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A Security Bug In Mozilla - The Human Perspective
xslf writes "Alex Vincent, the reporter of the data-loss security bug 259708, writes about the behind the scene process of reporting it, casting light on the problems of dealing with security related bugs reported by the community, which isn't always aware of the security implications of the bugs reported. The issues with the FLOSS process shown in this bug might get worse, once more and more people use FLOSS and add to the process, without being full fledged coders, and rely on binary releases of software." (Note, you'll have to copy and paste that link to view the bug report, or click through from the linked story.)
What are you trying to do? Shut down the Mozilla project?!? If you absolutely NEED to see the bug, go to MirrorDot and look it up there.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Bug 69070
The bug was on bugtraq in 2001! It allows remote pages to open and use files on the local machine, and is also a denial of service on Linux, since Mozilla stupidly allows the opening of paths which are not regular files (/dev/tty).
My experience with 69070 has been educational. I've learned if there's a security bug you care about, you had better fix it yourself. Unfortunately I can't but maybe someone in the audience has the spare time to step up.
Opps.. where are ALL my precious precious downloaded files?
-Woof woof woof!
Um, that seemed to be the whole point. Again and again throughout the article he does a mea culpa. At the same time, I believe his general frustration with not knowing how to proceed comes through. We in FOSS need a more concrete process on how to handle bug through the system. And even very successful projects, like Mozilla/FireFox, can do a better job at communicating the way to handle these types of situations.
Gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late --Ian Curtis
http://www.shadowpublications.com/blog
Wait a sec, you're bitching that they won't pay you to work for them, when you don't pay them for thier product?
Holy hypocrisy...
feh. stuff.
Acronym loving developer: I advocate the use of FLOSS and if it's with ENEMA, all the better.
CIO: You're fired.
I've been swashdotted -- Elmer Fudd
Hmmm. That's a rather difficult conclusion to reach if you really read the article and think about it. Alex accepted the blame where he messed up, and noted other places he wasn't sure about.
The fact is,the other person should not have reposted someone else's blog entry without permisison.
The article was quite insightful. Hopefully it will lead to a better process.
This guy made the #1 mistake you can make when it comes to bug advocacy. He assumed his bug was more important than all the others. It had to be fixed now! Now! Now! Now!
Which can be entirely correct, but you don't get anywhere by running around like chicken little trying to make everybody look at your bug. They heard you the first time. If you don't have any new substantive information to give them, sit back and relax. People never respond to selfish requests well. It can even discourage them from taking a look at it.
As he tried to convey in the article, the issue is not whether he can be faulted or not (and indeed, he can; then again, you can expect that many/most bug submitters would make "mistakes" like these).
The quote, however, deals with someone who submitted for his weblog a word-for-word copy of his original bug report, without any comments, return address, or source. That goes a bit beyond useless and unhelpful, IMHO; that borders on disrespectful. At the very least, as he is saying, if that person indeed wanted full disclosure, he should point to where he found the copy of the text, so that the Mozilla security team could be made aware of it.
Overall a well written article, certainly a lot more thoughtful than your comment.
-tor
This bug was a security bug in part because Firefox 1.0 changed the default download directory so that downloadable files were saved directly to the desktop.
Microsoft is always criticized for having bad defaults. In this case, having the default download directory be the desktop was a bad default. I would argue that you wouldn't neccessarily do bad to create a folder for each downloadable file. No one would be annoyed by that, and it would provide protection in the file system for any future holes.
You could also have a "recently downloaded files" directory on the desktop. Even a shortcut to "Location of downloaded files". Mozilla has been known for its innovation. Using the desktop is not innovative--the desktop should never be a permenant storage location. Everything Microsoft puts there is a shortcut.
I also question whether it was wise to change or set defaults in a "1.0" milestone release.
First off, if someone reports a bug, it should be ASSUMED that there is a potential security issue there, until proven otherwise. Why? Because there are generally side-effects. Even if the bug doesn't directly do anything nasty, it may very well cause something unintended which, in turn, causes something else unintended, and so on. Programmers generally talk of such effects "cascading" or "snowballing", because the effects usually do build up over time. Sooner or later, this will result in a corruption of data, a program crash or an exploit due to insufficient value checking.
There are two classes of bugs in a computer program. Those that cause the program to crash, and those that don't. The second type are much harder to track down (because you've no real indication of where the problem started), but they are generally much worse and much more prevelent.
The "correct" way to handle bugs is to assume that (almost) any problem puts the software at risk of a non-fatal bug that could (eventually) destabilize the program or open an exploit. Spelling errors in text messages are probably OK, but even there, if you're placing them in fixed-length buffers, it is saner to check and be sure that the risks are low than to ignore apparently trivial "appearance" stuff that could be catastrophic. I've seen programmers give themselves buffer overflows, I've even seen programmers rely on certain OS quirks when an overflow occurs. The code may not be portable, and it sure as hell isn't safe, but it does work.
(I've actually seen some code that won't run, unless the debug flag is present. The code will actually segfault if the extra padding the debug data creates is not there. Not from the Mozilla team, this was in a prior place of employment, but it does demonstrate that coding is not just about making something "work" it's about making it work for the right reasons.)
Now, the Mozilla team is probably simply too small to regard every bug entered in their database as a potentially critical show-stopping security hazard. This, however, reflects more on the userbase than on the Mozilla folks. Open Source works if, and only if, the "lots of eyes" out there looking for problems also translate into "lots of hands" for fixing problems.
Sure, not everybody is going to be a coder. So? If a mere 1 in every 100 users took the time to chase down not only the bug as seen, but at least some of the prior bugs that that bug depended upon to do anything at all... Mozilla would be in a lot better shape.
Politics in projects don't help. GCC and Glibc suffer badly from a management style that can be diplomatically summed up as "Old-Style IBM without the money - or the justification". There's a lot of "Not Invented Here", "Somebody Else's Problem" and "It Works For Us", although the GCC team is apparently a lot better than it used to be.
The moment any project suffers from any of those three things is the moment that it is under a self-imposed sentance of death, to be carried out the moment a better alternative arrives, where the only possible hope of a reprieve is to tackle those attitudes and eliminate them.
9 out of every 10 security bugs are caused by a fault in attitues, at the time of coding or later, and not by any fundamental nature of computing.
BTW, this is off-topic, but biologists and geneticists are mourning the passing of one of the three scientists who discovered the structure of DNA. The BBC is reporting the death of Professor Maurice Wilkins, aged 87. He died in hospital, no cause was given.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'm flabbergasted that the mozilla security people seem to think that "hiding" a previously public bug after it's noticed that it has security ramifications is an effective way to keep black hats from noticing it.
I think it's safe to assume that black hats interested in finding 0-day security holes in mozilla have already, or soon will create a mirror of the bugzilla archive, with history. Then they can look for bugs that are suddenly removed from the public bugzilla archive, and have some very good candidates for fresh security holes.
And there's no way the mozilla security people can effectively combat this. At best they get into a technology arms race with the black hats, trying to figure out what techniques they're using to spider and mirror the archive.
Once a bug is posted to a public bug tracking system, even if it's only been there for an hour, you might as well give up and assume it's widely publically known.
Oh and in my personal experience, the best way to get a security bug fixed once you discover it is to immediatly write an exploit, clearly flag the bug as a security hole, and post it to a public forum with a sifficuently broad readership that someone in a position to fix the bug will, be that the project's BTS or bugtraq.
see shy jo
Running Mozilla or Firefox in a chroot environment would greatly enhance security.
I recently tried to get this working but didn't have much luck (haven't given up yet). There isn't much info on the web.
I currently run Firefox under a separate user ID, which is better than the default.
Any suggestions to get chroot working with Firefox?
Wow.. one post, so much criticism. I honestly haven't experienced that on /.
;p
/. ) I was flamed.
Guess it's not a good idea to criticize Mozilla developers
OK.. allow me to respond to all of the replies in one post.
1) Bug reports = good. Insulting bug reporters = bad.
As a developer, I'll tell you that having your customers report bugs to you is a GOOD THING. Something that you want to ENCOURAGE. There is no amount of alpha or beta testing that can substitute for real world use. However, I've been encouraged by this experience to very much just "shut up and take it or leave it" (paraphrasing from one of the more colourful indignant replies I alluded to). I'm not going to report more bugs if this is the response I'm going to get to them. Which is a BAD THING for the Mozilla project.
2) Encouraging and reminding developers = good.
Developers are human beings. They can forget, get distracted, etc. And like all people, sometimes it's a good thing to remind them of outstanding issues. Perhaps they forgot about it? Perhaps they've completed the task, but haven't checked it in? Perhaps the guy responsible for the bug has too much work on his plate, but is reluctant to say so without being prodded.
Certainly, a post every few days asking if the bug's been fixed is just about as annoying as "are we there yet?" queries on car trips with children. But that was not the case here.
3) There ARE paid developers working on Mozilla
Most of them work for Netscape. I wouldn't doubt if there were contract workers as well. Personally, as an independant developer, I don't have the time or resources to program if I'm not being compensated for it. The question was asked why I don't fix it myself, and I gave a truthful answer. As a result (as here on
I hope this clears up any confusion.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Yes, ideally all bugs are fixed even more rapidly. But originally this wasn't marked as a security bug, and nonsecurity bugs often take more time to fix than you'd wish in any development process:
What changed everything was marking it as a security requirement. Here I agree with the author - the author should have identified this as a security problem in the first place. And I'm really sympathetic to his sitatuation; we all make mistakes, and at least he reported the bug in the first place. Thankfully, a later reader DID realize this, and raised it to a security issue. As a security issue, suddenly the "unlikely" problem becomes "near certainty" since an attacker WANTS to cause trouble, and will work to cause the unlikely to happen.
And once it was labelled as a security problem - look at the speedy response! It was fixed in less than a half hour - that's extraordinarily fast in any software development process, OSS/FS or proprietary. It's even more amazing because the problem was in a completely different place than 3 previous developers had thought... so this was clearly not an easy bug to find and fix (at least for most project developers).
And Firefox is still at the "previous release" level, it's not even officially released! I routinely use Mozilla and Netscape, not Firefox, because Firefox THEMSELVES state that the product's not ready. When they say it's ready, I'll let other people try it out first; version 1.0s are often a little wet behind the ears (remember Windows 1.0? Probably not, and there's a reason for that). But once Firefox 1.0 is out for a little while, I'll probably switch to it; it looks really nice. Obviously a lot of people
Getting ansy about taking a little extra time to find a non-security bug, when the product can't be released til it's fixed anyway, and it's hard to fix, seems a little excessive.
The process issues he raises are interesting issues, and they're certainly worth addressing. E.G., how do you "make secret" that which is already public? But I'm sure there are many possible answers; discuss, pick one, and move on.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Today's Headline - A Security Bug In Mozilla - The Human Perspective
;o)
Tomorrow's Headline - A Security Bug in IE - Sweet Jesus, Microsoft Fucking Sucks Yet Again
Don't worry, I hate Microsoft too
I don't contest what you're saying, and personally I think it's a bad idea from Microsoft, assuming it actually happens. But I find this argument quite interesting.
Let's assume for a second that Mozilla becomes the most widely used browser in the world (for whatever operating system). 100 million people download and install it. And then someone finds another serious vulnerability with it. The Mozilla folks patch it. Then what? 20 million people upgrade, and 80 million don't. What then? The exploits come. How does Mozilla handle this? Because they're going to have exactly the same type of problem Microsoft has today: people who just don't give a damn if their computers are turned into spam zombies or get bogged down with malware. These are the people from whose machines you and I still get those stupid mass-mailing worm messages, and of course spam.
Mozilla can very well damn rewrite the entire Gecko codebase and it will do them absolutely no good. Just like Microsoft with IE. With the small distinction that Microsoft does still support three versions of IE, while Mozilla likely won't even go there.
Today you can find thousands of Linux machines out there that have year-old holes in Sendmail, SSH and the kernel itself. It's just that very few of them are being run off Comcast cable modems and virus writers just don't see much value in taking them over. It's no different from Windows.
Even if Microsoft decided to bite the bullet and support seven versions of IE, I doubt it would do much good. What they can do is "force" users to upgrade to minimize the problem, which is what people around here call "the upgrade train" and is exactly what RedHat started doing with their corporate customers because support costs are prohibitive. And that's what Mozilla will have to do ("we don't support version X anymore, sorry. Upgrade to Y now!") because there's no other way to approach it.
And BTW, the fact that some obscure company decided to "support" older versions of RHEL means nothing in the desktop/home user space, so "having the source" is useless.
The people who write free software seem to think they can engineer all these problems away by writing "cool code" and making it "absolutely secure" from the get-go. That's not going to happen. They're still finding bufer overflows in Sendmail, for crying out loud. No, they're going to be in the same situation as Microsoft is today and they're going to get the same beatings left and right. I really hope I get to see that, if only for the chuckles.