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Analyzing Binaries For Security Problems

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the look-ma-no-source-code dept.

Matt writes "At the last talk at BlackHat in Las Vegas, Greg Hoglund demonstrated a product for sale by his new company that analyzes binaries for security vulnerabilities. He showed the analysis of several commercial products, the results of which were shockingly insecure. This product should help end the debate of closed source or open source applications being more or less secure."

4 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. Like the concept, but... by Meat+Blaster · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Isn't it blatently illegal to analyze the majority of the binaries out there? You can't even give benchmarks on many of them without violating the EULA, let alone actually dig through the internals, because it's damaging to the rights of the software designer under the license.

    Then again, it's not like virus scanners don't do the same thing.

  2. How exactly does this help open versus closed? by blowdart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Lets look at the quote on the web page, shall we?

    "The alternatives are to laboriously test software or meticulously review source code line by line. But these options are so time consuming and expensive that few companies will do it." (emphasis added)

    So how exactly, as the article submitter says will this "help end the debate of closed source or open source applications being more or less secure"? The product page already says that few companies have the time or money to check source code, and how many others do? Sure, it's great to have the source, but when you install apache do you check every single line for buffer offerflows? Of course not. You rely on others doing it, and you rely on others doing it correctly. That may well be a mistake, are you sure someone else will check every revision line by line?

    So, frankly, this product contributes nothing to open or closed source arguements, it's simply a nice tool to automate some reviews.

    (as an aside, it appears that bugscaninc have made their choice over open and closed source,

    Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
    X-Powered-By: ASP.NET

  3. Found a huge hole in an executable once myself by LordDartan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Once before, while working at a client site, I was installing a 3rd party application. Well, in setting it up and looking for any security holes, I found a pretty large one. Apparently, the client application talks to a MSSQL server using a single account (which happens to have dbo access). Not only did it use a single account for everyone, but the username and password were stored as cleartext in the executable itself! Now granted, not likely that an end user would look there to find this information, but if someone did, and the client did happen to know someone breached the security, the only way to block the intrusion was to shut down the entire system. With the username and password hard coded into the executable, there was no way to change it witout having the vendor make the change and send out a new executable.

    Just goes to prove that MS programmers are a dime a dozen, but most of them are worth that too!

  4. Scam by roady · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Reverse Engineer Halvar Flake called BugScan a scam at his BlackHat Amsterdam course.

    It is just a bunch of simple IDA pro plugins and it will give you a false sense of security.

    Halvar has published is own open source version called BugScam on sourceforge