Slashdot Mirror
Don Box: Huge Security Holes in Solaris, JVM
DaHat writes "Don Box, one of the authors of the original SOAP specification in 1998, now an architect on Microsoft's next generation Indigo platform recently responded to James Gosling's remarks regarding huge security holes within the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). Don argues that the same 'flaws' that Gosling noted in the .NET CLR exist both within the Solaris operating system as well as the JVM, both of which support execution of C and C++ code, as well as explaining why this is not necessarily a bad thing."
Solaris - yes, it's unsafe. That's why my Solaris machine gets attacked if I don't have a firewall in front of it for ten seconds.
JVM - no, that's safe. JNI is an API, not a platform. For that matter you can say that any language which uses sockets for network programming or can write a file is unsafe. Not to mention that normal programmers never use JNI... It's a very low level integration API.
Don's comments did not really add anything that wasn't covered in the Slashdot discussion.
Pat Niemeyer
Author of Learning Java, O'Reilly & Associates
Are we just going to have this continuing debate in which every side is inaccurately reduced to one slashdot-blurb-sized sound bite?
Anyway, JNI doesn't need to be a security hole of the sort Mr. Box mentions; one can concieve of a Java VM which disallows unsafe JNI code from touching the memory of the bytecode-verified safe code, by partitioning JNI execution into a separate process. In fact at least one such JVM implementation exists already.
I can see it now..."Bugs deserve rights too!"
Well, ask the original bug at NSWC if it enjoys being taped to a cardboard note since 1947...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
is this one of those, "your hole is bigger than mine" arguments?
To use JNI inside of an applet, it needs to be signed with the DLL/shared library pre-installed in lib. So, the topic of "Huge Security Hole in Solaris and JVM" is alarmist and FUD, considering that to get outside of the sandbox, you need to jump through serious configuration hoops.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
This just in: Programming languages are insecure. They allow third parties to run arbitrary code on your processor.
Microsoft will be releasing a patch which fixes this problem soon. Stay tuned.
www.kiwilyrics.com - a wiki for lyrics
When .NET was first announced and the details began to be known, there were a number of lively discussions here about it. The "feature" of running unmanaged code was hotly debated, but the debate seemed to me to be entirely one-sided. It seemed clear unmanaged code is another classic Microsoft mistake - trading sugary convenience today for billions in headaches for their customers tomorrow. I went looking for someone to convince me otherwise and didn't succeed. Maybe now?
.NET gives you only the worst of both worlds.
.NET runtime not to allow unmanaged code. That doesn't matter, because the choice is there, "unmanaged" is still a huge problem.
There is great value in a "managed" system like the Java VM. It gives us an extraordinary amount of safety that we are frankly unaccustomed to. People are still gradually learning how to think about it, but you see more and more security-critical projects going "Java only" as they figure it out.
There is also obviously no way we can do everything that way. For hot code, we work at lower levels, put in more work, and (for now) accept the additional risks. Note that the constant stream of ugly worldwide security problems is gradually but now noticeably decreasing our apetite for doing everything that way.
As far as I can tell, by allowing unmanaged code in the runtime,
You get all the overhead of the VM, but you don't really get safety.
I know perfectly well you can tell the
Either it is avoided by everyone (everyone recognizes that it's a mistake), or we all begin to use it (it's in XYZ library), and then we all end up allowing unmanaged code, and we are no longer safe.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
So when will this become a serial exchange of yo momma jokes?
Java source code is available with little effort. So if you want to check it out and do some security analysis, you can do it.
JNI is the second edition at a Java to C++ API. It is the underpinnings of every binding from Java to platform there is, not an afterthought for applets (though Netscape were involved). If you don't use it much in your code, it's because other people (i.e Sun) do it for you. They also go out their way to make it hard to do so, whereas MS, with P/Invoke and COM support, make it really easy to invoke native code *from trusted apps*.
.NET code that I know doesn't use unsafe either: MS go out their way to discourage you. You have to compile as unsafe, grab pointers only briefly, and then only ever get to run if your code came from a trusted place. All remote code is blocked, even that on a network share.
.NET APIs, too much of which are thin wrappers around Win32. OR the fact that the .NET runtime needs IE6 installed, and IE6 is the web browser component for .NET apps. OR the fact that ASP.net is built on IIS. Those are security holes. Windows is a security hole. ActiveX is a gaping security hole. IIS is server side disaster. .NET is actually pretty secure, but its just damage limitation on an otherwise dangerous piece of junk. Its like having ABS brakes on a Ford Explorer; not enough on its own to stop you crashing and burning horribly.
Most
Where MS do care is about COM integration, about platform integration. True, there is only one platform they care about, Windows.
But consider this: Integration between Java and Linux, especially the GUI, sucks. Want decent Java/Gnome bindings? You need the third party Java-Gnome libs, which use, wait for it, JNI. Want Java KDE bindings, go to KDEJava and get the java libraries plus native code. If you want to integrate with the OS, you need native code, which means JNI.
The fact that JNI is pretty rare can be seen by the fact that Gnome, KDE and drag-drop integration with the rest of the Linux GUI is pretty much nonexistent.
I think the FUD Sun are saying about "unsafe" is so bogus. If they want to slag it off, just pick on the
I can't help feeling that some small percentage of this type of back-and-forth is something like a junior-high whiny geek arguing about how the Micro Channel bus architecture is better than ISA and that , incidentally, Apples are utterly irrelevant. ...Oh, wait. That geek was at one time a friend of mine, and this was circa 1985, and this was an actual discussion. ;) (hi, don ulrich! i still use a Mac, and Apple still exists! where's your precious PS/2 micro-channel NOW?!?! nyaaah, nyaaah!!)
Let's take a look at how each technology can become a security hole: By remote execution of content presumed to be in a "sandbox".
.NET: Since unmanaged code is turned off by default for remotely loaded code, it will not be run by an unexpected trip to a web page.
.NET is sophisticated enough to allow some apps to use unmange code, but not others, or some users, or software from a certain publisher, and a bunch of other options as well. You don't have to simply "turn on unmanaged code". They even have a simply way to allow software publishers to communicate these settings to customers instead of letting Joe Blow admin decide to simply turn off security to make it work.
Java: Since JNI won't work by default under the same circumstances, the newest virus won't be injected into your system by an evil web page.
Anything else is simply an architectural choice. MS likes to preserve compatibility while allowing you to move forward as quickly as posible. Sun wants you to rewite stuff in Java (for the most part), so the new stuff is more secure, but there will be more old stuff floating around that is still unsecure because we won't yet have found time to port it.
BTW, Code Access Security in
In summary, both technologies allow you to blow your own foot off if you aim the gun properly and squeeze the trigger. So what -- we were allowed to do that before these technologies came along and preventing you from being able to blow your own foot off will only slow adoption and cause more feet to be blown off.
The consequence of this is that no-one uses JNI unless they absolutely positively have to. It's a pain and life is much easier if everything is in Java. Thus with the exception of a few esoteric things such as SWT, most libraries are pure and portable.
Now contrast this with .NET. Writing native C++ and wrapping it in a garbage collection safe class involves no stub generation and can be done in a single file - the assembly info, interface and gc wrapper can all be specified in situ. Consequently it's a lot easier to pull C++ into a .NET application. MS DevStudio 2003 even has wizards to do it. It is also a lot easier to call DLLs and ActiveX from .NET since MS provide PInvoke and COM Interop to do just that.
Now on the face of it, this is all well and good, especially if you have a lot of legacy crap to port. But by the same token it means many more .NET apps are tainted than on Java. The problems this causes for portability should be obvious.
And this is called "Microsoft having their cake and eating it". They can expound portability and present the facade that .NET is cross-platform, when in reality they provide tools and wizards to ensure it remains anything but. Apps that are infested with native instructions and OS-specific calls are by definition unportable.
Mono demonstrates the problems faced in porting .NET to other platforms. Mono must literally pull in the whole winelib in order to cope with the number of tainted .NET apps that attempt to call out to Win32. And too bad if you're running Mono on a non-x86, non-Linux system since winelib is x86 only (for now).
And I don't see the situation getting any better. Perhaps if Mono gains momentum it might put the brakes on tainted code, but there is a long way for that to happen. I believe the only way Mono is going to make an impact is if ships with a cross-platform IDE with tools that default to its open source stack. This is almost a reality since ICSharpDevelop & MonoDevelop are both fairly complete IDEs but there is nothing yet which defaults to the open source stack and runs on all major platforms.