Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:22:41 +0100
From: Christian Sciberras <uuf6429@...il.com>
To: Dan Kaminsky <dan@...para.com>
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: Two MSIE 6.0/7.0 NULL pointer crashes

People are unreasonable, first they complain about lack of quick
patches/fixes.
Next they complain about fixes crashing their system.

Regards,
Chris.






On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Dan Kaminsky <dan@...para.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 1:53 AM, Michal Zalewski <lcamtuf@...edump.cx>
> wrote:
> >> Testing takes time.  That's why both Microsoft and Mozilla test.
> >
> > Testing almost never legitimately takes months or years, unless the
> > process is severely broken; contrary to the popular claims,
> > personally, I have serious doubts that QA is a major bottleneck when
> > it comes to security response - certainly not as often as portrayed.
>
> There are a lot of factors that go into how long it takes to run QA.
> Here's a few (I'll leave out the joys of multivendor for now):
>
> 1) How widespread is the deployment?  A little while ago, Google had
> an XSS on Google Maps.  An hour later, they didn't.  About a decade
> ago, AOL Instant Messenger had a remote code execution vulnerability.
> Eight hours later, they didn't.  Say what you will about
> centralization, but it *really* makes it easier and safer to deploy a
> fix, because the environment is totally known, and you have only one
> environment.  There are a couple dimensions at play here:
>
> a) How many versions do you need to patch?
> b) How many different deployment classes are there?  If your
> developers are making a bunch of enterprise assumptions (there's a
> domain, there's group policy, there's an IT guy, etc) and the fix is
> going to Grandma, let me tell you, something's not going to work
> c) What's at stake?  Your D-Link router has very different deployment
> characteristics than your Juniper router.
>
> 2) How complicated is the fix?  Throwing in a one-liner to make sure
> an integer doesn't overflow is indeed relatively straightforward.  But
> imagine an oldschool application drenched in strcpy, where you've lost
> context of the length of that buffer five functions ago.  Or imagine
> the modern browser bug, where you're going up against an attacker who
> *by design* has a Turing complete capability to manipulate your object
> tree, complete with control over time.  Or, worst of all, take a
> design flaw like Marsh Ray's TLS renegotiation bug.  People are still
> fiddling around with figuring out how to fix that bug right, months
> later.  Complexity introduces three issues:
>
> a) You have to fix the entire flaw, and related flaws.  We've all seen
> companies who deploy fixes like "if this argument contains alert(1),
> abort".  Yeah, that's not enough.
> b) You have to not introduce new flaws with your fix -- complexity
> doesn't stop increasing vulnerability just because you're doing a
> security fix.
> c) The system needs to work entirely the same after.  That means you
> don't get to significantly degrade performance, usability,
> reliability, or especially compatibility.  Particularly with design
> bugs, other systems grow to depend on their presence.  No software
> lives in a vacuum, so you have to actually _find_ these other pieces
> of code, and make sure things still work.
>
> 3) How many people do you actually expect to deploy your patch?
> There's this entire continuum between "only the other developers on
> SVN", through "the people who call to complain", to "everybody who
> clicks 'I accept the risk of patching'", to "my entire customer base
> with zero user interaction whatsoever".  A patch with problems 0.005%
> of the time is acceptable if 1000 people are deploying, but not if
> 1,000,000 people are deploying.  Note that security research is very
> strongly correlated with deployment numbers, to the point that
> vulnerability count is much more correlated with popularity than code
> quality.  So you have this interesting situation where the more your
> fix is pushed, the more scrutiny there will be upon it.
>
> Now, you can consider these all excuses.  Believe me, QA people have
> no shortage of guys who look down on them and their problems.  But
> certainly different bugs have different characteristics, and assuming
> that all things can be fixed in the same time window with the same
> output quality is just factually untrue.  You might as well be
> claiming the next version of HTML5 will include an <antigravity> tag
> that will make your laptop float in the air and spin around.
>
> There is a balancing act.  Years is, of course, ridiculous.  In many
> situations, so too are a couple of weeks.  If the goal is to achieve
> the best quality patches, then you want the issue _prioritized
> heavily_, but not _on public fire_.  The latter encourages people to
> skip testing, and you know of course what happens when you skip
> testing?
>
> You end up with Gigabit Ethernet drivers that can't actually handle
> all frame lengths.  (Epic Intel find from Fabian Yamaguchi.  Wow.)
>
> Responsible disclosure has its risks.  You really can be jerked around
> by a company, *especially* one that hasn't experienced the weirdness
> of an external security disclosure before.  But engineering realities
> don't go away just because the suits finally got out of the way.
> Testing matters.
>
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