Slashdot Mirror
Security Hackers Interviewed
An anonymous reader writes "SecurityFocus has published an interview with Dan Kaminsky. He was guest-hacker at Microsoft Blue-Hat event. At the same time, Whitedust is running an interview with Richard Thieme from back in April. Richard is best known for his column 'Islands in the Clickstream' which is syndicated in over 60 countries." Thieme also wrote a column or two for Slashdot back in the day. From the Kaminsky interview: "Corporations are not monolithic -- there is no hive mind that can one day change every opinion towards some sort of 'rightthink'. Microsoft has said the right things about security for years, but then, who hasn't? Security requires more than PR, or even proclamations from C-levels."
Note to Microsoft
We have more then enough hat colours as things stand.
Blue Hat hacker sounds like an IBM employee anyway (or an Anti-Fedora agent?)
My pics.
Duh.
... oh yeah, put a firewall in front of it. What, we were hacked? We had a firewall ...
Security is a neat buzz word lately. We all "need" to do security, blah, blah, blah.
Security is just like customer service. In order for it to be effective you have to ingrain it in a culture which places it as a top priority. It's obvious that most developers and corporations think of this as an after thought.
Okay, we need functionality x and y. Great, now that we have it
Just reading the article it shows that the developers were surprised someone can reverse engineer their code; they were "annoyed" someone created a graphical exploit. Annoyed? How about pissed? What about "motivated" to plug the hole. Obviously we weren't there to hear this first hand but it sounds like just an oh well we should do something about this. The article talks about a priority shift. Just another corporate slogan.
If it was a true culture shift you would see something like: x company has announced the hiring of 1,000 new software programmers to create a new division of security. This new division will audit all code for potential security problems before any new programs are released.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
I am glad to see that Dan did not kowtow to MS despite being a speaker. MS cannot smoke and mirror us into believing the "Windows is secure mantra" by merely providing good, believable speakers. His comparing apples to apples was also a jab at the MS statistical spin machine.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
The interview with Dan Kaminsky, while heavy on the car/computer analogy still comes across as "okay". He provided some insight into what happened at the "Blue Hat Hackers" meeting with Microsoft. The interview with Richard Thieme left me awestruck. He is a spittin' image (interview-wise) as Jon Katz. Lots of buzzwords that didn't provide any information or insight. I feel as though I was a security expert forced to listen to a marketing person tell me why he is a security expert. That was painful and I'm not a security expert.
But why is the rum gone?
Another problem with metrics is that you can't "test in" security, and measuring security by the number of failures is really trying to do just that.
You need to look at what the actual failures are, whether the kinds of failures are changing or not, whether there's a common cause to some class of failures and how hard it would be to address that common cause, and whether different systems tend to suffer from different kinds of failures.
Buffer overflows, for example. Everyone gets hit by buffer overflows, there's a common cause, but some of the techniques you can use to address them are easier than others. Non-executable stacks, great. Easy to do, if the hardware supports it, and doesn't have much of an impact on the developers. Changing to a language where buffer overflows can't happen? That's hard.
Code injection by playing quoting games, using '%2E%2E' or some complex Unicode string instead of '..', or telling me your name is '%34;cat%20/etc/passwd;echo%20%34'. Different symptoms, sometimes you can systematically fix them, sometimes you can't. A lot of what people think they know about these kinds of attacks is wrong, and they fix them badly and someone with a name like "d'Artagnon" finds he's a hacker.
Sandboxes. Lots of bad information about these going around. Microsoft used to say sandboxes were a bad idea, too much overhead. I don't know if they still do, but they need to come up with a fully sandboxed inherently safe version of Internet Explorer... the sooner the better. Oh, and Firefox has been playing with fire here too... and Apple needs to quit trying to sandbox dashboard at all and just treat it as another application platform... before they end up with people depending on a sandbox that isn't really there.
But the bottom line is, all the metrics in the world won't tell you whether these problems are things that vendors should be held directly accountable for, or whether they're the user's responsibility for configuring their systems correctly, or whether it's a third party plugin/cgi/component vendor that's the real problem.