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

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Date: Sun Mar 26 03:53:50 2006
From: william at lefkovics.net (William Lefkovics)
Subject: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap
	PatchTuesday for Critical flaws

Indeed.  You don't want to release a bad patch (who does?) and you also want
to work on critical issues in an ASAP manner, not tied to any schedule like
7 to 14 days.

"The worst scenario for us is that we release an update which has quality
problems. We believe the downstream problems of releasing patches too
quickly are even more serious than not putting in the quality that they
deserve." - Ben English, Security Leader, Microsoft Australia

Furthermore, Microsoft has an exception policy in place for addressing
vulnerabilities with greater customer risk.

"Microsoft will make an exception to the above release schedule if we
determine that customers are at immediate risk from viruses, worms, attacks
or other malicious activities. In such a situation Microsoft may release
security patches as soon as possible to help protect customers."
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/revsbwp.mspx

-----Original Message-----
From: full-disclosure-bounces@...ts.grok.org.uk
[mailto:full-disclosure-bounces@...ts.grok.org.uk] On Behalf Of
Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2006 6:23 PM
To: n3td3v
Cc: full-disclosure@...ts.grok.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap
PatchTuesday 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.