Are they offering help or ratting us out to the hackers?

[Daniel ~]

Are they offering help or ratting us out to the hackers?
Written by Daniel
Thursday, 04 January 2007
Rift Widens Over Bug Disclosure
DarkReading

JANUARY 3, 2007 | There's a growing rift among the research community over whether the Month-of-Bugs initiatives are helping security or hurting it. (See Buggin' Out? and Apple Bug Bites OS X, Windows.)

There's even now a little pushback from one researcher to the current Month of Apple Bugs (MOAB): Landon Fuller, a former engineer for Apple and currently with Three Rings, an online gaming developer, is answering each MOAB bug with a fix of his own...

Front Page

[Gizmo]

Speaking as a software developer myself, it seems to me like there should be some balance here. If there is a bug in my software that results in a security vulnerability, I definitely want to know about it. However, I don't want to be blind-sided if I can avoid it.

48 hours notification from the discoverer so that I can get my act together should be sufficient, I would think. That way, there can be a joint announcement where the vulnerability is disclosed and I can tell my users, "Yes, I know about it and I'm looking into it; here's what I know so far...".

At that point, the researcher has done their part and it is all on me to keep my users notified about what is happening with regard to addressing the issue.

[Daniel ~]

No doubt some of them need a kick in the ass from time to time... but it seems to me that the researchers have to make a clear decision as to whose side they are on. You hurt my software developer and you hurt me.

[Favu]

I reckon that, if they got the devs involved with the MOAB, and told them right off about a vulnerability so that they could immediately start working on a fix then it makes sense. This way the problem would be solved before hackers can get around to widely using the exploit.

However, if the devs ignor the MOAB (which seems to be the case currently) then a bug is published, hackers work on an exploit and get that out before the hole is patched.

Just my $0.02

[Aedan]

There are several sides to this:

If an announcement of a vulnerability is made, there will be a number of people who will then focus on finding a way of exploiting that vulnerability, even if the details are not public. Thus, the act of announcing the vulnerability can hasten someone writing malicious code for it. (There's a metric called "time to exploit", which is the timespan between an announcement/patch and exploit code being seen. In the current climate, it's less than a week.)

Vendors do need time to respond before things become public. Firstly they have to be able to reproduce the bug, assuming that it is actually a bug (Not all reported vulnerabilities are actually vulnerabilities). Once that it has been verified as a bug, then fixing can take place. However, in complex situations it may take a significant amount of time to correct the bug and then test that the fix does not break anything else.

Users do not want to be vulnerable. They would rather have a patch before any announcement of a vulnerability was made.

So, if someone announces a vulnerability a day for a month, and the vendor does not have sufficient resources to fix and test 31 new vulnerabilities in a month, what happens?

However, some vendors are not so good at responding in a timely fashion. I am aware of some vendors who have fixed a problem within a day, and I'm aware of some vendors who have taken a year and a half to fix a problem.

[Gizmo]

True enough, but think about this:

Are we really so naive as to believe that the security researcher is the first one to have discovered the bug? If it is a popular product, I would have to argue that the bug has probably already been discovered and exploited by the Bad Guys well before the security researcher found it, simply because there is a lot more money in it for the Bad Guys. In such a situation, if it is a serious bug it needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. While it might be embarassing and even painful for the software developer, people are trusting the developer's product. If that product is abusing their trust, the peope need to know that, and know what they can do about it, as quickly as possible. Suggesting that we are better off to keep the vulnerability secret until it can be addressed is rather like suggesting that getting stepped on by an invisible elephant is preferable to getting stepped on by one I can see.

For less popular products, then it may be true that the researcher is the first one to discover it, but if that is the case, the risk of damage from exposure is going to also be significantly smaller.

Sorry, but I really don't buy the whole "We are better off not to know about it until it can be fixed" argument. That whole line of reasoning is how we end up with products like Windows.

[Daniel ~]

Hey! What's wrong with Windows!? LOL LOL LOL LOL