Apple Responds to MOAB
frdmfghtr writes "Apple has released what appears to be the first security update as a result of the "Month of Apple Bugs." While the Apple site doesn't explicitly say that the fix was a result of the MOAB, it does point to a sample Quicktime file that triggers the overflow flaw (well, sort of...it says the file is there but doesn't provide any links)."
So what is the proper response to the MOAB people? They are revealing real bugs, some of which could be exploitable. Ignoring them leads to decreased security. At the same time they have behaved very irresponsibly with regard to those bugs they have found, not notifying the vendor and providing time to fix before publication, nor following the route of immediate disclosure, the MOAB people seem to think it is all right to sit on bugs they find until the most convenient time for them to gain publicity. Worse, they intentionally space out the publication of the bugs, making a Dev/QA cycle to fix them have to wait till the end or commit to missing some. As such they have maximized the time of exposure for these bugs which encourages worms by giving malware authors as much time as possible.
Obviously increasing the security of end users is not the top priority. Accurately informing the public does not also seem to be their top concern since they named their project "Month of Apple Bugs" while many of the bugs they've announced are in third-part code (some of it cross-platform) that has nothing to do with Apple. It seems to me all they care about is publicity and sensationalizing themselves in the hope that they can capitalize upon it. Looking at them in that light, it makes sense to spread out the announcement of these bugs and not inform vendors beforehand because it increases the likelihood that people will be compromised, giving them the opportunity to go to news outlets ands say, "see we told you this might happen."
Given all of the above, what can be done? I'd certainly never want to work with people who eschew responsible disclosure and are interested only in themselves, nor would I trust them. But any press is good press, and most people are not security people and won't even understand what it is these people are doing, they'll just know they got press for security research. Is there any way the security or computing community can discourage this crap in the future and make it clear that irresponsible behavior like this is unacceptable?
This fix is in line with the typical timing and attention given Apple security updates - relatively quick and competent.
This pretty much busts MOAB's claims of Apple's ignorance and/or hostility at bug reports.
Apple has been doing better than most, fixing 99.9% of their problems through their established channels without MOAB's brand of nonsense. Count all the bugs fixed thru the normal dev bug report process. Count all those fixed by MOAB's. Compare.
IIRC nearly a third of their "Apple Bugs" are 3rd party problems to begin with.
MOAB are still flaming Apple Inc., Apple users, and anyone else who critiques their methods, and it's gotten personal and insulting. They come out swinging their fists at the Apple community, then cry foul because someone hits back.
If Apple users make you cry, go kick your tires.
You want the world to believe that you're a responsible developer that anyone will listen to or hire, prove it in daylight.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Yeah, it is hard to accuse Apple of dodging the project by explicitly highlighting their 'contribution'. I wonder what the author wanted to see.
"Oh Noez, W3 WUZ PWNED by the MO@B Kr3w!!!!"
Really pretty respectful to simply describe the bug, and describe the exploit that is specifically focussed on that bug, pointing the the source of it.
I think that MOAB did focus attention on some real issues although they had to stretch out some issues to multiple days (several DMG file structure errors which essentially were DOS at worst (a corrupt file shouldn't cause crashes it is true, but that can be one day worth of bugs since the fix is essentially 'validate file more effectively before loading it')
As far as the questions about things like diskutil restoring permissions on files that have lost their SUID bits due to being modified, thats a solid issue, although diskutil is run by administrative account from what I recall, and really points back to the question of how do you avoid having someone with an account on a machine they have in their home or office from getting root access, and then not doing stupid things to their machine. Basicly the same can be said about any system that allows someone root access. There is no OS that can stop SU from fraking things up as far as I know.
Anyway, I think the real truth is that there are no great showstoppers. Omniweb closed their security flaw the day it was released (and wondered why they couldn't have been contacted prior to the publicity. Any argument that 'Apple ignores bug reports' sort of goes to hell when talking about third party software issued). Even worse was day two's focus on VLC a project that has less relevance on Apple's OS than it does in the Linux world. I think they should have focused on things Apple needed to fix, rather than things that break on Apples, just like they break everywhere, without Apple having much to do with it at all, nor any real influence on the developers. I mean technically you could put any Window security issue into the Apple MOAB since Windows apps run on Macs these days. Is that helpful? Not really.
So I would say that Apple has shown a willingness to respond to a bug report, I have not really seen them creating negative press against the MOAB folks, and there hasn't really been a showstopper that was strong enough to get mainstream press.
They have VLC and OmniWeb in the list though. As these are not directly Apple bugs, I would have to lower the number to 21.
They also have Transmit, Rumpus, Colloquy, APE, and the PDF spec listed, none of which Apple wrote (although Apple did write an implementation of the last). To be generous, you'll have to drop the number to 17.
...by doing security review and finding some flaws that shouldn't be there in OS X.
We value OS X for its security and Unix-derived security and stability. How can you all claim to be good Commie open-sourcers like Stallman is and still oppose any peer-review that leads to the improvement of one or more BSD distro's security?
Many of these flaws are common on all platforms. OS X developers will have to be more careful in coding as this review shows. If we want to go on being secure on our virus-free platform, Apple and our developers need to do the code reviews for security.
many of the bugs are problems that are just outright bizare in thinking of how they'd get executed.
"Here is a malformed HFS+ filesystem that can potentially cause a kernel panic and cause arbitrary code execution. you should all be quaking in your boots."
now just one damn minute... first, you have to get me a DMG, which, apparently, will instantly panic the kernel. Fine. so what? In real life, i'd throw out the dmg file, download it again, it would panic again, and i'd give up.
I'm missing (and it could just be me) how that's in any way exploitable in any meaningful sense.
i think the problem is that MOAB is putting on a show of bugs.. and nothing more. These are bugs that either made it past the guys in Cupertino, or they just didn't see them as that big of a deal, and figured they'd get to them eventually.
Some of these bugs are bad and could cause Macs the world over to get pwn3d and get used to do whatever you can do with an pwn3d Windows box. Fine.
But many of them are just, well.. bugs that causes the system to crash. So the hell what? Without some kind of setup and extreme set of circumstances, the majority of the bugs here crash your system, and then you reboot...
Microsoft's problem has been "be a user on the internet with their software, get pwn3ed." I'm trying to see which of these bugs would give Mac users similar "functionality".
#21 requires a local user to take advantage of this escalation problem - on a machine that they are probably already the only user of
#20 is the same thing... as is #8, and #15.
the bulk of the others are "DoS, cause computer to crash with possibility of arbitrary code execution..." and that assumes the panic condition is consistent.
the only actual scary ones are #19 (not apple's software, and i don't even know if it could actually allow arbitrary code execution), #17, #1 (now fixed), #2 (not apple, and fixed), #4, and #20... so, 6... and 4 are left.
this is just stupid.. my machines are still buck naked on the internet, and i'm still not scared at all.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
WMD or not it will still ruin your day if one drops on you.
I know my last thought at seeing one coming for me would be "Well thank god I'm not being killed by a WMD or it would sure be tragic!"
"But this one goes to 11!"
Do you think these people have a monopoly on finding bugs?
What people? Security researchers?
Once OS X gets enough market share to be worthwhile to blackhats you're going to see a lot worse.
OS X has enough market share and other features to motivate people to exploit it now, it just has not had enough to motivate people hard enough to get past the difficulties involved. There is also no guarantee that OS X's market share will increase or that it will become more attractive to hackers at a rate that is greater than it becoming more difficult to exploit.
If you think researchers releasing bugs to the public without waiting for the vendor to patch is bad then you really won't like it when someone discovers a vulnerability and uses it to create a worm themselves or sells it to someone else that will. This is only a taste of things to come.
Yeah, creating a zero-day worm is worse than just releasing the bugs in such a way as to make it more likely that someone else will create a worm. What is your point?
The people you're complaining about. The people running MoAB.
I described several groups of people looking for security holes in OS X and you ask me if I think the MOAB people have a monopoly on looking for security holes in OS X? I'm going to say, "no" and wonder what you're smoking.
You're contradicting yourself, "they're motivated but they're not motivated enough". Ok.. that doesn't make sense.
Are you motivated to get $1000? Are you motivated enough to pick it up off the sidewalk if you see it? Are you motivated enough to saw off both your legs with a hacksaw if someone will give $1000 to you?
With OS X there is motivation, but since the task is more difficult for a variety of reasons, people with motivation exploit something else that is not as hard.
Any way you want to spin it, OS X doesn't have enough market share to be worth it.
The additional market share that can be exploited on OS X by adding a zero day exploit to a multi-vector worm is greater than adding most windows exploit vectors. In addition, those machines are more likely to contain certain valuable data commodities and a great deal more notoriety and recognition is possible. Assuming that market share tells the entire story is misguided.
OS X may be more secure than insert-other-OS-here but it's still going to have bugs and there will be people there to exploit them.
Again, what is your point and what does this have to do with anything? How does this particular project help that situation?
I'm trying to figure out your point. You're complaining about something uncontrollable as if it matters.
My points are very simple. I'm not convinced that there is less security research into OS X than Linux and Windows. The MOAB project is being run in a very unprofessional and irresponsible way and is obviously not being conducted by researchers who should be trusted. Further, due to their methods, they are doing more harm to overall security than good.
The important thing is how Apple responds to bugs not complaining about how 3rd parties disclose those bugs. It's offtopic and it seems like just another fanboy putting his own personal RDF spin on things.
You think it's off topic to discuss the methods of a third party in a discussion about Apple's response to that third party? Have you ever thought that the way in which bugs are submitted and publicized has a lot to do with how Apple will respond to them? You're really reaching here.
Your ad hominem attacks against MoAB...
Do you even know what ad hominem attacks are? I discussed what the MOAB people were doing that was wrong, not who they are. Please go reread a book on the rhetorical method.
Of course the vulnerabilities exist. That's not an issue. The point being discussed was how Apple has and should respond to disclosure that is designed to make them worse than they would be with a responsible disclosure method. Apple will fix them the same way they always do, they look at the problem, fix, it test, and roll it into the next patch. What other options do they have. Just because the MOAB people intentionally spread them out so this process will leave longer windows of vulnerability, there is not really anything else Apple can do, aside from criticize them for their methods.
Well for all intents and purposes the Month of Apple Bugs was to Apple security claim pretty much what your MOAB is to those poor trees. Hate to break it to you ladies and gentlemen, but there is no such thing as bug-free/secure OS. Not Linux, not OS X, and definitely not Windows. The bottom line is that the system is only as secure as its user makes it. What in this case made Month of Apple Bugs so disrupting was not that Apple's OS is insecure (at least not any more than any other OS), but rather the fact that Apple's own hype has painted them in a corner, making this an inevitable "discovery" of something that has been known all along.
Of course they didn't release an update for the Windows version of QT.