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Dan Geer's Monoculture Bomb Goes Off
Andy Updegrove writes "Three years ago, celebrated security expert Dan Geer lost his job at @stake when he co-authored a paper on the dangers that the Microsoft 'monoculture' represented for end-users. Last fall, he authored a similar warning in a Perspective piece he wrote for CNETNews.com, applauding the action of Massachusetts in adopting OpenDocument Format, thereby reducing its vulnerability to the same type of risk. Four days ago, Dan's prediction came true, when users of Word (but not those that only trade files created in StarOffice, OpenOffice, or other ODF compliant software) began to be infected with the Backdoor.Ginwui virus - a malicious Trojan program that hitches a ride on bogus Word documents. In short, an object lesson that in IT, as in biology, those that exist in diverse gene pools are at a lower risk, both individually and collectively, from those that subsist in a proprietary monoculture."
When all the thousands of PHP/AWStats defacements were made last year as well? Or is the PHP/MySQL/Linux triad not considered a "monoculture"?
It's a good thing he didn't take his monoculture bomb to school. Otherwise he'd be charged with terroristic threatening.
One time at work, I was working on code when a rumbling spread across the floor, up and down the building -- people were losing access to their machines, in our MAJOR CORPORATION! Some virus had invaded the corporate network, machines were in infinite recycle loops.
Until the noise was loud enough, I hadn't noticed. I was working on my code on my linux box. And, it was code compatible to be used on the same project everyone else was developing on their Windows boxes. Interesting.
Ultimately, the mono culture in my office got me too because of my dependency on shared drives running on infected Windows machines. It took at least one day to get machines half way back to normal.
I hate Microsoft, but I think Geer's prediction, and point, are well made without blaming or pointing at Microsoft. I Unix or Linux monoculture could be susceptible to the same result (though I think with much more expended effort to achieve the same catastrophic result).
It's not, of course, because if we standardize on an open document format and a crippling bug is discovered in, say, OpenOffice, there are many other programs that exist or could be written implementing the same functionality. Don't really have that option with Word.
In IT, as in biology, those that exist in diverse gene pools are at a lower risk, both individually and collectively, from those that subsist in a proprietary monoculture
Just because your analogy "sounds right" doesn't make make it a valid thesis. The fact is that computers are not biological organisms and "viruses" don't work the same way. And if you take the analogy for anything more than a mild curiosity, it really exposes your underlying idiocy.
Not to mention it completely ignores the economic factors which created the "monoculture". It's cheaper for society to buy anti-virus than to support multiple OSes, and the analogists just have to deal with that. Computers are tools. Period.
And how exactly does yet another word virus suddnely prove this theory? It's not like there haven't been many since the paper was published.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Object lesson? I think you mean an 'abject lesson' but I could be wrong. Of course, I could predict that some virus will infect Microsoft in the future too. And that a much lesser used format will not be affected. I suppose I could blog about it. Then when it happens, I could blog some more about it, saying how smart I was. Maybe I'd misuse the word 'irony' too as in "isn't it ironic that Microsoft got infected when linux didn't"... It would be a web-trifecta...
You guys under 25 are too young to remember the Morris Worm but it's a good study in monoculture. Although it affected well under half of the internet-connected computers worldwide, at many institutions it had a disporportionate impact.
Back in '88, Sendmail was to internet-mail-exchange what Outlook Express is to mail-clients today. Thanks to a bug in Sendmail and a bug in a student's project, email came to a grinding halt for several days at universities and other institutions worldwide.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Given how easy it is to write MS Office malware, how long until a more advanced version of this worm can search a user's hard drive for other Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Visio documents, infect them, and wait for the next generation of itself to be transmitted?
If the malware itself could change/adapt/evolve (ie, create new functionality within itself), then MS has essentially created a petri dish out of each install of Office.
In other words, MS has created a true "software ecosystem".
In other words, MS has created a true "software ecosystem".* **
*Patent Pending
** "Software Ecosystem" is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I wouldn't want to be a sys admin in a company that had to support OpenOffice, MS Office, StarOffice, XYZOffice. Or had to support Windows (XP, 2000, 2003), Linux, OSX, and *ix. Can you imagine the headache of getting all of them to play nice with each other on a daily basis? There's something to be said about standardization.
On the other hand, if the sys admin has backups and servers distributed across Windows, Linux, OSX and whatever platforms, that would make sense.
I mean I can understand the argument that diversity can add a certain degree of robustness, but it also raises the level of complexity of that environment, and that complexity comes with a cost that can be easily more expensive than dealing with the occasional severe threat.
I mean the ultimate objective behind OpenDocument is to obtain a monoculture in the document formats. That different things implement it isn't relivant. Why? Well most likely they'll be refernce code and documents to do that, and most likely people will follow those most of the time (why reinvent the wheel?) and thus if a bug happens, most things will be venurable. You see this with things like the libpng bug that affected so much software.
So, why tolerate this? Well because I for one don't want to have to play with interoperability nightmares. I want a single document format I can share, I want standards in how computers operate so I don't have to relearn everything every time I sit at a new workstation.
The magic of computers is really their ability to share information, and for that to work effectively, standards have to develop and prevail. I do not want to work in a world where my word processor has 150 different save formats and I have to pick the right one depending on the instution with which I'm communicating. I do not want a world where there are 50 different previlant microarchitecutres and no software runs on more than a handful, and so on.
We have to accept that we can have diversity only to a degree. There has to be common grounds. Yes, those are going to be potential points for an infection to pass. Well, that's unfortunate, but it's simply something we need to live with if we want easily interoperable computers.
Just breaking things in to a "duoculture" wouldn't really solve much. I mean lets say we achive that with Linux, 50% Linux, 50% Windows. Ok fine, what happens now, in additon to exploits that happen to affect both, is that stuff still spreads, just among it's subset, or malicious authors start making viruses have dual payloads that execute the right one on the right platform.
To really have any significant effect, you'd have to have hundreds of different types all mixed together that were minimally interoperable. For example Linux running Wine to use Win32 programs does no good, now it executes the same code and thus is venurable in the same way.
Trying to avoid common systems and formats for security may be valid in an isolated, secure environment but it just doesn't work in computing at large. We want interoperable computers and we strive for it (well, some companies like to try and stand in the way of that). That, by necessity, means that there's more possible vector for infection. Hell, when you get down to it, we could really clean all this up by eliminating the TCP/IP monoculture. If every organization used their own proprietary network, then it'd be real hard for an infection to spread outside an organization. However I hardly think that's the answer.
To me his peice seems like just so much anti-MS rehetoric. He's pushing ODF, which is a standard intended for interoperability, intended to create a document format monoculture. Yes, any word processor could use it, but like I said, that doesn't really gain you anything. He seems to be pushing for switching from one to another, rather than pushing for real fragmentation.
This notion of IT "Diversity" being the end all and be all for information security is a sham.
Extend the same logic to the freeway. If we had even more brands, models, and geek knobs to choose from, would our traffic safety improve one bit more than where it is today?
Security quality is security quality. Don't confuse security quality with market forces.
+++
it will be happy fun time with lots of rainbows, flowers, fluffy clouds and lollipops.
...and happy penguins, damit. Don't every forget about the FUCKING PENGUINS!!!
See? Doesn't that make the world more happy?
This is the very reason we need to have open standards. If the standard is robust and exploit-proof, then the only exploits will be in the implimentations. Many different implimentations eliminates the monoculture problem.
:(.
From time to time we discover standards have holes in them. When the holes are serious, such as a fundamental flaw in a cryptography standard, it must be abandoned. However, most of the time the holes can be worked around or the standard can continue albeit with reduced functionality, as vendors patch thier software to not impliment the broken part of the standard. For example, despite standards to the contrary, most web clients will not fully render a page that is in from an untrusted or hostile host, due to broken-ness/exploit-potential in the standard.
If there were only one web browser in common use, then you have both the problem of browser-specific exploits and the problem of a slow-to-patch vendor. Thankfully, we don't have that prob... er, nevermind
By the way, your mentioning of the TCP/IP monoculture raises some good points. The original TCP/IP standards had holes which were initially patched by vendors, or customers for source-licensed code, turning off functionality until the standards could be revised. There are still some issues outstanding and there are probably some we are not yet aware of. However, thanks to open standards, a process for revising the standards, and multiple open- and closed-source implimentations of the standard, the more serious holes tend to be patched quickly by at least one vendor and vendor-specific holes tend not to have as big an impact as they would in a single-vendor environment.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
if it has happened before. There have been numerous scripting exploits in word...
Also, predicting a security vulnerability in ANY piece of software is like predicting rain. It is *going* to happen, it is not impressive at all, and proves nothing when it happens.
It would in fact probably stop the flow of viruses if most computers all ran different operating systems (if there was no 90% majority of any system), software etc. I think this is fairly obvious.
One thing to consider though is that it would also have additional costs associated training for most companies. Also, in terms of operating systems, no majority platform makes it more difficult for developers to make a profit since everyone is feeding off a tiny segment off the market.
The unices have survived by adopting source level compatibility to broaden their effective market share, and above all by specializing. Apple has also survived by pandering to specific markets (education, graphics artists, home users) at the expense of other markets (business). The problem with having no majority operating system is that you can no longer build a general purpose computer that does everything. Instead one must dual boot, which is what linux users have done for a long time and what mac users are doing now that they can. Now, multi booting isn't the worst thing in the world, but it is an inconvenience.
The last and most problematic issue of having no majority operating systems is drivers. One might think that hardware manufacturers would be most likely to be forced to write their drivers for multiple systems, instead of just windows as they do now, but this is not realistic. A no majority operating system is going to be an environment with lots of highly specialized operating systems. Makers of uncommon hardware are still going to only support one platform, the one on which their hardware is used. If you need to use two specialized gadgets, you are probably going to need to set up two different computers, or dual boot.
Possibly multiple operating systems could adopt the same driver model, but I have to ask why that isn't happening right now when it is already advantageous for linux and others. Right now the only operating capable of using foreign drivers that I know about are freedos and reactos (using DOS and windows NT drivers respectively of course). Frankly, it would be a big boon for the desktop market and others if linux or freebsd could use stock windows drivers... but I suspect there are some technical problems with this. Linux developers have always quoted as a reason for not maintaining binary compatibility with drivers that they didn't want to impose arbitrary restrictions in the kernel. My suspicion is that compatibility with windows drivers, if technically feasible at all, would have performance issues for linux. Would someone more familiar with the kernel and the windows driver model care to comment?
no ponies?? ..... sniff
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This stuff is so silly ... if you're using your box correctly, and not running as admin, this whole thing is meaningless and amusing.
The freeway system is NOT a monoculture. Yes, it has a set of "open standards" in the form of somewhat-uniform road signs and driving rules, but in its implimentation it varies widely from road to road and vehicle to vehicle.
We have concrete roads, asphalt roads, and in some places around the world roads made of dirt or ice. We have cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, and in some places bicycles and rick-shaws. Vehicles are powered by gasoline, diesel, more exotic fuels, and human-power.
We have exit and entrance ramps in a variety of configurations.
Now, imagine if you will a country where all the roads are made of the same material from the same factory and are built by the same vendor. Imagine that there is a flaw in the material or road-making process that shortens the useful life of the road by 25%. I'd say that country has a serious problem. Much more serious than they would if a variety of vendors built the roads using a variety of materials sourced from a variety of manufacturing plants.
All in all roads, at least in the USA, are not a monoculture in its implimentation. Not by a long shot.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Over specialization breeds weakness, Its slow death.
Too much of the one thing is bad, Diversity is good!
From an organizational point of view (be it a company, a government department, whatever), while it's true that a monoculture introduces security risks, a 'polyculture' introduces other problems - complexity in terms of patch administration, help desk, staff training, desktop imaging, license compliance, etc etc. This is precisely why organisations generally standardise on a single product + version - regardless of the underlying format.
Switching to an open format (eg ODF) does not imply a polyculture, it just doesn't preclude it. Chances are that a given organisation will standardise on a software tool to work with that format; they'll still be a monoculture and (theoretically) subject to the same risks.
Having said all this, I agree on the statement that publically owned documents should avoid proprietary formats. That's a no-brainer.
If your box has a local-user privilage escalation exploit that you can be tricked into executing, then a black hat can 0wn your box.
If your box and boxes used by 80% of the computing public share that same exploit, it makes a very attractive target.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
from those that subsist in a proprietary monoculture.
Actually, that would be a "monoculture," not just a proprietary one. If everybody ran Linux and such a vulnerability existed, the same thing would happen.
It's news if a worm doesn't exploit a large piece of monoculture software (a.k.a. MS Windows or Word). This same story could have been rewritten with the same words, just exchanging virus names for almost any virus. News would be a terrible virus exploiting a less wide-spread piece of software, like the blackice firewall software and the witty worm a few years ago.
For example, look at the list on the libpng problem I noted (http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/10857/info). I mean my god, that's a ton of platforms. Windows, MacOS, multiple linuxes, multiple browsers, etc. The problem is that they all implemented PNG and for somplicity, they were all using reference code to do it. Thus the exploit, found in that code, applied to all of them.
I'm not saying that's not harder to exploit than a bunch of systems 100% the same, I'm saying it's still a problem. If you REALLY want to protect thigns by a heterogenoius environment, you need to have thigns that are majorly different. Use different OSes, different microarchitectures, different document formats, etc, etc.
I don't think it's a problem having common standards and even common platforms, we gain more than we lose. We just need to get in a more secure mindset.
As an example of a big monoculture that most people are quite happy about is x86. Everything in the consumer world uses it these days, now even Macs. It's wonderful for interoperability, ask anyone that's ever messed with VMWare. However, it is a weakness. If the machine code is 100% different, it means you need two totally different binaries to affect two platforms. With a shared microarchitecture, that's at least taken care of. However I don't think you'll find many that would seriously suggest we should have tons of different platforms just to avoid problems.
Open standards are great, but precisely because they can create a monoculture standard, the one format everyone uses to exchange a certian kind of data. The problem with Word isn't the monoculture, it's the lack of openess.
I use Word on four computers, and I haven't seen this infection.
Hmm, maybe because unlike in biology, we can easily fix computers without years of clinical trials. and research studies.
The whole concept that diversity somehow protects from viruses is ludicrous. It may stop a universal outbreak by limiting it to some subset of the population, but if you are part of that vulnerable population, a virus is no less devastating. Empirically, when there *was* a diversity of computer operating systems, viruses *still* ran rampant. Think about the late 1980s. There were substantial populations of MSDOS, Commodore, Apple, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari, etc. computers around. Most people here are probably too young to remember but there were a lot of viruses in those days too. It is not the evil Microsoft monoculture that brought about viruses. They pre-existed that by a long while.
I would go so far as to predict that a diverse culture of computer operating systems would actually *increase* the damage viruses can do. Sure, a single virus couldn't take down everything at once, but there would also be far fewer resources thrown at stopping any given virus. Antivirus software would have to be written and maintained for each platform. Security vulnerabilities would have to be patched for each platform. Each time you diversify the culture, you increase the amount of redundant work needed to keep the entire population safe. Fewer resources means more vulnerabilities and slower response times. That, in turn, would mean more viruses doing damage in the real world.
An epidemic keeps propagating if, on average, an infected subject infects more than one target. If it infects less than one, the next "generation" will be smaller than the previous one, etc. The number of infected targets depends on how many contacts the subject has, and how many of these get infected.
For human infections, an infected subject contacts family members, maybe schoolmates and coworkers. On average, it takes more than a simple casual contact to get infected. So, the number of contacted targets is small. If enough are vaccinated, or otherwise invalid, the average number of infected targets drops below 1, and the epidemic stops. The interesting result is that the infection stops before every potential target is infected. A typical infection affect a city or a province, and then stops.
Computer infections are very different. A virus infected computer can contact thousands of other computers. Even if many are protected, chances are than many more than 1 in a thousand will be infected. Computer viruses can spread very fast!
Diversifying with two or three brands of software will maybe minimize the results, but cannot stop such infections before all vulnerable machines are infected. To limit the infection to "a city or a state" when a sick machine contacts thousands of otehrs, something like 99.9% of the machines must be either "different" (diversity) or "vaccinated" (anti-virus,etc). Unless you are ready to manage diversity by running a thousand different brand of software, the anti-virus route looks much more realistic.
-- Louarnkoz
I see what he's saying about the rare case of viruses. But the alternative to monoculture is having a standard that is poorly implemented by a ton of different programs which all have different bugs, so you can't do anything anywhere.
If you need an example, just try looking at HTML/CSS/JavaScript. You can write code that is completely standards-compliant and have it look different in each of IE, FireFox, Opera, and Safari. If the same thing happens with the Open Document format, everyone will be devoting 50% of document-writing time to portability testing/hacking just as we have to do with web-dev time now.
Given the choice, I'd prefer to have standards that are IMPLEMENTED and fight viruses by... fighting viruses.
It's easy to predict what has happened thousands of times before. It's hard to predict the future.
Retraining won't be a problem. You just need to have computer literate employees. :-)
Is the problem that we have a monoculture, or is it the quality level of that monoculture, or is it that we don't have barriers and quarantines to limit damage?
Thought experiment #1: you have a choice of a diverse world where Apple, Microsoft, Sun and everyone else has written their own sshd, or a monoculture world where everyone runs OpenSSH. Which would you choose?
Thought experiment #2: how worried would you be about monoculture if the operating system on 95% of computers were OpenBSD? SELinux?
Thought experiment #3: before malware enters your body it has to run the gamut of being stuck to mucus and swept out, being sneezed out or coughed out, being hammered by natural antibiotics, being dropped in acid, and potentially being expelled from the digestive tract if found to be toxic. Do our computers have an equal or similar level of protection against unfriendly programs?
This particular vulnerability was discovered when it was attempted to be used on a highly specific target. This was not your typical 0-day worm or anything, not even close. Targeted attacks will use any vector they can to get in - it may as well have been Winamp or any other program.
So which came first again?
The chicken or the egg?
I predict that because of ... monoculture... whatever... err microbiology, nanoparticles and so on, a virus for Vista will be created.
That's it. In one year Slashdot will write about me and my amazing prediction came true, how the hell I can be so smart to ever guess this coming?!
I think you meant to say "the less obvious future" there, otherwise your first clause contradicts the second.
Isn't it the MS Product Management culture?
You have a PM who is measured on sales. Sales by now are hugely upgrades. The only way to motivate upgrades is new features. So you introduce them, whether they are really needed or wanted, or not. They are then heavily used by the salespeople, before the sale, selling to people who are not the end users of those features.
And so it comes about that IT buys, and what the ordinary user thinks of as a glorified on screen typewriter actually becomes, via Word macros, a powerful if flawed programming language, and what the end user thinks of as a document becomes a program that can wipe his hard drive or change anything at all on his machine it chooses.
This is not about mono culture versus poly. If you had twenty different PMs behaving like this across the whole industry, it would be as bad or worse. Its about feature driven business models in areas where the buyer is not a sophisticated end user of the products. IT buys Office. What does IT really know about using Word to write? Hosts of features can be sold to IT that could never be sold to the people who use the stuff....
How in God's name would you switch a from MySQL to PostgreSQL to Oracle to MS SQL or to anything. Have you ever actually written a real database application?
Seriously, the amount of time spent switching between any of these system is drastic. For a typical, small database application, there is probably 20k-50k lines of stored procedures. All the different vendors have their own SQL proceedures.
How about securing the databases. I'd love to see how anyone could possibly say that the administration of a transition could possibly be an option. If your problem was MySQL security to begin with, how can you possibly suggest that switching to another database could be easy. The simple administration cost of securing a new server, especially with an existing dataset that was previously developed to be secured on another SQL server would be tremendous.
Switching between PHP and Perl, hehe come on now... I won't even bother wasting my time on this one.
Linux and Solaris.... if you have a security issue on one, you have a security issue on both. The fact is that the majority of security bugs that would be related to these is due to servers that are either not kept up to date or due to zero-day exploits. Both server systems are actively hacked and are high level targets for crackers. It doesn't matter which you use, you have to update both pretty much the same way, switching is a waste of time and money.
So, if you were to reason that the original posters comment was regarding the monoculture of PHP/MySQL/Linux, well I'll make it simple....
The open source community forces this crap down our throughts all the time, they love this solution, it works more or less. There are books on it. There are sections on Orielly's website dedicated to it. It's advertised regularly everywhere. This solution is chosen not specifically on its merits for simplicity/stability/security, but it chosen because it is relatively simple, relatively stable, and relatively secure, AND most importantly, it's Open Pop Culture.
I know a bunch of sales people that love to sell the hell out of the solution because it's fun to say LAMP. They don't know what it means, but they make up all kinds of neat new industry sales terms regularly to make them sounds like they have a clue... they don't. Oh, they also think P stands for PHP or Perl, not both. They don't understand how a letter can be variable.
So, before you put your 2 cents in, think first. Your rinky dink 50 line PHP scripts for changing passwords is not representative of a full mature system. In a real development work, we use features like stored procedures, complex views, server specific indexes. Also, just because your blog hasn't been hacked, don't think that just installing a new SQL server is actually going to secure anything, some of us have actually spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours just setting securities and permissions to different data sets.
The LAMP monoculture is real, it is there. Once you use it, you're locked into it. There is no transitioning from one to another.
Now if I misunderstood you and you really meant that Linux/MySQL/PHP itself wasn't a monoculture because you can choose different options when you're first starting... well ok, that may be true, but the majority doesn't. Perl rarely appears on the web anymore, the web is typically PHP, ASP, or JSP. I don't have exact numbers, but if you want to make me look like an idiot, post real numbers with reference that contradicts me. LAMPHP is a monoculture because it's used so often that lack of talent on the other solutions keeps it that way.
No go and try to sound like you know something somewhere else
>underlying idiocy
We shouldn't put people on pedestals above all criticism, but Dan Geer has earned the right to have people at least offer some evidence when they accuse him of "idiocy".
Incidentally, Kephart and White have used biological epidemiological math to model the spread of malware, as have Williamson and Leveille. Actual researchers are finding the pathogen analogy fruitful.
This discussion could not be complete without a car analogy.
Analogies are like cars. Sometimes they're buggy or unsuited for the job but if you test them carefully they can be superb tools.
First we hear about our beloved, albeit cloned bananas at risk of going extinct, now Apples and Windows lemons are in danger... it's all over folks. Get out your tin foil and wrap your fruit up tight.
And MAYBE part of the reason Word is being infected with worms, isn't some side-effect of monoculture and the lack of software diversity, but rather a result of hackers almost solely targeting Microsoft products.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Postgres/Oracle/DB2/MSSQL/MySQL all have a similar functionality set, so they can reproduce the data the user wants with a lot more certainty.
I'm sorry, but your premise is too insufficiently developed for your conclusion to naturally follow. By the same logic, one can say that since Word has font sizes, families, bold, and italic, as well as the ability to set text as having certain styles, and so does every other word processor, that would be a "similar functionality set" and therefore can reproduce the data the user wants with a lot more certainty.
Can I just shut down Postgres, bring in MySQL and point it at the file(s?) that Postgres was using and just have it work, or is there more to it than that?
Anyway. He is right, although wrong at the same time. The widespread use of just one forum software package has indeed led to a mono-culture of sorts and a discovered hole in the package means thousands of sites are at risk.
He is however wrong in thinking this says anything about Linux Mysql Apache or even PHP. The bug is in the software written with it. It would be like blaming C (or whatever word is written in) for word virusses.
But the fact that everyone use phpBB for their forum in its default form is a perfect example of the risks of a monoculture. You gain the benefit of standard software but the moment a security risk develops everyone is at risk.
The more people use your software the more secure it has to be. It is unlikely anyone will bother to hack my own php login script. You probably will never even find it. A lock on a door somewhere in the artic just doesn't need to be as solid as that off one in london.
Especially if the lock in the artic is unique and everyone in london uses the same lock (and even the same key).
HOWEVER there is one advantage to opensource. I can easily rewrite the phpBB software to make it invulnareble to standard attacks. Good luck rewriting MS Office or anyother closed source piece of software.
Opensource is not immune to mono-culture problems. It is just easier to prevent it/fix it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The other reason for the attack being a Word only is down to the number of copies of Word which are used day to day compared to the alternatives. As Star Office/Open Office etc become more popular the number of attacks will increase.
The same thing is true for Firfox, the browser with the biggest market penetration is the one which will suffer the attacks.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Four days ago, Dan's prediction came true ...for the 200th or so time. Remember Outlook? The corporate mail system monoculture? At home, it might have 20% or so of the market, but it's big with business users.
True, the Word thing is more nifty, because people don't expect it, and it's not a macro virus. But even so, this is hardly the first time MS users get bitten exactly because they are MS users.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
While I do enjoy someone writing a think piece on the idea of the dangers of a mono-culture. This work has been throughly research by Stephanie Forrest ( http://www.cs.unm.edu/~forrest/ ) at the university of new mexico via the sante fe institue and the complex systems program at the University of Michigan. For anyone that wants to acutally learn more about the application of immunization models to computer security, I suggest you check out her research.
The analogy is not neccessarily false when you introduce the factor of human interaction into the equation. Since computers are operated by humans, and very large percentage of malware depends on human interaction, the lack of enough potential hosts can indeed make the spread of certain types of malware impossible.
For example, if a person must open up a email attachment and execute some bad code in order to get infected and spread the worm further, potential targets are a large factor in the ability of the worm to spread. Just as only a certain percentage of people who come in contact with a sick person will actually get sick themselves, only a certain number of people who get email worms in their inbox will fall for it and infect themselves. The mitigating factors are different of course, but the end result is that the inectious agent, whether it be biological or electronic must have sufficient contact with other potential hosts to propogate.
So the common thread that makes the biological/electronic analogy work is humans. The person who volunteers to teach spaggetti art to 3 and 4 year olds at the pre-school, is more likely to catch a cold than the person who doesn't - just as the person who browses porn with IE while logged on as an admin is more likely to catch some nasty malware than someone who doesn't.
Network borne worms that require only internet conetivity (no human interaction) to spread are another story. Because every potential host on the planet is reachable in a matter of milliseconds, and contact with another vulnerable host guaratees infection, the percentage of vulnerable hosts on the net is almost irrelevant. The BlackICE worm from a few years back is proof positive of this.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I've looked for reasearch like this before, as the commonalites between the spread of biological agents and electronic malware has always interested me, but have never seen this.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
... can it evolve Linux?
:P)
(Sorry, couldn't resist
Monoculture?! Try bad coding and bad management. There's plenty of propietary software out there that is excellent and secure, it's just done properly.
"One of the reasons that birds feed in flocks is that it means more eyes to watch for danger. Most of the time, at least one member of the flock will see the hawk coming and sound the alarm." - Hawks at the Feeder
The moral is obvious: living in a "proprietary monoculture" can reduce your risks.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
The symantec description doesn't provide enough detail to be sure, but like everyone else I'll assume that this attack is enabled by a Word macro exploit.
.doc files have been around for over a decade now, and the closest thing I've ever seen to a legitimate use of them is to write self-propagating viruses. (in fact, I once received a CD from Microsoft - the original "wolfpack" cluster server beta - that had macro viruses in its .doc files. Gave the virus scanner a fit when it couldn't scrub the files...)
.vbe or .vbs) But that's been an obvious solution for a decade, and they haven't done it yet, so I wouldn't hold my breath.
Word macros included in
It seems that in all this time *someone* could have taken the effort (granted, a large one even with the libraries out there for dealing with Office file formats) to write a filter to strip macros from Word documents. Then install this filter in all your mail servers, and voila - no more word macro viruses.
Of course the easiest solution would be for MS to remove the ability to include macros in Word documents entirely, and require them to be saved to and read from a separate, executable file type. (e.g. one of the existing VBscript file types, like
Okay evolution in viruses is easy. A couple of random numbers and you're away. Use one to determine whether to modifiy the virus itself (low probability, on the order of 5% because most mutations are bad rather than good for an organism), whether to leave it alone and copy it as is or whether to lengthen or shorten the code. The second random number determines which byte within the code to modify if you're going to modify the code and a third random number gives you the value to change it to.
There you go... Evolution. Most of the modified copies won't work and are "dead", but some will and they will go on to pass on their code to the next generation.
Additional strategies... Don't infect every potential file with every execution, that'll give you low diversity and you're looking for wide diversity. A few per execution, also chosen at random. Also don't bother checking to see if a file is already infected, just re-infect it because most of the infections will after all be dead; think of it as predatory behaviour.
So you now have an evolving organism taking advantage of the software environment. A monoculture such as Windows and Word will allow it to spread far and wide. A Linux or OSX monoculture would be just as vulnerable.
Deleted
I think some of you guys have the "mono-culture" thing all wrong.
I believe the notion that formats and standards developed by a group of people with an intellectual mono-culture are more likely to have flaws than, say, formats and standards developed and maintained by many.
This has nothing to do with the fact that the formats and standards themselves are a mono-culture.
Some here would be implying that the basic design of a dog is wrong, simply because dogs are similar- in that they all have 4 legs. This is just silly- we should be looking at the diversity of the dog's gene pool, and the power of this ability to improve the dogs resilience, longevity, etc.
So when the there is a pileup, if you're in one type or model of car you're more likely to kick the bucket than another model. And you know what, people do look at safety when buying a car so there's a gradual evolution to safer vehicles.
You're right, diversity isn't the be all and end all, it doesn't help the individual, but look at the number of species on the planet which are not single sex species. The whole point of sex is to increase diversity so that when disaster hits, there are enough mutations out there that the species as a whole doesn't disappear. The organisation isn't halted completely.
Deleted
My fears about the monoculture in nail driving have come true!
From this, we learn the lesson that we don't have to have a single vendor in order to have universal interoperability. This funny thing called "open standards" allows numerous different vendors to interoperate with each other. And then apps live and die by how user friendly they are and how well they support the standards.
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If it's a question of moving to WordPress, there are many who have made the switch before you and some have even supplied instructions.
If what you're really looking for is a one-click method to make the shift, maybe you should reconsider your future in IT.
blog
Its facinating that IT is just like biology. Much like our bodys whose dna is full of viral fragments and viral workarounds, so to our computers are having increasing amounts of computer 'dna' in the form of applications and services that do nothing but keep the viri at bay.
Theres a Phd in there somewhere on how to apply biology to IT in this arena!
My bad - it looks like it may be a buffer overrun exploit, not a macro attack. So it's not a problem with the Word design and functionality, but the implementation, of the sort that no one should make and almost everyone does.
So to get my 2 bits in on monoculture:
Buffer exploits - whether the Morris worm or this attack - rely on monoculture. This expolit is in fact an extreme example, only infecting Word 2003. (since it crashes other versions of Word, it looks like the vulnerability is present in those other versions, but the virus writer either didn't or couldn't craft an overrun string that would hijack multiple versions properly.)
Lots of other exploits don't rely on monoculture. But buffer exploit attacks rely on the (almost) exact position of the stack pointer and a variable on that stack; merely recompiling a program with a different optimization level will probably require exploit code to be re-written. At this level, open-source systems like Apache aren't necessarily a monoculture, as long as everyone isn't running the same version of the same distro.
How about this to break monocultures?
Give every processor a different instruction set. So if you want code to run on a particular machine, it has to be compiled for that particular machine. In practice that's likely to mean compiled on that machine. Then there's next to no chance of "foreign" code {viruses, worms, trojans, whatever} running on your machine.
This would mean it would be very difficult to sell closed source software, but that's no great loss IMHO. Remember, before Windows, software for the various Unix versions and VAX/VMS often was supplied in source form but without a licence permitting distribution. And anyway, the lack of source code never prevented anyone from copying Windows or Office.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
From the article: "Examples are as plentiful as they are sad: Consider the virus that brought on the Irish potato famine".
*Viruses* had nothing to do with the Irish potato famine. While there were many factors for the famine, many of them political, the pathological reason was the *fungus* Phytophthora infestans.
The "monoculture bomb" analogy only goes so far before failing. When we're talking about corn or something like that, obviously a specific engineered disease could cause widespread devastation. But in the computer world, viruses can do far more insidious things than just shut down a network, and a polyculture might actually make that easier.
Let's say you've got a hacker who wants access to a file on your network that a bunch of users have access to. In this case, the hacker isn't trying to infect ALL the computers; any one of them will do. In this case, a polyculture actually HURTS security, becuase the hacker only has to find one flaw in any of the many different applications people are running. Can't hack his way into Word? That's okay, some nerd in the office is running StarOffice and he can find a backdoor for that. Or whatever.
Not to mention, in a monoculture it's easier to standardize training and security. The security guys in an all-Windows place only need to keep up with the (legion) Windows vulnerabilities out there. In a polyculture environment, they have to know about Windows vulnerabilities PLUS Linux, Mac, and all sorts of other vulnerabilities, because one compromised computer can mean a whole lot of lost information.
Give every processor a different instruction set. So if you want code to run on a particular machine, it has to be compiled for that particular machine. In practice that's likely to mean compiled on that machine. Then there's next to no chance of "foreign" code {viruses, worms, trojans, whatever} running on your machine.
That doesn't follow at all. It just means that they will have to distribute themselves in source form and compile themselves on the target machine--or rather, trick the target machine into compiling and loading them. This is already close to what macro-malware does, and is exactly what the old pine worm did (the subject line tricked users into pressing two keys which would save it to a file, compile, and run it on most systems). It worked on any processor that had a roughly-posix OS with good C compiler called "C".
--MarkusQ
You don't have to be a Dr to have this level of common sense. This isn't super amazing OMFG groundbreaking stuff. Same old same old.
The thing that amazes me is that there are *so* many interesting issues that this view of computer systems raises and the best that the collective wisdom (such as it is) of the net can come up with is a bunch of mindless Linux advocacy and Windows counter defense. In general, any discussion of this topic without also recognizing systems other than Windows and Linux is missing the point.
Have a nice day!
That is all.
I commend you on your creation and use of this straw man, (that "Diversity" is the end all and be all for information security). Then, like a soda virtuoso soda jerk putting a cherry atop some frozen confection, you deftly place a car analogy upon the crown of your straw man. I don't think anyone (that has any intelligence) is arguing that a diverse computing environment is going to solve all computer problerms.
Incidentally, using your freeway analogy, what would happen if one day, without warning, there simply was not enough gasoline? Gasoline powered vehicles would not function, and unless there were vehicles capable of running on alternative power sources, transportation in any meaningful sense would just not happen. The more alternatives there are to gasoline engines in actual use, the less impact such a sudden loss of gasoline motive power would have.
Does that rough analogy clue you in as to what the conversation is really about?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Word viruses have been around for at least 8 years, and the Microsoft Word monoculture for longer than that. How is this new?
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
Explain how, by expressing a ressemblance between things otherwise unlike, he invalidates his analogy.
Not to mention it completely ignores the economic factors which created the "monoculture".
And also explain how these economic factors invalidate the analogy. Do use examples of agroeconomic factors pertaining to crop monocultures while doing so (I expect the word "locust" to make an appearance in this explanation).
You can't take the sky from me...
From the millions of Windows-only trojans, viruses, etc.? Yeah, the most fruitful target will attract the most exploits (and also the most investment in countermeasures). The thesis was obvious, and this Word-only trojan is hardly the first demonstration of it.
Heck, it had already been well-demonstrated when it was first suggested.
OTOH, the biological analogy is flawed in many ways, most notably that computer systems don't reproduce themselves, and therefore the central risk associated with a monoculture (that a single hazard will reduce the population to below where it is reproductively viable) doesn't exist.
That neither the target systems nor the exploits evolve in the darwinian sense is also a critical difference which makes the dynamics radically disanalogous.
Given the mass disk imaging techniques currently in use at many corporate sites in lieu of traditional installations, and given the ability for Linux sysadmins to lock down end user boxes so that only the central admins could install software, I could certainly see a "monoculture" being a very real possibility at a given site even when running Linux in a corporate context.
Now, whether or not that monoculture represents the same kind of risk that a Windows monoculture does is a different question. :-) But there is still some risk.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
If the Apache foundation was conquered by crazy quilters, they might force you to by an Apache quilt in order to run their monopoly. They too would be in violation of the Sherman Act. This is a silly example, but the point is that monopolies may be bad for security or free markets but they are not illegal.
A monopoly is a bit like a spouse. Having a spouse is not illegal, but abusing your spouse for personal gain is both illegal and repugnent.
Think global, act loco
Geer and company stated that any uniform and ubiquitous OS could cause similar problems, so it is not as though this is a MSFT-only situation.
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The NSA, meanwhile, used to mitigate the risk by using the same OS (*nix variant) compiled in different ways.
CCIA still has the report on its Website: http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf
The report is as true today as ever......
Will Rodger
If you generalize things enough then you can make almost any rule apply to fields that it wouldn't normally apply to. Of course diversity makes it harder to write viruses and spyware, but at the same time forcing diversity upon the computer industry might also make virus writers write multi-platform viruses. The motivation of evolution and that of a virus writer should not be compared since once is based on natural selection and the other is based on the conscience choice. It's not that non MS programs don't have exploits it just that most malicious programmers are not interested in writing a virus for openoffice or linux. The comparison is really not valid at all beside that of saying DUH diversity can be advantageous. Unlike the real world however diversity in the computer field leads to confusion, lowered productivity and much harder administration. Must a person make up a catchy phrase to claim credit for knowing that MS would get hit first my virus writers? I think anyone who knows anything about viruses already knew this information over a decade ago. This really isn't news just a fancy way of saying I told you so. Open document standards are a great idea, but it's not as big a disadvantage to MS as you would think. The competitions products simply are not that great. All MS has to do is make legacy products like Office 2000 work with open document standards to include diversity while excluding competitors.
orthagonal
Word not found in the Dictionary and Encyclopedia. Did you mean:
orthogonal
John Titor, is that you?
Are you sure the word "mono" still applies ?
Except that Microsoft got legal trouble for trying to prevent alternative solution (like closed standart preventing interoperability).
Given the availibility and the license of Apache's source code, I don't think user feel "locked-in".
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Although I don't agree with the parent post I don't think his post should be marked as a troll. Let's have open, honest discussions not try to silence the opinions with which we don't agree.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I think that the folks over at Consortiuminfo need to hire some real life tech experts
t ures-and-document-formats-dans-bomb-goes-off/
http://rjdohnert.wordpress.com/2006/05/24/monocul
Duh!
But that's an internal monoculture. IBM isn't going to have the exact same system as Sun, or RedHat, or whoever. You can have a standard base without being exactly like everyone else.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
But this just brings us full circle back; a monoculture is easier to maintain, upgrade, troubleshoot, etc. -- all things that an IT department wants. Computer break? Lemme re-image a new one. Bam. 1 hr later and you're back to exactly where you were (you did keep backups, or all files on the server, right?).
I think the larger problem is monoculture outside of each corp -- sure, a virus might take ABC, Inc. down because all their computer share the same vulnerability, and that's too bad, but if almost all computers globally (ATMs running Windows variants, anyone?) also share that vulnerability, it's not bad, it's a *disaster*.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Well that does pose a risk. I can see in the next five years someone making a wide-spreading Linux worm/virus, and if all your boxen are identical then the same vulnerabilities would be present across your organization. A virus would indeed shut your company down for hours like it does today. However, you've still got diversity across multiple organizations. Sure, your Linux version of Sasser or MyDoom could shut you down, but it won't shut EVERYONE down like MyDoom did. Best security practices would dictate that you keep at least a few machines running something else (Linux in a Windows shop, Windows or *BSD in a Linux shop, etc.) so that you can restore and keep going. Make sure that your servers are one thing (or a bunch of things) and your client machines are another. The network admin's box is something else. Hard to maintain? Maybe, but you can still standardize with X number of known systems, so long as everyone isn't bringing in their own distros or copies of Windows and installing their own apps in root mode.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
Crap, the sky is falling. Again.
Terrible karma and aiming lower, which in this environment of one-sided reason, is higher.
That's intelligent design.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Use Word in SAFE MODE!
I'm not kidding...TechTarget reported that this morning in one of my security emails...
Microsoft expects scores of millions of office workers to reboot their systems into Safe Mode to write a document until they offer a fix next month...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
If everyone technology adhered to the same standard, be it ODF, ECMAscript (javascript), tcp/ip, etc., would that constitute an equally vulnerable, just not proprietary, monoculture too?
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Did it happen because it was foreseen or because his ideas sowed the seeds?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Brian: You've got to think for your selves! You're ALL individuals!
The Crowd: Yes! We're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different!
The Crowd: Yes, we ARE all different!
Man in crowd: I'm not...
The Crowd: Sch!
those that exist in diverse gene pools are at a lower risk, both individually and collectively, from those that subsist in a proprietary monoculture."
s/from/than
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
The System V mailers and the V8 mailers (AT&T Bell Labs Research stuff between Version 7 and Plan 9) mostly ran with group-mail privileges instead of root, and the Upas derivatives had simple and elegant rewrite rules. Both sendmail and the AT&T versions dealt with UUCP as long as that mattered, which was another can of worms (though Honey DanBer cleaned it up a lot), but sendmail couldn't really defend itself well against UUCP problems.
As far as monoculture goes, the BSD side of the world almost all ran sendmail, the System V world mostly didn't (but most of the Internet ran BSD variants including SunOS), and it took a while for SMTP to supplant UUCP, largely because of the Acceptable Use Policies that kept the Internet quasi-non-commercial until the Commercial Internet Exchange opened it up.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
>Big boon? Short-sighted users and developers may think so. It is difficult to get hardware documentation from
>some major vendors (NVIDIA, for instance), and embracing binary drivers certainly does not help at all.
Is that there will never be documentation for every little hardware device on the market. *Not* *ever*. Seriously, if they had to document ever feature, some devices just wouldn't be made. Today people write drivers by walking down the hall to the guy who made the hardware and asking him how you do various things.
Obviously, I'm not talking about ATI cards here, but there are plenty smaller devices that can't have documentation released.
Also, as far as NVIDIA and ATI cards go, let me clue you in. No one using them cares whether the binaries are open source or not. If ATi is willing to release decent binary drivers, then that's what users will use. If ATI only puts out decent binary drivers for one platform, that sucks, but if there's a workaround to get those to work, there's no reason not to use it.
Or, as it is done here in the University where I work, "bring-your-own-distro" is tolerated, as long as : 1. The service's local sysadmin is informed and has given consent, 2. details of the installation are kept written some whare.
Beside, university-wide, two distro are officially supported : Mandrake is supported by the Linux people, Suse is (starting to get) supported by the Novell team.
And I can almost add Solaris to the list of supported "partly opensource" systems, now that Sun is putting some effort with the OpenSolaris kernel...
(Most server here are running Solaris, Linux, NetWare, there are some running MacOS X. Admins try to avoid Windows as much as possible whenever possible - During the MyDoom wave, only the (windows-based) desktops were unavailable. The servers remained up).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
*Viruses* had nothing to do with the Irish potato famine. While there were many factors for the famine, many of them political, the pathological reason was the *fungus* Phytophthora infestans.
*ahem*
[shallow and pedantic]
*Fungi* had nothing to do with the Irish potato famine. Phytophtora is an oomycete, not a fungus.
[/shallow and pedantic]
This is really just an economic decision. An IT monoculture brings with it certain benefits, such as decreased (non-virus-related) support costs, but also certain costs, such as increased vulnerability to viruses. It's worthwhile for people like Dan Greer to make the IT world aware of those costs, but even once they become aware, a Windows monoculture may still be preferable for some. OTOH, I don't think the costs of supporting multiple OSs are as high as most people think. We have a small network with OS X Server serving files and doing authentication for a bunch of Windows and Linux boxes, and it's really not very hard to keep running.