611 Defects, 71 Vulnerabilities Found In Firefox

Danny Begonia writes, "Some folks at Klocwork examined the large and complicated code base of the popular open source browser, Firefox. Overall, Firefox is a well written and high quality piece of software. Several builds were performed on the code, culminating in the final analysis of version 1.5.0.6. The analysis resulted in 611 defects and 71 potential security vulnerabilities. The Firefox team has been given the analysis results, and they will determine if or how they will deal with the issues." What are your thoughts — do Firefox and the open source community welcome this kind of analysis?

Comments

Obvious.

[keyne9]

do Firefox and the open source community welcome this kind of analysis?

Obviously, yes. Otherwise, open source would be closed-source.

Re:Obvious.

[ClamIAm]

Well, there's certainly some developers who get pretty bitchy when you file bugs or point out errors they've made. Does that make their project(s) closed-source/proprietary? No.

But the bigger point here is basically this: Slashdot editors appending a leading/flamebait question onto a story generates more responses, and more ad impressions, and hey look I fell for it too.

YES!

[Total_Wimp]

What are your thoughts -- do Firefox and the open source community welcome this kind of analysis?

God I hope so. What on earth is the advantage of open source security if they don't get this kind of analysis?

TW

Why Not?

[eldavojohn]

What are your thoughts -- do Firefox and the open source community welcome this kind of analysis?

And why wouldn't they?

Seriously, any free testing is better than none. Especially when they point out the problems explicitly and hand them to you. As a developer, you're then given one last chance to fix your product -- if these even need to be fixed. I would expect things like the 134 memory leaks to be fixed and fixed fast. I've known Firefox to occasionally go on a memory splurge at my computer's expense and have expected this to be the problem. As far as some of these other problems that are mild security issues, they might not need to fix them at all.

Even the article admits that a lot of these "issues" are trivial to fix:

By far, the majority of the defects reported were null pointer dereferences (446 defects). A large number of defects resulted from the code not checking for null after memory was allocated. In addition, there were many cases where the return value of functions designed to return null were not checked prior to dereferencing.

Sounds like a two week job of an intern to me. Checking for null and handling it after memory allocation could probably be a cut and paste job. If they mention the line numbers and files, there's your fix.

Either way, this is the beauty of open source software, anyone can go in and do this. Now, if you found bugs in a proprietary program from some company and sent them a breakdown of problems, you'd get one of two responses. 1) No response and 2) A charge that you are reverse engineering their product and in violation of many anti-piracy laws. If the company still didn't address the issues and you published the bugs, then you're nothing but a software terrorist.

So let's kick back and watch open source at its best! No software is perfect, but it will be enjoyable to know that a process like this can occur -- with the end result being a better free product on my machine!

Re:Why Not?

[RAMMS EIN]

``As far as some of these other problems that are mild security issues, they might not need to fix them at all.''

Rule #2 of security: there is no such thing as "mild security issues".

(Rule #1 is that the only secure system is no system at all)

Re:Why Not?

[Todd Knarr]

"Package A leaks memory when used with package B? Package B needs to free the memory we allocate. Not our fault. *CLOSED*"

Could be entirely legitimate to close it. If the spec says that package B shall take ownership of the memory when passed in, then yes a bug against package A for a memory leak should be closed and refiled against B that's not honoring the spec.

"Package A has a buffer overflow vulnerability? Packages B and C must filter the strings they send us. Not our fault. *CLOSED*"

Again possibly entirely legitimate. I've written a number of low-level routines that don't do much error-checking. This fact is explicitly noted in the API spec, and responsibility for error checking is explicitly placed on the caller. That's because these routines get used in performance-critical inner loops, and the error checking should only be done once outside the loop instead of every time the loop executes. That's easier to do if you hoist responsibility for the check up to the point where the data comes in, rather than pushing it down to the lowest level. But things like that do need to be spelled out in the spec, so users of that routine know what their responsibilities are.

Re:Why Not?

[ajs]

Rule #2 of security: there is no such thing as "mild security issues".

This is unreasonable in the extreme. Security analysis is a matter of risk analysis, and to say that there's no such thing as a mild security issue is about the same as saying there's no such thing as a mild risk. Risks of all forms are multi-dimensional quantities, and yes it is possible to have a risk that is so mild that the trade-offs involved in fixing it are not worth the pain.

Here's a great example: I can stand over your shoulder and watch you type your password to your 401k account in your browser. Firefox could address this "mild security issue" by having you pre-assign a dummy string which it removes from typed passwords. In any other browser that was not so configured the password you typed would fail to work, and the security problem would be greatly reduced.

This is, however, not enough of an issue that it's worth it to firefox to take the lead in addressing it. Perhaps if some particular OS or desktop provided such an option as a user-level setting, then it would be worth picking it up and using it, but as it stands, there are bigger fish to fry.

Why not?

[gstoddart]

Why wouldn't people like the fact that an independant group audited the code?

At least with open source, you can do that. And, giving the report directly to the Mozilla people means that they know the issues are there and can address them.

Better than security through obscurity where only the one who found the exploit knows it's there.

Cheers

Of course it does

[Dark Paladin]

Does Open Source encourage this kind of analysis and input? Absolutely. I'll take it two steps further. As of now, the Firefox team can:

1. Ignore the data.
2. Use the data to make a better product.
3. Look at the data, decide what is a true security issue/bug or not, and proceed on.

And, then there's also the option for the users:

1. Use Firefox as it is.
2. Make their own version.

The very idea of Open Source would, if there is a truly serious bug/security flaw that Firefox ignores, allow another group of people to fix the issue and release their own version - which could compete and even surplant the current Firefox version with the user base should people decide that's what they want.

So, without appearing rude, I would state that the question is a silly one. Yes, Open Source encourages this kind of analysis of all kinds. It just has a built in process that allows action to be taken - even if the primary code developer does not want to.

Of course, this is all just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Costs and motivations

[kjs3]

What are your thoughts -- do Firefox and the open source community welcome this kind of analysis?

Of course they do. Closed source companies say "what's my profit motivation for fixing these, and how much is it going to cost me to do it, and what are the costs of not doing it". Open source projects (usually) don't operate under those restrictions, so there's little downside to having issues pointed out.

Speaking of which... (Was Re:Obvious.)

[Billosaur]

Obviously, yes. Otherwise, open source would be closed-source.

The numbers look large given that Firefox is supposed to be the superior browser, but can you imagine what those same numbers would look like for IE? Think Gates & Co. would care to give up the source code to do a head-to-head comparison? I'll bet the folks in Redmond are looking at these numbers and wondering just how to get IE's numbers that low.

Re:Speaking of which... (Was Re:Obvious.)

[ScrewMaster]

I realise the comparison may seem odd, but my point is that being open about problems is a far better way to reach solutions, whatever field it is applied to..

That is actually an excellent example (and hardly off-topic) but in that case as well as software development, it only works when those responsible are actually interested in finding solutions. Far too often the goal is simple suppression of any negative information. That can be for any number of reasons, but true openness requires a degree of, well, maturity that is in rather short supply nowadays. It doesn't help that there are thousands of hungry attorneys out there just waiting to pounce on any misstep (from a purely legal perspective, honesty is not necessarily but the best policy.)

Re:Memory leaks

[kripkenstein]

TFA mentions 80 possible memory leaks and 54 certain ones (as certain as you can trust their software, but that's something else). That doesn't sound like very much for a large project like Firefox. Still, Firefox does seem to use more memory than it should, at times. Perhaps these newly-identified defects are related to such behavior?

Not too bad

[dctoastman]

At first I thought "Great, another FUD piece overblowing what are probably trivial issues."
The I RTFA and saw that it was an honest report of errors given in a straightforward and clear manner.
And like other posters have mention, none of them sound that life-threatening.

I'm sure some Microsofties are going to be spinning this wicked for the next couple of months however.

For one who works in QA this doesnt bother me....

[Thrymm]

Ive been in the QA field since 97.... no matter the complexity of the application, there are countless bugs, defects, etc.... in fact development in most cases welcomes the more found, hence the more fixed. There is a book on Amazon called the Art of Software Testing (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Software-Testing-Second /dp/0471469122/sr=8-1/qid=1157645733/ref=pd_bbs_1/ 103-3570097-7021412?ie=UTF8&s=books), which states no matter how many defects are found, it's probably not even half of what could be found with plenty of people testing an application. With an application like a browser where millions of users become testers of sort, this is bound to happen. So this doesnt bother me, as hopefully one would think the vulnerabilities and major issues will be fixed....

Security reviews are _the_ push for OSS

[msobkow]

The biggest push I've heard given to corps over the years is not that OSS can be modified, enhanced, integrated, or reused, but that it can be inspected, reviewed, and fixed.

If there is anyone working in OSS who doesn't appreciate receiving such an analysis of potential bugs, then they shouldn't be programming anywhere. Whether for fun or profit, fixing the bugs and adding features is what the "job" is.

Firefox Top 15 Excuses for Not Fixing Bugs

[Futurepower(R)]

Firefox developers become "defensive" when so many users report problems? That's a new excuse for the collection:

Mozilla Foundation Top 15 Excuses for Not Fixing Bugs

Top 15 things Firefox and Mozilla developers say about those who report difficult bugs, collected during the last 4 years:

1. Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly build.
2. Yes, this bug exists, but other things are more important.
3. No one has posted a TalkBack report. [If they had read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too, or a TalkBack report is not generated.]
4. If you would just give us more information, we would fix this bug.
5. This bug report is a composite of other bugs, so this bug report is invalid. [The other bugs aren't specified.]
6. You are using Firefox in a way that would crash any software. [But the same use does not crash any version of Opera.]
7. I don't like the way you worded your bug report. [So, I didn't read it or think about it.]
8. You should run a debugger and find what causes this problem yourself. [Then when you have done most of the work, tell us what causes the problem, and we may fix it.]
9. Many bugs that are filed aren't important to 99.99% of the users.
10. If you are saying bad things about Mozilla and Firefox, you must be trolling. [They say this even though Firefox and Mozilla instability is beginning to be reported in media such as Information Week. See the links to magazine articles in this Slashdot comment: Firefox is the most unstable program in common use.]
11. Your problem is probably caused by using extensions. [These are extensions advertised on the Firefox and Mozilla web site, and recommended.]
12. Your problem is probably caused by a corrupt profile.
13. If you are technically knowledgeable, you can spend several hours trying to discover the problem: Standard diagnostic - Firefox. [Firefox has "Standard Diagnostics"! LOL.]
14. I won't actually read the (many) bug reports, but I will give you some complicated technical speculation which pretends to be helpful but, on investigation, is shown to have nothing to do with the bugs.
15. It's understandable that Firefox developers become defensive when users report so many problems.

That oo.org bug is horrifying.

[Grendel Drago]

Oh. My. Pants. I saw that oo.org bug referred to in one of those posts that you link to.

Paraphrasing:

User: If you use the KDE save dialog, oo.org doesn't check before clobbering your files. Here's a simple three-line method to reproduce a bug that can cause users to lose data.
Developer: Works for me if I use the GTK or oo.org dialogs. *closes bug*
User: I said the *KDE* dialogs.
Developer: But oo.org uses its own dialogs. That's KDE's problem. *closes bug*
User: There's an option for using native dialogs! Right here! Also, no other KDE app has this problem. You're not using the filepicker correctly.
User 2: I can confirm this. Something's definitely up with the code interfacing with KDE's filepicker.
[five months pass]
Developer 2: Have you tried a newer version? Maybe it's fixed in the point release. Re-open if you're still having the problem. *closes bug*

I have to laugh, to keep from crying.

Welcome this kind of analysis

[aCapitalist]

What are your thoughts -- do Firefox and the open source community welcome this kind of analysis?

First we have the obligatory borg-like, "the community" reference. But the question should be re-phrased to "How many of you are so emotionally immature and insecure that you'll throw a tantrum because there might be something not uber-positive said about Firefox, Linux, Gnome, KDE...?"

P.S. who is making these thought decisions for "the community"?