full-disclosure - Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap Patch Tuesday for Critical flaws

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Message-ID: <200603260223.k2Q2N8sX018485@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
Date: Sun Mar 26 03:23:18 2006
From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu)
Subject: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap Patch
	Tuesday for Critical flaws 

On Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:12:23 GMT, n3td3v said:

> You Microsoft must officially agree that all flaws marked as "Critical" must
> have a patch within 7 to 14 days of public disclosure.

OK... Nice try.

Too bad you didn't add a requirement that the patch actually be *correct*.

Also, you're totally overlooking the fact that *sometimes*, fixing a problem
requires some major re-architecting - for instance, if an API has to be changed,
then *every* caller has to be updated, and quite possibly re-designed, and
the changes have an annoying tendency to ripple outward (if subroutine A
has a 7th parameter added, then everybody who calls A has to be updated.  And
it's likely that you'll find routines B, C, and D that have no *idea* what the
correct value of the parameter should be, because they don't have access to the
data - so now callers of B, C, and D have to pass another parameter that gets
passed to A).

Any company that will commit to a "must" on this one is nuts.  It's a good
target, but making it mandatory is just asking companies to ship a half-baked
patch that seems to fix the PoC rather than the underlying design flaw.

And going back and reviewing the patch history on IE is instructive - more than
once, Microsoft has released a patch for a known Javascript flaw, only to find
out within a week that a very slight change would make the exploit work again.

Is that *really* what you want?  It's certainly not what *I* want.  Waiting
another 3-4 days past your arbitrary 14-day limit for a *good* patch is certainly
preferable for those of us who actually have to deal with this stuff for a living,
rather than hide out on a Yahoo group.

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