Microsoft Admits to Hiding Flaw Details 147
Spongeform writes "eWeek has an interview with a Microsoft security official admitting to hiding details on software vulnerabilities that are discovered internally. The reason? Microsoft believes that full disclosure of every security-related product change only serves to aid attackers. However, companies using host-based IPS that rely on flaw information to build signatures are basically left at risk because of Microsoft's silent fixes."
So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerabili (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, here's another reason why that report was flawed - it turns out that Microsoft are fixing multiple vulns in one advisory - from the article:Of course, Microsoft is going to argue that they fix vulns silently to prevent the 'bad guys' from using the patch info to create attacks, but this is refuted by the same researcher:
Obfuscandalous! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's time they should change their "Who would ever think to put those bytes there anyways?" mantra.
The risks of using "someone else's" software (Score:2, Insightful)
This isn't exactly limited to Microsoft.
Re:So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerab (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not really sure how the statement you posted really refutes it. He's right under the assumption that the attackers are aware of that particular flaw existing. But if Microsoft (or a good samartian) finds it first, then why wouldn't staying mum mean less risk of attack? We can metaphor joust about it, but I wouldn't say the argument is totally hot air.
Don't confuse this post as support of MS's practices here. I don't agree with it. If I know an exploit is out there, even though I don't have the skills to build my own patch, I can at least take other steps to minimize or even prevent damage from happening. I just don't entirely blame Microsoft for advertising to the world the exact details of how to be a total butthead on the internet.
Re:Obfuscandalous! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not defending their practice(this is
Customers? (Score:4, Insightful)
But, if they are your customers, they can get the patches no problem right? So really this policy only helps out the pirates. Right?
Re:This article is flamebait [or are you a troll?] (Score:5, Insightful)
If you had read the article rather than rushing to get first post, you would know that they're talking about releasing information about flaws after the patch is released.
If you still don't understand why they should release information, consider the following from the article:
Re:Every MS Patch is Utmost Severe? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it possible to design an easy to use, accessible, and reliable application that has no security holes?
I think not, but if you could, you may become richer than Gates himself.
The reason you wouldn't become richer than Gates if you did this is that it would be incredibly expensive to develop such a system. You would also have a long time-to-market. The result would be a very reliable operating system that is late to market and incredibly expensive. Your would-be customers would then choose your cheaper competitors that have more modern features that they have come to expect. These features would be ones that were invented during the huge period of time that your operating system is going through its rigorous design, implementation, and verification process.
Even coming up with a workable definition of a "flawless operating system" and stating exactly what criteria is used to certify the product as "easy to use, accessible, and reliable" would takes a lot of time and money.
Re:So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerab (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps I should be clearer. My quote included The attackers are already reverse-engineering the patches.
All the attacker needs is the patch - they can look at that to see whats changed and where & deduce from that where to start looking for attack vectors. It's not particularly a big help for them to hear "Function blah in program blah has changed"
System Administrators on the other hand do not have time to reverse engineer the patch, but can read the summary and say "we don't use function blah in program blah, lets apply the patch as it won't affect our operations" or "Holy shit, we have program blah exposed to a hostile network, lets quickly test our stuff & rush the patch out"
So what Microsoft is actively hampering administrators and not hindering attackers.
Re:scandal! (Score:3, Insightful)
If you had read the article rather than rushing to point out slashdot's supposed hypocrisy, you would know that they're talking about releasing information about flaws after the patch is released.
Nothing to with responsible disclosure at all.
Microsoft charging money for security tools? (Score:3, Insightful)
With that in mind - why would they tell other, competing, anti-virus companies what flaws to protect against?
Come to think of it - why bother fixing flaws at all - just defend against them in the MS Anti-virus gadget instead and encourage people to pay the anti-virus tax. It might even be tempting to add the occasional flaw just to make that work better.
I don't know whether any of these things will actually happen - but you simply can't trust the motives of a company that behaves the way MS consistently does.
Do you even know what RFPolicy means? (Score:4, Insightful)
If, at any point, the vendor suddenly decides to play not-nice, the RFPolicy is quite clear -- go ahead and post it to bugtraq or whatever you like. It also states that the vendor should acknowledge the original disclosure. That is, if I found a vulnerability in slashcode, but delayed publication because I was trying to get it fixed in good faith, the Slashcode developers would acknowledge my efforts in their advisory -- even if someone else comes along and posts an advisory after I report it to the team, but before the team has posted an announcement.
Nowhere in the RFPolicy v2.0 [wiretrip.net] does it say anything along the lines of, "Hey, you should silently slip-stream fixes without ever notifying anyone ever " -- which is what this article is about Microsoft doing.
The shit that gets modded up. I swear, we need a "-1 WRONG" tag we can apply to posts. Some kind of clue stick for the mods that don't bother to look up RFPolicy would also be good.
Truly not the right approach (Score:1, Insightful)
This is VERY important for the customer, which Microsoft has shown repeatedly not to give a rat's ass about. So, no surprise here. The best defense for the customer is to just assume MS is evil, and act accordingly.
Re:Microsoft charging money for security tools? (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of "anti-malware" tools is *not* to protect against software flaws, it's to protect against user mistakes. A rather large proportion of people on Slashdot seem to have a great deal of difficult understanding this.
No amount of OS "security" can stop the end user from shooting themselves in the foot. The purpose of "anti-malware" software is to give them a chance to dodge the bullet.
The inherent problem: "Doesn't apply to me" (Score:3, Insightful)
This patch might have fixed a key security hole. But if you don't know it, how should you decide whether you should apply it? I don't buy the story that MS knows what's good for me. If anyone knows, I do. And I certainly won't hand this decision over to someone else.
Re:So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerab (Score:5, Insightful)
If you apply a Microsoft patch for something that is never likely to affect you, you're taking a bigger risk by applying the patch!
Most people here should be aware that applying a Microsoft patch is likely to screw something up -- something Microsoft has become renowned for.
Re:So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerab (Score:5, Insightful)
The news is that microsoft are admitting it. The security community have 'stronly suspected' this for years.
B) Do you realize even *nix vendors do this, including Linux distributions?
Could you please provide an example of this (for linux vendors)?
Of course - even if you do find an example (I doubt it), it doesn't change the fact that its just the distribution - the upstream developers will have released patch information, etc. There is no parallel for this sort of openess in the windows world.
C) Do you also realize that Apple patches more items in a single Patch on average compared to MS by a factor of 10 or more?
I do realise Apple patches multiple vulns in one go. Fortunately however, anything remotely important that is distributed by Apple is written by third parties with more responsible discolure policies (ie openbsd, the apache foundation).
You make a good point about granularity of "bug counting" lists. There's a lot of room for improvement.
FUD! (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed.
What makes it worse is that Microsoft knows full well that this data is false, and still uses this in its FUD attacks against Linux/Open Source.
Even if Microsoft persuades people that it has a good reason for not disclosing vulnerabilities, Microsoft has no good reason to use false statistics, created by its hiding of information, in order to help persuade people that its software is more secure.
Re:So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerab (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be an insightful comment... in fantasy land. Most Windows system administrators are not programmers, and of those that are fewer still are technically skilled enough to reverse engineer a binary patch.
Exactly - so how are they meant to know what it does? On the other hand, at least some of the bad guys can and will reverse-engineer to the patches. (Some security researchers are able to too, hence why this came out, but they probably don't have the time to do it for every single patch.)
Microsoft has a valid point when they say that publishing vulnerabilities mainly helps out 'bad guys' because the majority of their 'good guy' users don't have the skills to counterattack. It's not like the open-source world, where there's a large community of skilled programmers ready and willing to publish fixes... and, more importantly, outnumber skill-wise any malicious programmers.
We're talking about vulnerabilities for which Microsoft has already released a patch - all the sysadmins need to know is that it exists and they need to apply it. The fact that Microsoft is providing incomplete information about what its patches fix means that some systems might not get patched because the administrators think it doesn't apply to them and don't want to risk breaking stuff by applying it.
Re:Obfuscandalous! (Score:3, Insightful)
The point is that relying on security through obscurity alone is a bad strategy. The ideal is to be able to publish the entire architecture and the system would still be safe. No system in existence meets the ideal.
Full disclosure is bunk, there are large numbers of evil hackers on BUGTRAQ. Exploit code is often published there for the sole purpose of covering the tracks of an attacker.
Re:So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerab (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, I *am* an experienced developer. When I do initial probes on "black box" binaries, I actually prefer to NOT have source available (as I am interested in what it is doing, not the comments or source that the original programmer put down indicating what it was intended to do).
Administrators? Generally can't do it. If I WERE a "black-hat", I would be all over the actual patches. I don't care about the paper reports.
The paper reports are critical to the administrators. They are not looking for a crack -- they have to trust that the changes have been checked and the work done carefully to avoid additional problems. But the only way the administrator has to determine if a patch should be applied, and what the risk is, is by full vendor disclosure. The "black-hats" don't really care that much. Of course, full disclosure can be a public relations nightmare.
The advantage that "open source" has here is that the laundry is already out in the open. Reputation can be (perhaps) slightly reduced by exploits, but it (again generally) doesn't destroy the product.
As an example, many people (including me) use sendmail and bind.
However, a closed source provider typically stakes a marketing created reputation. Exploits can really hurt. Take Windows 9x as an example. About the only thing Microsoft can do is state that future Windows are more secure. (even though Windows 98 as a core is reasonably hardened, as long as trojans are not executed, which it is VERY vulnerable to).
Oh, and "good guys" don't "counterattack". Just because someone attacks sshd on my box doesn't mean I turn around and attack. Generally, I ignore it. A "counterattack" stops at reporting the attempts to an upstream provider if they are very persistent (or successful).
Re:So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerab (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This article is flamebait [or are you a troll?] (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So that's why Microsoft has such a low vulnerab (Score:3, Insightful)
No.
You're taking a risk running a "non standard" environment too.
I am?
Besides, you should always patch a few systems that seem common to your environment before rolling out patches in a large corporate environment anyway.
Indeed. You should test the patches first; however, if there is a vulnerability that you really must patch, and it's going to knock out something you're dependent on, either way you lose.