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Mac Developer Mulls Zero-day Security Response
1.6 Beta writes "Landon Fuller, the Mac programmer/Darwin developer behind the 'month of Apple fixes' project, plans to expand the initiative to roll out zero-day patches for issues that put Mac OS X users at risk of code execution attacks. The former engineer in Apple's BSD Technology Group has already shipped a fix for a nasty flaw in Java's GIF image decoder and hints an an auto-updating mechanism for the third-party patches. The article quotes him as saying, 'Perhaps [it could be] the Mac OS equivalent to ZERT,' referring to the Zero-day Emergency Response Team."
The former engineer in Apple's BSD Technology Group has already shipped a fix for a nasty flaw in Java's GIF image decoder and hints an an auto-updating mechanism for the third-party patches.
Windows has an auto-updating mechanism for "third-party patches". It's called Internet Explorer.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Apple isn't doing this, and Landon Fuller doesn't have anything to do with Apple, other than having worked there. (And no, conspiracy theorists, he's not doing this at Apple's behest or as part of some coordinated fanboy effort to "make Apple look good".)
What Apple should be doing is developing a much more comprehensive and responsive security response group, which is lacking now. Apple needs to be patching issues in a much more timely manner. Hopefully the outcome of MOAB, things like Fuller's proposal, and other related things will be a real discourse on Apple security response and Mac OS X security.
It shouldn't be a marketing advantage, releasing patches with so little testing onto the general population. Yes patches should be released in a timely manner, but that would just be taking it to opposite extreme.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
When days become weeks and weeks become months waiting for the official patch to arrive, the risk equation (such as it is) may very well be worth it for some groups of users. Maybe not you, but it's no use foreclosing everyone who might be interested from that possibility. And even beyond that there's the whole Freedom to Tinker thing. I personally found working on some of the MoAB fixes to be fun mental exercise.
MOAB includes hack attempt
Almost all of the MOAB bugs have already been patched, including OS fixes by Apple. Some of the application fixes were released within hours of the public announcement of the bug. Yet NONE of those fixes have been linked on the MOAB website.
The normal processes are working. What is NOT working is the MOAB process. If they used the normal procedure of notifying the developers privately, these bugs could have been fixed in days or even hours, before any public disclosure. But that wouldn't achieve what the MOAB hackers wanted. MOAB isn't about security, it's about publicity whoring.
When fanbois and anti-fanbois come into contact they emit a special radiation that causes a temporal shift, known informally as "a colossal total waste of time", for anyone who happens to be reading or listening. For example, you're reading a technical thread, then two of these subsentient particles come into contact. They insist on threadjacking your discussion into an us versus them discussion that only tangentially involves the subject at hand and is logically irritating since it represents a false dilemma. As you skip past the messages looking for some meaningful discussion and swearing about the state of technical discourse, you suddenly discover two hours have passed due to the temporal-moronic radiation.
Maybe people could study training Bayesian filters to delete those messages (or just delete the authors).
Although I agree that a Mac OS X worm would be bad publicity for Apple, and that Apple could improve the way they handle response to reported security defects, I think they have produced a reasonable track record over the past five years regarding the basic security of Mac OS X. Apple's security track record is due much more to the relatively weaker security of Windows systems than to Windows market dominance. Windows is low hanging fruit, crack-wise. If it were harder to own Windows systems, crackers would switch to Mac OS X in a flash. Crackers don't need to own 20 million systems, they really only need a few thousand at a time.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The claim that the "Mac community is arrogant" mystified me until I realized that people who make this claim are probably masking an inferiority complex of some sort. Most Macintosh users don't know enough about computers to be arrogant. They are, if anything, rather meek on the whole. I suspect that IT professionals whose experience is limited to Windows (which is, after all, most of them) resent the honestly dumbfounded looks they get from these fawn-eyed Mac users who innocently say things like, "Why is my computer at work so flakey? I've never had a problem like this on my Mac at home."
It seems more likely to me that the professional IT community, which has backed the wrong horse, is resentful.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I guess Slashdot joined some of major IT sites not giving any "advertisement" to MOAB trolls. For example, Slashdot could publicise these idiots having inline jp2 which will make Safari which is a TABBED browser freeze, other script kiddies may link it as their homepage on some zealot fighting sites such as Digg.
BTW it didn't "try" to crash Safari, the default/preinstalled browser of an operating system, a tabbed browser. It actually froze it. It is again, not a security issue but could be a good troll tool.
IMHO if nobody has seen true face of these idiots, they should have seen on day 29.
ps: That JP2 is bad for OS X Finder too, don't keep it in your disk or don't browse that folder with Finder/Path Finder,whatever uses Kakadu jp2 lib.
auto-updating mechanism for the third-party patches.
He's going to port apt-get to OS X?
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I don't see why this shouldn't be done. In fact, it makes a lot of sense for all platforms. Create a third party mechanism by which users/admins can patch Zero day/unpatched flaws that relies on a community effort to provide the patches. Simple. Except it really needs the support of the OS vendor, because at some point, when the vendor releases the patch, you'd want to be able to "turn off" the temporary one. You'd also need an agreed upon "Master List" of vulns, for tracking purposes.
You'd think that this kind of hand-in-hand cooperation would be a no-brainer, but I doubt it. Companies (here's looking right at Apple) still just haven't wrapped their heads around the open exchange of ideas; they are afraid that admitting flaws makes them -look- bad. Ewwww, poor coders. But in reality I think everyone who uses computers by this point in time KNOWS flaws happen...it isn't that they will happen, it has become what are you gonna do about it? And it is pure arrogance by the OS vendors to think that neither the community has the ability to create these patchs nor that the users/admins are interested in them.
Really this is a thing that OS vendors should aspire to, integrating this kind of response mechanism into their existing Software Update suite would be a Good Thing.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
Given that Apple's not exactly famous for being Johnny-on-the-spot with security fixes, I don't quite get where you get "a few days" from.
Do tell, how slow is Apple to fix known security issues? My coworkers have submitted two security bugs to Apple that I know about. Both were local rather than remote, thus posed little risk to the average user. Both were fixed within a few weeks and credited the person who found them. In at least one instance of a more serious security issue Apple turned a fix around in 9 days from disclosure, which is bloody fast or a full dev/qa cycle at any real software company. So you do have some reason for believing Apple is slow to respond to real security concerns, don't you? I'm a bit less inclined to just assume you're right and a little more interested in some citations.