5,198 Software Flaws Found in 2005

An anonymous reader writes "Security researchers uncovered nearly 5,200 software vulnerabilities in 2005, almost 40 percent more than the number discovered in 2004, according to Washingtonpost.com. From the article: 'According to US-CERT...researchers found 812 flaws in the Windows operating system, 2,328 problems in various versions of the Unix/Linux operating systems (Mac included). An additional 2,058 flaws affected multiple operating systems.'"

Comments

Axe Grinding

[alanw]

Brian Krebs is clearly either extremely stupid, or has an axe to grind. If you look at the Cert Cyber Security Bulletin 2005 Summary, you can see that many of the lines in it end in "(Updated)" A simple count of lines gives the results that Brian quotes, however there are far more "(Updated)" entries in the Unix/ Linux Operating Systems section. Removing these lines gives the following results:
including excluding
"(Updated)" "(Updated)"
Windows 813 671
U/L 2328 891
Multiple 2057 1512

(sorry about the spacing - can't find any way of doing it)

greatly reducing the proportion of Unix/Linux vulnerabilities

Re:Axe Grinding

[ginotech]

That is messed up. You're right, simply updating a vulnerability doesn't make it a new one. You know why Linux and co. have more updated ones, though? Because people can actually see the bugs in the code!

Re:Axe Grinding

[someone300]

Also, isn't this more of a survey of the security flaws of the software running on the operating systems, rather than the operating systems themselves anyway? The summary linked article seems to imply that it's an OS flaw.

7-Zip isn't an OS vulnerability, nor is 4d web star.

Couldn't this be tilted against linux/unix/whatever due to the larger amount of crappy server/networking software available for it?

Re:Axe Grinding

[click2005]

Where is the mention of seriousness of the flaws? How many allow root access or something else serious/critical instead of "clicking this button makes the tool tab disappear" or something.

They also fail to mention that a lot of these flaws are not in the OS itself (or essential components) but in 3rd party software.

A lot of the software isnt even included in a standard installation.

Re:Axe Grinding

[twiddlingbits]

As someone pointed out some of these "flaws" are not OS flaws but issues with application software, and the Severity level are not indicated. So, until the list is sorted accurately it's hard to tell if Win of *NIX was better.

The way I read the results, *NIX list cover the whole set of OSes of this type. There are at least three major versions of UNIX (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX) and multiple releases/versions of each in production. I know that Solaris 8,9 and 10 are all still supported by Sun in 2005 and that is a very big base of installed servers. There are about a dozen LINUX distros, some with serveral releases/versions in production. The Windows numbers cover XP, Win2K, Win2K server, Win2003server. If you count desktops, the Windows installed base is bigger meaning a flaw may affect more users.

However, until someone publishes a more detailed study,with the methodology described, we are ALL just speculating.

Re:Axe Grinding

[jc42]

Hey, you missed the even bigger method of increasing the unix/linux score: counting each distro separately.

Thus, if you go to distrowatch.com, you find 100 distros for linux alone. So for most actual kernel bugs, you can count each one at least 100 times. And for apps that run on all unix releases, the multiplier can be a lot higher.

Of course, there are several distros of Windows, too. But not nearly as many, and the people adding up the bug counts somehow always seem to miss this trick with Windows.

Anyone else got a favorite way of producing misleading bug scores?

The state of security

[Ckwop]

There's two ways to look at this. I would say that it is quite unlikely that the quality of software with respect to security went down in 2005. Computer Security now has such high profile that software houses across the world are spending many dollars trying to provide better security.

If you accept that security quality has not gone down, then you must conclude our ability to detect vulnerabilites is getting better. This is universally a good thing. Every vulnerability the "good guys" find before the "bad guys" is one we can have fix for before the bad guys take over our system.

Then there's the other side of these figures. That's alot of vulnerabilities. Now, fair enough not all vulnerabilities are created equally but I'd bet at least 10% are serious enough to get your system taken over if you're not careful. That's a lot of ways to break in to my system and it's a lot of work to make sure you're not vulnerable.

We have such a long way to go. For example, in PHP if they'd just follow Microsoft's example and put a SQL injection and XSS attack filter on information passed to web-pages we could close a serious hole in many web-applications. I've not looked at Ruby on Rails but I bet it fails this test too.

For gods sake, if you're not writing an operating system you have no business using C. Read me lips: YOU CAN'T WRITE SECURE C. Not now, not after 20 thousand hours of training, not ever. Sure, it's possible to write secure C in theory but the difference between theory and practice is that in theory they're the same and in practice they are not. In practice, you have deadlines, in practice you have people on the team who have less security training than others, in practice you have developers who have just had children and don't get a lot of sleep. In practice, people make mistakes. Code reviews may help but they wont remove everything. If you write your software in C you're doomed to having silly security bugs. If you want to remove most of the worry about overflows, use a language that rules them out.

Another thing, why should code we execute on our computers run at the maxmium privellege set of the user who's running it? Suppose my program checks a HTTP page against an MD5 hash periodically and sends an SMS through an internet based SMS gateway. Why should that program, if it wants to, be allowed to access the disk? I don't know about Java but C# has got a set of attributes that can control this type of behaviour. Really, we should be forcing declarations at the language level about what permissions each method of the program needs - the default being none of course.

Simon.

Re:The state of security

[canuck57]

For gods sake, if you're not writing an operating system you have no business using C. Read me lips: YOU CAN'T WRITE SECURE C.

I beg to differ, C can be real secure if written that way. The problem comes in that most people do not know how C works inside yet they code something. Then of course to your next point:

Code reviews may help but they wont remove everything.

This would solve alot of issues. How many environments routinely run bounds checking and code reviews for functionality AND security? How many people who really understand C reviewed the code?

And security problems are not just C problems, any language like Java, .NET, PHP, C# can also have their issues. CERT and others concentraight on the operating systems that we all use but generally skirt applications security which can be very bad. Job schedulers written in Java that allow root access, data warehouses that give up encoded (but not encrypted) UIDs/passwords ovr the net, the list is long. And how many people use unencrypted telnet/ftp/imap/pop3 even though secure options exist? I know senior NT and UNIX admins that don't know what a key pair is let alone what a certificate chain is. But they have a half dozen certifications.

But secure code begins with it's priority, in design and takes more time to code no mater what language you use. Having knowledgable coders helps alot. But we are in a day and age where we only want cheap coders. And here is a hint, cheap coders are never good coders or they would not be cheap. There in is the issue, more time is something people do not want to do either in training, coding or review.

Explorer vs Firefox

[dynamo52]

Firefox: 1
Explorer: 45
Explorer wins!

shocking numbers

[CDPatten]

"researchers found 812 flaws in the Windows operating system, 2,328 problems in various versions of the Unix/Linux operating systems (Mac included). "

If we listened to just the media you would have thought Windows has thousands and the others only had a few dozen. I promise I'm not trolling, but do those numbers stop and make anyone on the site re-think stances? We all saw the numbers that put Firefox with more holes then IE earlier this year too. Could MS be doing a better job, but just getting hammered in the press (who are mostly Apple users by the way)? MS holes get lots of press while other operating systems get a free pass.

"I know Microsoft issued a lot of patches this year that fixed quite a few vulnerabilities ... but 812? My suspicion has always been that Microsoft sometimes fixes multiple flaws with a single patch, even though its advisories may make it appear as though the patch addressed a singular issue. "

MS always has an attached KB article that details everything their path does. I don't think that statement is denial.

I find myself defending MS allot on this site, and it's nice to have some numbers from a respected neutral organization to debate some of you guys with. I'm sure after this piece they will be re-classified as MS zealots, but what can ya do.

These numbers are meaningless.

[master_p]

Ok, I've made a 'hello world' program in C++...I had 0 bugs in it, do I win?

Seriously now, these numbers are useless without mentioning lines of code and programming languages. Suse Linux 9.3, for example, has over 7,000 RPMs, which is an enormous amount of software.

Absolute bug numbers are meaningless.

Umm am I stupid or something?

[bogie]

Because I know I just woke up but that CERT page is listing APPLICATIONS FLAWS and NOT OS flaws.

Is a flaw in "Gold FTP explorer" or Photoshop a Windows OS flaw?

Am I the only one seeing this?

Re:Language choice?

[jc42]

I often wonder why people still write in C at all, ...

Well, my last big project was written almost entirely in C for the simple reason that that's what the client wanted. We did a lot of prototyping in perl and python, but that code wasn't acceptable for delivery; we had to rewrite all the production code in C. If not, it wouldn't be accepted.

Much of the explanation was that the client had accepted C++ and java in earlier projects, and they were disasters for all the familiar reasons. They were determined that this wouldn't happen again, so they went with a "proven" language with a track record of use in major successful systems.

Similarly, I have a couple of friends who recently did a project in Cobol. They hated it, but they wanted to get paid, and that's what the client would accept.

In the Real World[TM], the decision about which language to use is very often made by managers who aren't programmers and don't have a clue about the real issues. So they make decisions based on things that they can understand and measure.

Not so shocking ...

[lasindi]

"researchers found 812 flaws in the Windows operating system, 2,328 problems in various versions of the Unix/Linux operating systems (Mac included). "

If we listened to just the media you would have thought Windows has thousands and the others only had a few dozen. I promise I'm not trolling, but do those numbers stop and make anyone on the site re-think stances? We all saw the numbers that put Firefox with more holes then IE earlier this year too. Could MS be doing a better job, but just getting hammered in the press (who are mostly Apple users by the way)? MS holes get lots of press while other operating systems get a free pass.

If you look at the first post, you'll see that the real count of vulnerabilities isn't so shocking after all:

Windows 671
UNIX/Linux 891
Multiple 1512

Also, when you consider the fact that "UNIX/Linux" includes many different operating systems (e.g., GNU/Linux, *BSD, OS X, etc.), you can't give any one Unix operating system the blame. Remember that although some code is shared between projects, GNU/Linux and the *BSD are more or less completely different code bases. In any case, the simple counts of vulnerabilities don't take into account the severity of each, so the real winner is even more ambiguous.

I find myself defending MS allot on this site, and it's nice to have some numbers from a respected neutral organization to debate some of you guys with. I'm sure after this piece they will be re-classified as MS zealots, but what can ya do.

While Brian Krebs might be tainted by his misrepresentation (see the post I got the numbers from), I can't imagine anyone here claiming that US-CERT is somehow a bunch of MS zealots. In fairness to Microsoft, they've definitely come a long way with SP2, and I don't feel nearly as vulnerable when using an SP2 machine as I did with previous Windows versions (though the recent WMF hole makes me a bit more worried). without considering the severity of each vulnerability. But they're still no where near the point where I would switch from Linux.

Unfair

[Kaelthun]

"The ignorant define themselves" why is there even a discussion going on about the essence of the word "flaw"? Fact is that this research has not been fair because all Linux distro's, UNIX variants (such as BSD) and Mac are counted as one, and MS Windows as another. You cannot compare the multitude of Linux distro's to the one-man platform of MS Windows. If there would have been a tally between, say, Redhat, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Mac OS (I dunno what version it is in atm) and MS Windows, and all stats would have been listed seperately ... that would have been fair and clear. Now it's just a mash of all these stats with just one simple query on it SELECT bugs FROM stats WHERE os = Windows. THey just mashed the rest together and called it "the rest".

Re:Unfair

[ComputerizedYoga]

thing is, all of those distros use the same software base. Redhat, Ubuntu, *BSD, they're all host to apache, samba, bind, openssh, php, gcc ... they're all essentially the same, once you get past package management, the kernel and the c libraries.

If you want to count "OS" flaws, you need to remove ALL the third-party apps. That means in linux, you'd JUST be counting the flaws in the kernel and glibc, and in BSD only the core system as well. And those aren't even going to be distro-specific.

While you're right that it's probably not fair to shove os-x vulns in with the unix/linux category (os-x is its own unique animal and has a lot of things that no other *nix has) I think it is fair to mash together the F/OSS nixes. Or at least to mash together their non-os-specific parts.

Of course, these comparisons are inherently unfair, if they're used as a metric for "which OS is more secure". That's become something of a moot point. No matter how someone calculates their metrics, someone or another is going to be displeased with their methodology. What's more interesting, and more to the point, is the sheer number of vulns found across the board, and that's the whole point of the story.