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GDI Vulnerabilities: An Open Letter to Microsoft
UnderAttack writes "Tom Liston, the guy that brought us the LaBrea Tarpit, wrote an open
letter to Microsoft regarding the GDI JPEG vulnerability, and Microsoft's scanning tool for this vulnerability, which he calls 'worse then useless'. Tom, who wrote his own scanning tool, ends his letter with 'Please stop treating your customers like idiots and give us information; information that we can use.' Like Tom explains, the official Microsoft scanning tool misses a lot of vulnerable DLL's installed by third parties, and Microsoft fails to explain if these libraries are a problem or not."
You don't even need third-party stuff or an application to make it hard under Linux. Typical cycle is: kernel version x comes out in March. It's in a Red Hat release in July. Vulnerability found in September, with an immediate release of version x+1 on kernel.org (which also has a lot of changed/evolved drivers etc.) Red Hat back-patches the fix to version x and makes a new funny version number to signify this. They might include a couple other things from x+1 in the back-patch to version x. Except that the funny redhat version number doesn't signify much to anyone on the surface.
Similar things happen for Red Hat (and other branded linux binary distributions) of Apache, SSL, etc., things that are all quite critical and you'd hope would be crystal-clear as to which patches your version has or doesn't have.
Now finding whether version X of a library or application has a vulnerability patched usually isn't too hard. And Red Hat does a pretty good job of keeping on top, way better than say Microsoft.
Disclaimer: I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I'm not a big fan of Red Hat (or, as I prefer, Head Rat) either (or any binary linux/gnu toolchain/popular application distro for that matter).
Most users ARE idiots. It seems completely appropriate that they should be treated this way. I very much mean this.
Yes, the slashdot crowd and others might do well to receive more information regarding vulnerabilities and fixes for them, but the average user would be overwhelmed.
I once mentioned to a gentleman that the standard encryption on an 802.11b WAP wasn't entirely secure and he panicked. He asked if hackers would steal his credit card and social security numbers. I asked if he ever shopped online or transmitted those numbers across the internet to which he replied emphatically no (he didn't even store them on his computer for that matter). He still did not understand that a "hacker" can not steal his information from a WAP if it was never there in the first place. He promptly switched to using a ethernet based network.
Most people are too stupid to be told even the fisrt thing about security. Better a patch is provided that works and they use it. Seeing as how the patch was not complete in this case, that'd differenty, yet the users should still be treated like morons.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Any valid points the author has about the uselessness of the tool, or the general state of affairs with security at Microsoft, are dimished by his pompous attitude and snide remarks.
Why not write a technically detailed letter about the code you find (since he read it so many times) and perhaps offer some constructive alternatives to improve it?
Not only would it be more interesting to read, but they might actually be more willing to consider it.
I spent about 45 minutes reading docs at MSDN/MSKB trying to find an explicit statement that IE6SP1 on Win98 is vulnerable, and I swear that they don't actually state that fact (explicitly) anywhere! I eventually was able to read between the lines and conclude that Win98 isn't vulnerable, but Win98 + IE6 is, so you should run Windows Update to DL the patch.
Am I certain? No. Like I said, it's very difficult to find answers to very simple questions in their docs sometimes. I especially hate reading their security bulletins because it's like they were written by very technical lawyers who are trying to maintain the illusion of releasing information without actually doing so. As often as is possible, I try wait a day or two for the DHS CERT to issue their bulletins because they do a slightly better job of relaying useful information.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Actually, according to TFA, your analogy should be:
"My home-built kit car has a Ford engine. There's a problem with the engine. Ford needs to fix it"
"She's furniture with a pulse"
For a better analogy, Microsoft is refusing to pay Child Support for its bastard child.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Kinda silly eh?
Of course 3rd party apps might have exploits. It's up to those 3rd party vendors to supply patches. Even if the code is originally based on MS code, the 3rd party vendor may have modified it in any variety of ways and MS has no idea if those will be dangerous versions or not. MS has identified the bad code, the 3rd party vendors have been notified about it. It's up to them to tell you if their version is bad or not, and patch their software.
would you give warranty for something you give for free?
i don't think so.
well, maybe he'll give you your money back!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
... first class on day one, they would cover off not including some pointless story about your childhood home which comprises half of the letter and has absolutely no relivence to the point of the letter, other than to say that windows users are "in the dark".
Don't get me wrong, the letter itself was justified, and the author is right about the tool by microsoft I'm sure. But why is that story in there, to make sure that someone at Microsoft doesn't actually read it?
----- sXe
Indeed, Netscape, which also uses that code for its JPEG decoding had that flaw (but it was fixed earlier, and of course, it did not make the news nearly as much as this Microsoft issue, owing to its much smaller market share.)
http://www.openwall.com/advisories/OW-002-netscape -jpeg/
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
So, is Linus going to put out an advisory that there may be some random explit in the Gimp that allows user level access to hackers? I know there must be some random buffer overflow in the Gimp somewhere. Linus should point this out according to your logic, shouldn't he?
.so file (installed into a special directory for each application that uses it, for no good reason that anyone could gather, and Linus insists that they aren't allowed to modify it in any way), and there was then an update to that .so file, I would expect the update that Linus issued to fix all copies of it, yes.
/lib or /usr/lib and you only have one copy of each of them. An update would ensure that the single copy you depended on had the vulnerability eliminated.
If Linus wrote the code, and told the application authors that they were only allowed to use it by accessing a
Of course, nobody behaves like this in the Linux world. Shared libraries are installed to
I am surprised that Microsoft does not do what Linux does and have a common DLL provide all the JPEG functionality. At least in Linux, most, if not all apps, use libjpeg.so.
Fixing a problem like this in Linux is trivial. Only libjpeg needs to be patched, and automagically, all apps that depend on that library are also rendered invulnerable.
We saw this with png and other shared libraries. Also, offering many of these common libraries as DLLs helps reduce code bloat since every app no longer needs to reinvent the wheel.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Beyond that, if I find out that my Windows version of "The Gimp" is also vulnerable, I know enough to go to the author of that program and find a patch.
If, on the other hand, 'The Gimp' told me that GTK may be vulnerable, and the 'GTK' folks told me that 'The Gimp' may be vulnerable, I would surely be the first person to stand up and write a singularly upset letter to those projects.
On the other hand, I didn't pay $199 per copy of "The Gimp" and, as a condition of my use of said software, it clearly tells me that I am free to modify the code to my liking. Thus, I don't feel that "The Gimp" and the "GTK" projects owe me merchantability. Microsoft (on the other hand) I do feel owes me - at least - merchantability to perform as advertised...
So long as Microsoft can fix the issues that are theirs (as opposed to point me in a circle), I have no qualms with spending more of my fine earned money to them for a really nice gaming OS.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I see. The tool wasn't designed for use. They just made it available for download so we could all see what a tool would look like if one were available.
"What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos"