Slashdot Mirror
Sendmail Bug Tests US Dept Homeland Security
yanestra writes "CNET reports that the reported Sendmail bug has been a test for the US Department of Homeland Security which seems to have managed information flow in this case."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
While keeping news of the issue from leaking to those who might exploit the vulnerability.
Free flow of information > Security
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Interesting to read that the government is involved with this -- kind of makes you wonder what happened to CERT, which always used to coordinate public disclosure of and vendor response to bugs like this.
The fact that CERT always seemed to do a decent job makes this even more interesting. The biggest criticisms voiced about CERT were that they acted too slow and didn't provide enough detail information about problems (other than to acknowledge the general nature of it). How will the government do better in these areas?
My guess is that the answer to the latter question is 'not much', and that we'll start hearing the same complaints about the Dept. of Homeland Security soon...
This is actually quite encouraging. Having an organization that deals with the painful process of contacting each vendor and major user of a program with a newly discovered vulnerability is a major improvement. They also seem to have the law behind them (is this true?), so we finally have someone that can force people to fix security holes. I don't quite like the homeland-security big-brother model, but it worked nicely in this case and got the job done, something pretty hard in the Internet jungle.
Are they saying that this worked perfectly? If so, what about the next exploit? What if Joe Nobody finds a hole, and makes it public before the DHS gets with the makers of the software? What about the businesses in the private sector that fail to patch their systems? Wasn't the fix for SQL Slammer out for months? I'm sure this is a step in the right direction, but really, what happens next time?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Sendmail is a very flexible mail package...too flexible for most people.
It's power and configuration settings make it a good choice for admins who have taken the time to read on it. However, more often then not we find that there are a lot of lazy admins out there who just get it "up and running" and don't care to understand the security issues with the server. While I've used sendmail for years in the past, but now use postfix. There are a slew of other mail programs out there that can be configured without having to use m4 rules, understand sendmail's rewrite metods etc. I would suggest that if you must have a mail server up, but don't want to take the time to learn sendmail, PLEASE, use something else. I realize this is a little off-topic but it's not too much. It all boils down to securing the net. That takes more then a few bug fixes (and YES you must apply all of them) and a good admin to configure the server/services.
Speaking of the Dept. of Homeland Security, here's an link to an article with some suggestions to Tom Ridge on how to improve his department, so that it actually keeps the citizenry well-informed and aware of possible terrorist threats and how to handle them (as opposed to keeping them scared and in an information blackout).
Bush Lies Watch
We all got notified to patch our systems immediately.
Everyone is working togther to get all the systems running sendmail patched.
While this doesn't seem like a big deal in the corporate world, in the government world, all red tape has been removed and we can make changes to critical systems INSTANTLY.
FIX FIRST, meet later. It's an entirely different attitude, and it allows me to do my job more efficently. It works.
Wouldn't it be best to issue a statement like "sendmail has an exploitable vulnerability, we recommend that you switch to your standby alternate mail system until we release a fix"? There is no way that blackhats would figure out where to look from a statement like that, and those of us with really good security could switch to our exim-based solution if we really feared to be hacked. Basically, do we trust the homeland security dept to determine our security policy?
That being said, good to see a well coordinated patch release. I just wish the paranoids would get advance warning.
Stop the brainwash
Is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security also going to try and take care of software developed internationally?
For example, it seems that a lot of OpenSSH development is done in Canada and Germany. And the server is run out of Canada.
The OpenSSL team looks primarily international too (UK, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand). There server is managed by Brits and Swedes.
Actually... I think you'll find that a lot of crypto software is based outside the US. Probably due to constraints placed on crypto development in the last decade.
Windows always has been and always will be a security risk.
Superior alternatives exist... so why is anyone still using Windows???
--
Sure Joe runs sendmail, and sendmail is insecure. But does Joe's server get attacked frequently? Chances are it probably doesn't. If it does, Joe may be looking into alternatives, or Joe may have found one already.
Joe doesn't have the time to fix every potential threat. Joe probably installs patches and updates as frequently as possible, maybe even on a schedule. Joe does his best to keep sendmail from being a problem, and at the same time Joe tries not to waste time.
If Joe were working for a huge company that depended heavily on it's e-mail, Joe would probably spend more time on sendmail. But odds are Joe doesn't, and Joe is doing the best he can.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I liked the handling of ssh's problems last year much better. "Heads up, there's a problem in these versions. We'll let you know exactly what after we get the patch out." It's not enough to give a hacker a reasonable foot up, but it gets the service off the network should anyone already be quietly taking advantage of the weakness.
Quote:
"Working with the private sector, we alerted key owners of the vulnerable software and got them talking," said David Wray, spokesman for the IAIP Directorate. "We think this is a great example of how this should, and does, work."
The Department of Homeland Security got high marks from the security community for giving companies the necessary time to create the patch and for synchronizing its release.
"This is the model for what you do if you want to find a vulnerability," said Alan Paller, director of research for the SysAdmin, Audit, Network and Security (SANS) Institute
Once again, ISS have let the community down. Instead of informing the vendors, or CERT, or even just posting to Bugtraq, they informed the USG first. As a result .mil sites had the patch four days before anyone else (so far as we know) were even aware that there was an issue. [Although they claim that they checked their private "sensor" networks, somehow I doubt they have better coverage than eg DShield.org. ) This is unacceptable behaviour for an info-sec company that wants to be a responsible member of the community, and of course is just the latest in a list of behaviour that I at least consider unethical. I work for an ISS reseller outside the USA, and I will be exercising my influence internally to push for replacing the ISS prodcuts either with Free alternatives, or proprietary products from companies with a better grasp of their responsibilities. BTW we have several very big global clients.
It sounds cool to have the US govt leaning on vendors to write patches, but I have a feeling that if this becomes the norm, vendors will just push DHS for longer and longer lead times. The article indicates this particular bug was known since January. Two months is a pretty long time to wait for patches!
And this is just DHS's "first test" - I imagine after they build up a cozy relationship with the major security-problem vendors (i.e. Microsoft), they might not even disclose any known flaws until patches come out (i.e. months to "never").
Remember that government officials will probably listen a lot more attentively to "captains of industry" (i.e. MS) than "those unwashed hippy hackers" (i.e. the open-source community).
Does anybody else find it disturbing that "good security" is being equated with "keeping exploits quiet"?
It's precisely the threat of publicity that pressures vendors into patching their compromised software quickly. If that threat is relieved, by Official KeepYerDamnMouthShut Orders from a government body, those same vendors may start to think "Phew, now we can wait for the next upgrade".
This is Not a Good Thing.
I think it's interesting that the government is getting credit for working with the private sector in releasing information. Part of the the point of open sourced software is so that bugs can be found and patched quickly. The CERT email I got yesterday afternoon had MANY patch sources listed by vendor (RedHat, Apple, Sendmail etc) and was timely. I don't belive that the pat on the back goes to Uncle Sam in this situation, but rather the folks at Sendmail who worked to resolve this issue in a timely and organized fashion. They released the information to those who needed to know (including the DHS) and worked on a solution to get this stuff out to the public.
To quote Eric Raymond, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"
Kudos to Sendmail for getting this taken care of.
AF-Design, web development.
In the future, the Department of Homeland Security will be the U.S. agency that will manage any response to major cyberthreats.
I hope these guys have Microsoft's number on speed dial...
Run with Scissors!
The one thing I didn't like about this article was the idea that this kind of process should be followed by everyone. This is what I saw as the process:
Here's the flaw(s) in this process:
I guess the biggest thing that I don't like about this is that idea that this model will support the Closed Source software model because of the arguments of:
How exactly is this helping? Control the information flow? How is it then, that links to, and a discussion of, the flaw and possible exploits were publicly available six hours ago on this very website? I wouldn't exactly call a discussion thread on one of the world's largest weblogs "controlling the flow of information."
This is about the level of competency I've come to expect from Large Government Entities.
Thanks for the link. You know, I don't think 2 months is exorbitant in this case. As your article states below,
"Because there are so many different flavors of Sendmail, twenty software vendors had to develop a variety of patches for the flaw..."
So, they had to patch a ton of different versions, and you don't necessarily want them issuing a shitty patch. So if you blame anyone, blame those sendmail monkeys for the delay. ;) Given the nature of the coordination effort, I think they did quite well.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The problem is that just because I (an innocent user of the product) don't know about the vulnerability doesn't mean that the evil crackers don't know about it. Sure, a public announcement increases the number of crackers who know about it, but also gives me enough information to react. There is a security hole in sendmail, but no patch yet? Well, without real information, I can't confirm if my particular installation is at risk. Once I know about it, I can take reactive steps. With enough information I could try to patch the vulnerability myself. With enough information I could try to limit my risk (say, changing my sendmail configuration to limit what an attacker can get, or adding a wrapper to detect the attack and terminate the connection). With enough information I reasonably weigh the options of disabling sendmail for security reasons versus keeping it up for my users.
With no information, I'll just keep ignorantly running the vulnerable version, possibly getting attacked by crackers who already knew about it. With a little information, I don't have enough information to decide if I'm really at risk and to weigh my possible solutions.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
the homeland security is responsible for making us americans feel all warm and fuzzy inside that our government is doing something to protect its citizens on its soil.
l =c1
they're responsible for releasing alert warnings every so often. placing the country on a level 3 or orange alert whatever that means, but it sure spikes the sales of bottled water, canned foods, batteries and duct tape for when the big bombs and chemical warfare comes our way.
to be honest this entire administration has been doing a complete knee-jerk reaction to the WTC and Pentagon events from 2001. they're molding those knee-jerk reactions into something they can use to bomb Iraq and overthrow Suddam because quite frankly there's some big roots in the big state of Texas where "all Your Oil are belong to us"
here's my favorite quote from the folowwing article:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/872585.asp?0c
That warning regarding tape and three days of water is profoundly helpful to people who are choosing to go to war with Iraq and need to cause an environment of fear in order that the public will do anything to break the fear fever. It serves the administration for the public to be so afraid. When you are afraid enough, you'll get on any train that's leaving the station, even if it is not going where you want to go. That sentence says it all.