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Thread: Reasons why softwares are insecure...

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    Exclamation Reasons why softwares are insecure...

    Castles Built on Sand: Why Software is Insecure
    by Josh Ryder
    last updated January 30, 2002



    We have all heard reports of vulnerabilities being discovered in various software. But what actually makes software more or less secure than the rest of its competitors? Theoretically, all software starts in the same place - with the very first sketch on somebody's napkin over dinner. It grows from there; the environment in which it is developed, who controls the project and most importantly who works on the project all contribute to the outcome. Unfortunately, the outcome is not always what the developers had in mind. Many software programs are plagued by programming flaws that may lead to security vulnerabilities. This article will offer a brief overview of some of the factors that may contribute to insecure software.

    What are the Costs of Insecure Software?

    Before entering a discussion of the reasons behind insecure software, it may be useful to put the discussion into the context of the practical consequences: in other words, what are the real-world costs of insecure software. Ostensibly, organizations invest considerable money in software because it will make their operations run more smoothly and effectively. However, the flaws that are inherent in many programs may negate many of the benefits they offer. The following are several real-world costs associated with having insecure software installed on your systems.

    Maintenance

    If an organization has a network administrator worth his salt, he's probably spending a reasonable amount of his time installing security patches on the company’s machines. Finding, researching, and deploying these so-called "updates" is a time-consuming, often disheartening task. This is, of course, to say nothing of the overtime that admins are forced to put in when new malware is released that exploits a software vulnerability (a la CodeRed and Outlook). Trying to stay on top of the latest problems can be a full -time job in and of itself. Add to this the actual responsibility of deploying all of these changes and it is easy to see how an IT department's request for more personnel may be justified after all.

    Lost Productivity

    When a piece of software is compromised at work, everyone suffers. In the best case just one machine is affected - nothing more important than the junior programmer's system. Of course, this means that whatever is dependant upon this junior programmer cannot be accomplished immediately and must be delayed until such time as they are capable of completing their task. In the worst case, a network-wide outage/infection occurs that can stop an entire office in its tracks. When Nimda was released, whole companies were forced to sit back in collective horror as their networks ground to a halt as the infection spread. Those administrators fortunate enough to discover the problem before their systems were infected often took heavy-handed measures ranging from disabling the vulnerable program on all internal systems to shutting off e-mail access to the entire company until the patches could be distributed.

    Information Loss/Dissemination

    Let's suppose for a minute that you are corresponding with some potential clients over the cost of building an addition to their office. Now let's also suppose that somewhere on your hard drive you have a document that contains your internal cost estimate for the project -- a cost that is much lower than that which you quoted to the potential client. What would happen if that client somehow came by that file? I suspect, at the very least they would be displeased, and at worst they would never use your company's services again and would make sure that knowledge of your business practices were widely disseminated.

    Lost business through communication.

    If you can't communicate, you can't work. If you are an architectural firm that needs to send out drawings to a client on the other side of the globe, but your network is unusable because of this a new worm, you are out of luck. Likewise, if all of your computers mail everyone in each of their address books, far too much communication is occurring. And if all of those e- mails just happen to have your company's payroll information attached…

    Bandwidth

    Oh sweet, precious bandwidth. For those of us not lucky enough to have access to an unmetered pipe, bandwidth can be a real concern. For home users, a monthly bandwidth cap is often set on their connections…anywhere from one to 5 gigabytes seems to be the norm. These quotas can be reached with alarming speed if someone manages to exploit a hole in your computer's security and install an ftp server. Or, perhaps a more relevant example would (again) be CodeRed and Nimda. If you believe the statistics, CodeRed globally cost in excess of 2.6 billion dollars and Nimda another $590 million. And that is no drop in the bucket.

    Why is software so insecure?

    Internet Explorer is one of many examples of insecure software. Some call Internet Explorer the browser that made the Internet accessible to the masses. Others call it an accident waiting to happen (again and again). Let's think about where IE grew up. Started as a skunk works project alongside Windows 95, Internet Explorer was first released in 1995 as part of the Internet Jumpstart Kit found in Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95. While it was well integrated with the new operating system, few users adopted it, as much more mature and feature rich applications already existed. With the release of IE 2.0 in 1996 it was obvious that MS was not abandoning this software. Cross platform support was added for Macintosh users, and several emerging technologies such as cookies, VRML and RealAudio were now supported. Later that year IE 3.0 was released, and the browser wars truly began. Finally MS had released a product that was capable of competing with Netscape on even ground. Internet Explorer was no longer merely a Web browser, it was the launch point for most of the users Internet needs. Users could read your e-mail, check newsgroups, view videos, listen to music, and (believe it or not) browse the Web too.

    Within nine days of its release the very first exploit for IE 3.0 was discovered and released to the public. The rest, as they say, is history.

    So how could a company with the resources of Microsoft develop and release a product that is so obviously flawed? The Microsoft campus contains some of the most brilliant designers and programmers the world has to offer. Many of the development practices present at MS are used throughout the industry (which many would say contributes to the problem, but that is a different topic altogether). Why, then, can't even the imposing minds at Microsoft seem to be capable of writing software that can be trusted?

    First of all, we should note that there is more than one way for software to be insecure. Methods for exploiting and circumventing security in programs are as varied as the applications they are attacking. Perhaps the fundamental problem is that software is not necessarily designed and constructed with security in mind. Until recently, security has been something of an afterthought in the computer industry, both amongst vendors and among customers/users. However, as the previous section pointed out, it is becoming more obvious that security is becoming a very costly concern. Apart from the obvious problem that security has not been a fundamental part of the development process, there are other fundamental problems with software that add to insecurity. The following section discusses some of these problems.

    Complexity and Integration of Programs

    Today when a program is written, it cannot be assumed that only it and the operating system will be running at any given time. The terms integration and interconnectivity have been chanted like a mantra for several years now. For those old enough to recall, applications used to be relatively single purpose. WordPerfect 5.1, arguably one of the best word processors in existence, was only a word processor. It didn't have any notion of programs other than itself and the operating system. It performed a specific task, and performed it well. However, when Microsoft released their Office suite the world was forever changed. Now not only could you create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations using one application suite, you could actually use these tools together. For example, if you had a spreadsheet in Excel that you wanted to include in your report, all you had to do was copy and paste it into your report document.

    As time moves on, more and more components have been either integrated with one another, or are at least able to talk amongst themselves. Soon certain options and functions were only available if other, sometimes unrelated services were enabled. If you wanted to share files across a network, you had to enable the Microsoft file-sharing protocol. Along with this protocol, usually unbeknownst to the user, several other features such as printer sharing and remote registry management were also enabled. To put it another way, the "package deal" was delivering more than the user expected and possibly wanted. This makes the job of securing the system even more difficult as the user may not have an accurate picture of what is and is not setup on the computer.

    The code required to construct and run such sophisticated multi-application software is not only highly complex, it is also huge. The code for a single program, like Microsoft Word, consists of millions of lines of code. It is almost beyond the scope of human possibility to ask the software developers to perform the comprehensive quality assessment necessary to ensure optimal security. Even if it were possible, it would be very easy to overlook one or two bugs; after all, even if considerable resources are made available for quality assessment, there is still a finite time in which to conduct it. Hackers, on the other hand, have endless hours to prod and probe for a single vulnerability to exploit.

    Need to rush software out without adequate testing

    Part of the problem may be the “necessity” to role out commercial software by deadlines imposed by finance and marketing needs. Ask any software developer what it's like to code during a crunch and you'll probably get an earful of complaints. "They want us to do too much in too little time" or "I hope no one ever looks at this code again!” and “It's terrible, but it works" are oft repeated phrases. The Almighty "hack" -- a so-called elegant solution to a programming problem -- or more usually a short-sighted but "clever" way of covering up flaws in the system becomes the required method of development. Suddenly design and coding style are thrown out the window in favor of down and dirty "do what works, we'll fix it later" coding. Initially some of the more idealistic (and typically youthful) coders feel that this sort of programming is wrong; this feeling usually passes quickly under the tutelage of the more experienced team members.

    Under these time pressures, errors that may normally be obvious and easy to catch slip through because inadequate attention is given to reviewing and testing the code. This is not to say that flaws are not introduced into the system at earlier stages in the development cycle, but I suspect that most of the big errors are made during this time of accelerated development. Poor program or feature specifications are compounded by designers who can only assume that the specification is complete, and then further by programmers who each have their own unique idea of what the design is really calling for.

    With added features comes the added responsibility of ensuring that each of those features works both by itself and with the other components of the system. If you have a subsystem of 15 components, each of which relies on the other at some point, adding another component causes you to not only test the newest piece, but all of the other connected pieces. This can be a very expensive and time consuming process; it is a process that is often cut short, or is poorly done in the interests of shipping on time or reducing costs.

    Closed source patches (hint hint.. Bill Gates)

    An argument that you hear all the time from the Open Source community is: How can we trust your software if we cannot see what the code is doing? Closed source software is often patched by closed source patches -- essentially you are adding even more unknowns to the security puzzle every time you patch something. When Windows 2000 Service Pack 2 was released, one of the biggest concerns was that suddenly MS Exchange 2000 Server would not longer run. This was not documented, and it was a flaw discovered time and time again by hapless users who, perhaps naively, assumed that the bug fixes in Service Pack 2 would not adversely affect the way that other applications on their systems ran. In fact, even after taking a look at the full list of documented changes found in SP2, one would not be able to guess or deduce that any problems would occur with MS Exchange 2000.

    Poor Training

    Many software developers do not understand the risks that they are exposing their users to by creating poorly written code. While many explanations are possible, at the root of the problem we can usually find that poor training is the culprit. Either as students the young software developers were not adequately inundated with good coding styles and practices or they simply chose to ignore what advice was given to them. For those fledgling software developers who actually attended some post-secondary education in a relevant field, many of the assignments and problems that they were asked to solve were one-shot standalone entities, meaning that once a problem was solved by whatever code they had written, they would “throw away” their work and never look at it again. Why spend extra effort on making your code clean and safe when the quick and dirty solution still got you full marks?

    The write – debug - rewrite cycle is common practice among students and junior coders; that is to say that rather than spending time on design, they will code as much as they can, debug the software when it doesn’t work, and continue rewriting and debugging until such time as the code does what they want it to. Once the goal has been accomplished, it is left alone and the next problem is attacked. Audits for proper memory management, coding style, or compatibility with other code are not adequately conducted. If this trend is not stopped early on, it will grow into a much larger problem until it becomes standard operating practice.

    Conclusion

    Underlying all the causes of insecure software is a simple philosophical flaw: software is not designed with security in mind. However, there may be a light at the end of the tunnel. Recently, Bill Gates issued a company-wide memo to all Microsoft employees dictating that from this moment forward, security will be a programming priority. In the memo, entitled “Trustworthy Computing”, Gates states: “Trustworthy Computing is the highest priority for all the work we are doing. We must lead the industry to a whole new level of Trustworthiness [sic] in computing...Eventually, our software should be so fundamentally secure that customers never even worry about it...So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security" (Complete Text of the Bill Gates "Trustworthy Computing" Memo). Whether or not this resolution will be realized is impossible to tell. However, the fact that the memo was issued indicates the growing awareness that software developers must place a much higher priority on secure coding. Whether or not they do so remains to be seen. Until they do, organizations that base their operations on bug-weakened software will continue to be castles built on sand.



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    Thumbs up Nice

    Old Bill himself needs to read this one. Nice post very informative. This is what a post is all about. Info, info, info. We ca'nt count on MS giving it to us straight or in a timely fashion. Thanks for the good post. Keep it up.................Yeah....................!
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    most excelent post s0nIc
    zion1459
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    \"Software is like sex: it\'s better when it\'s free.\" -Linus Torvalds

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    A few more resons why software is insecure!

    1. You might have 1000 of the best programmers at M$, but when a product is released you will have hundreds of thousands of ppl trying to find flaws with it.

    2. The deadline. We live in a money driven world and a product has to be coded debugged packaged and released within a certain timetable, perhaps if there was less emphasis on releasing a product so the money starts rolling in, and more time given to the coders to get it right in the first place - to check intergration etc, then this would without doubt lead to higher quality software with less flaws

    Nice informative post

  5. #5
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    Excellent post!


    Well it's just like this stuff has happened at my work. It's been reported at my work that contract programmers or consultants sometimes insert logic bombs as insurance that they'll be paid for their work. A programmer spends three months building your invoicing system and trying it to your inventory database. You get angry because the programmer promised to have the work done in two months. You figure the delay has cost you $5,000, so you deduct that from the programmers final paycheck. The programmer takes the check but gives you a strange, dead-eye look.

    Things go well for a couple of weeks, and nobody notices the phone call to the company server at 3:00am on Wednesday. Instructions are sent into the server over the phone, and the logic bomb is activated. The next day, your entire inventory and invoicing database is history -entirely wiped clean. Perhaps even worse, thousands of e-mails have been sent to your customer list, informing each of them in highly obscene language that they are the worst, most@@@##$#@ annoying customers this company has ever had the bad luck to deal with. You really should have paid that programmer
    Many software programs are plagued by programming flaws that may lead to security vulnerabilities. This article will offer a brief overview of some of the factors that may contribute to insecure software.

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