat
| them yourself barely into your third paragraph, you don't give me much
| to do!
|
| To summarize:
|
|> have any untrusted local users - for instance, my laptop.  The only users
|> on it are me, myself, and I<, and the guy that owned my webserver, or
| the guy that owned my email client, or the guy that owned my audio
| player, or the guy that owned my video player, or the guy that owned my
| web browser, or the guy that owned my FTP client, or the guy that owned
| my PDF reader, or the guy that owned my office application>
|
| You're a very trusting individual!
|
| This is exactly why telling someone to update if they have any
| "untrusted local users" just doesn't make any sense since it misleads a
| majority of users.  A better replacement would be "if your machine is
| network-connected."  How do you own a website if you can't break into it
| directly?  Find out what other websites are hosted on the same machine,
| break into one of them, then locally escalate privileges, giving you
| access to all the websites hosted on the machine.  If you don't think
| this happens, you've got your head in the sand and honestly should just
| give up having anything to do with security.
|
| -Brad
|
| -------------------------
|
| _______________________________________________
| Dailydave mailing list
| Dailydave@...ts.immunitysec.com
| http://lists.immunitysec.com/mailman/listinfo/dailydave

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