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Multiple Vulnerabilities in OpenSSL

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the stay-safe-stay-current dept.

gfilion writes "Updated versions of OpenSSL are now available which correct two security issues: A null-pointer assignment during SSL handshake and an out-of-bounds read that affects Kerberos ciphersuites. Full advisory available on OpenSSL site and US-CERT."

1 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yawn by ChiralSoftware · · Score: 5, Interesting
    No, I'm not trolling. I can summarize your whole post in one sentence: "Don't make mistakes and everything will be fine!" We've been hearing that for years. The best C security coders in the world are the OpenBSD team and guess what, they make mistakes. They fail to validate input sometimes. They have had exploitable bugs in their code. And what are they doing now? They are moving to models like privsep, w^x and systrace which are all forms of sandboxing or hole containment. Eventually if they take that far enough, they'll end up running bufferless code in a VM, which would give me a sense of deja vu.

    Sure, it's entirely possible to write perfect C code with no mistakes, and it's possible to not validate input on Java code and make plenty of mistakes. You gave a great example: SQL injection attacks. Java has some great defenses against that: Use java.sql.PreparedStatement instead of java.sql.Statement. Even better, use something like JDO to give an abstracted OO view of the data.

    Here's where C breaks down: The human mind doesn't think in the right way to use C safely. We can't change the human mind (yet), but we can change which language we use. Humans just don't spot out-of-range errors, for example, but out-of -range errors are all trapped in Java and also because Java collections know their size (unlike C arrays/pointers) out-of-range errors are much more obvious.

    Also, saying that "if you validate your input you can run it at any priv level you want" is just the wrong way to think about this. Mistakes will happen in any sufficiently large system (ie, any system that is large enough to be useful today). The only reasonable thing to do is to contain those mistakes, which means isolate processes and functions.

    Or you can keep on repeating "nothing bad would ever happen if we didn't make any mistakes!" I guess if that's what you think, I can't change your mind.