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Word 2007 Flaws Are Features, Not Bugs
PetManimal writes "Mati Aharoni's discovery of three flaws in Word using a fuzzer (screenshots) has been discounted by Microsoft, which claims that the crashes and malformed Word documents are a feature of Word, not a bug. Microsoft's Security Response Center is also refusing to classify the flaws as security problems. According to Microsoft developer David LeBlanc, crashes aren't necessarily DoS situations: 'You may rightfully say that crashing is always bad, and having a server-class app background, I agree. Crashing means you made a mistake, bad programmer, no biscuit. However, crashing may be the lesser of the evils in many places. In the event that our apps crash, we have recovery mechanisms, ways to report the crash so we know what function had the problem, and so on. I really take issue with those who would characterize a client-side crash as a denial of service.' Computerworld's Frank Hayes responds to LeBlanc and questions Microsoft's logic.'"
What's the matter? Did the Slashdot editors lose their English-to-Microsoft dictionary again?
Um, it's defined in the twelve words after "fuzzer" in TFA
"a tool that probes an application for vulnerabilities by sending random input"
This is known as an appositive phrase.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
From wiki:
"Fuzz testing or fuzzing is a software testing technique that provides random data ("fuzz") to the inputs of a program. If the program fails (for example, by crashing, or by failing built-in code assertions), the defects can be noted."
Respect the laws of physics, for the laws of physics have no respect for you.
I wish I could just pass out when my wife asks me some stupid question that I don't want to answer. Better yet, when I'm asked to fix a bug at work, it would be nice to just roll over and hit the snooze. Let's apply this everywhere.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
...if I understand this correctly. Basically, a security researcher believes he's found a buffer overflow. However, he has not yet found a way to exploit that overflow because Word keeps crashing. Microsoft says that the crash is preventing any security hazard, and therefore there is none. Correct?
I hate to say it, but I'm going to have to come down on Microsoft's side on this one. If it's a non-exploitable crash, then it's a simple bug in handling corrupt documents and nothing more. The researcher can ring everyone again once an exploit has been found.
As for the DoS potential... seriously, why is everything a "Denial of Service" with these guys? It's a bad document. Word crashes. Life goes on. It's not like your computer is going to become unusable because Word crashed. You get minorly inconvenienced by the jerk who sent you the document, you figure out that the doc is bad, then you move on.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I am fully aware that writing bug-free software is impossible. Ultimately, it is unavoidable that crashes will occur. When they do occur, they should be handled as gracefully as possible. However one should not defend one's code (and coding flaws) by saying that "sure it crashes--but the crashes are part of our carefully engineered recovery mechanism!" That's a lame excuse, because if you're aware of a consistent crash condition, you should be able to code so that instead of crashing, the program does something more friendly.
Say you have a known vulnerability in your code, which fixing would require rebuilding your app from scratch (or damn near close enough to make it too expensive to fix). Also say that you have the capability to detect an attempt to take advantage of the flaw before any damage is done, and that shutting down the app will prevent further damage.
Wouldn't it be a good idea to shut down the app to prevent your whole network getting hosed? And doesn't the pain-in-the-assitude for the user maybe prevent them from opening shady docs the next time around?
Admittedly, it would be best if the flaw never existed in the first place. But if fixing the flaw outright is out of the question, why isn't this a good solution?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I can see Mr. LeBlanc's point, that it's better to crash than open up your system, but it seems like they are taking this awfully lightheartedly. They're still bugs and they still need fixed. I think they are confusing debug features with release features.
Um, it's defined...in TFA
;-)
Um, read that again, and see if you can find the problem.
there you go, expecting a slashdotter to rtfa. Shame on you...
"Um, read that again, and see if you can find the problem. ;-)"
...which means there's an error in your statement, which should read ;-)"
...
I found two:
1. No one reads TFA
2. There are plurality of TFAs
"Um, read that again, and see if you can find the problems.
There may be a plurality of errors in your statement, not sure
*head explodes
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Sony ha
Would any bright egg here care to explain what the hell an 'appositive phrase' is?
Yes I could google it, but so will 100,000 other slashdotters, so let's just post the answer here and be done with it.
OK, gotcha, but how do you differentiate this from normal Windows behavior?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
From the linked blog...
1) Your code blew up, and you're about to get 0wn3d. Yup, it's exploitable, and the customers are not going to be happy.
2) Your code blew up, and maybe it is exploitable, maybe not.
3) Your code blew up, and you meant it to blow up, and it's clearly not exploitable.
Since you are not coding specifically for your application to crash (Or I hope not) surely there can be no 3. 2 is as good as it gets, you have done everything you can to prevent your code "blowing up" you have tried to handle anything that can be thrown at it gracefully, and you have done everything to ensure that when if and when things do go wrong they can do no damage, that's 2, not 3. If you cannot foresee and prevent every possible thing that could cause your application to crash (which you can't), then how can you foresee every possible way in which that unforeseeable crash could be exploited. All you can ever do is your best.
Next up, from the article:
Two of the three bugs result in a denial-of-service-like situation, with the PC's processor maxed out at 100%, making the machine unusable until it's rebooted. The third, Aharoni suggested, could be used to introduce remote attack code after an exploit causes an overflow of "wwlib.dll," a crucial Word library. But "code execution is not trivial," he added.
If described correctly then these bugs all pose a risk. sure the first two are minor risks, the later is major, but all three are bugs that should be listed as security vulnerabilities. I would suggest that the reason that they are currently not being seen as such by Microsoft, is simply that no one can be sure if the conditions required to trigger them could be utilised by anyone wishing to take advantage of them, and thus they are theoretically less threatening than many of the other issues that have plagued Microsoft Applications in the past.
In the end however we should be simply sating that a problem exists, it may be a security risk, and until it is fixed, we will treat it as such. Anything else (rightly or wrongly) simply smells like someone is covering up issues, and lets be frank, Microsoft doesn't have enough good will for that to be acceptable.
Almost all the programs crash on invalid input, even Firefox and OpenOffice. So, hate to say it, MSFT is right in claiming that it is better to crash than to give a command line shell. But so many of the MSFT buffer overrun problems start out as crashes and people keep probing and probing and bingo, it becomes a remote code execution flaw. I thing the Windows Meta File graphics handling bug was a low priority crash bug for a long time before it became a remote code execution vulnerability. So while porturing it as "not a bug", hope they quietly work in the background and fix the issue.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Microsoft declared that they are not crashes at all; they are "rest breaks".
Chris mattern
If Word went ahead and executed arbitrary code, that's one thing. But as it stands, it just crashes out.
You do understand that in many cases, a "crash" is when the software attempted to execute random garbage; and that if you tailored the garbage, you would have an arbitrary code execution vulnerability?
A crash, frankly, is very often an incompletely exploited code execution vulnerability. That may not be so, here; but if the crash is caused by stack or heap corruption, there's a distinct chance the triggering dataset could be made into a shellcode exploit or the like.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I guess it is an attitude problem.
:)
If they said their software is sold "as it is" and that it possibibly had problems and were humble enough to admit it, there would be fewer MS-haters out there.
I agree with you on the impossibility of completly testing a software of the complexity of Word. No argument there.
BTW, calc.exe already GPFed on me.
Actually, according to the Computerworld article, two of the bugs discovered will peg the processor at 100 percent, forcing a cold reboot that potentially will do a lot more damage than just corrupting your Word documents. Whatever your philosophy otherwise, that really is a denial of service.
Breakfast served all day!
The old Apple ][ Reference Manual included a few pages of technical terms, with definitions. Buried among entries like track, sector, stack, and interrupt was this gem:
feature n. A bug, as described by the marketing department.
Breakfast served all day!
1) It's too much effort to read the article.
2) It's um... Can you repeat this one, I didn't read it.
a phrase that is placed in apposition to a noun or another phrase, usually serving to clarify the meaning or intent.
an appositional phrase, a phrase that clarifies meaning, is a fancy way of saying "redundant"
Apparently that specific line of text exploits the way that notepad determines whether the file is encoded in ASCII or Unicode.
Actually, in my opinion he's right.
People act as if a crash is the worst thing in the world. Generations of programmers have been trained to think of a crash bug as the ultimate badge of shame. The problem is that it is not, by far, the ultimate mistake.
I think it's useful to keep this in perspective. It's better that you crash the user's car than run over the user's baby. I always tell guys who work for to to place bugs in the following order of severity (1 is highest severity):
1) user's system security is compromised.
2) user's data is corrupted or lost.
3) give wrong answers that aren't obvious (2 and three might be interchanged in some circumstances)
4) crash bugs and obvious garbage output
It's not that crash bugs are good. It's that given a choice between a crash and things higher on the list, you ought to choose the crash.
This is not a choice that, once upon a time, we had to make. Crashes happen when a condition you hadn't anticipated happen, so they were not (as a rule) a matter of choice.
Java checked exceptions changed that, and required that I develop clear priorities. For non-programmers, an exception is a condition (usually abnormal) that can occur some place in your program. A checked exception is one that it is mandatory to handle some place in your program, otherwise your program is not valid.
I'm not religiously against checked exceptions, other than that they're a bad choice for default. The problem is that the places where exceptions occur are often not the right place to handle them. The temptation is to mishandle the exception, particularly exceptions that are rare, at a low level. Sometimes this is a temporary measure so you can get to some initial tests you want to do, and you never get back to undoing it. Sometimes it happens because the programmer doesn't know a good way to handle the exception, so he papers it over.
The result is that you convert a crash bug into some other kind of bug. Often a bug that's higher on the severity list. That's why converting a checked exception into a non-checked exception is often the best course of action, even though it creates a possible crash condition later on.
Automated testing does, or potentially can, stand in for the function of checked exceptions with less risk. Some kind of annotation that was integrated with unit testing might be ideal.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Hahahaha!
That is so early 90's!
Hello?? We have the internet!
Software can be downloaded!
In Windows, I can't just type in "office", click the resulting "kde office" and "open office" programs, and have them automatically downloaded for me, without fuel being burnt to get the bits from there to my computer. Amazing!
Also, I can just type in almost anything I may want my computer to do - and behold, one of more than 10,000 programs shows up which can be installed with a single click!
Oh wait, there's more. When I play a movie in full-screen, a bunch of "Would you like to update me?" dialogs of various programs don't jump up at me!
In fact, *all* (and that means all software you have) updating is done from a central location - by clicking the update icon.
Oh, Windows doesn't have that? Pitty, maybe I should stick to Linux!
While perhaps producing some rather amusing results, this is a unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of Notepad having to support a variety of encodings of text files.
It's not really news though, and I doubt Hugh Thompson deserves any credit, Raymond Chen explained why things behave like this back in 2004.
I'd apologize for the rant but this kind of bullshit spouted by slack ass "Programmers" and "Developers" just pisses me off to no end. Keep thinking your gonna have that job security you always wanted by making sure there's no one else that can weed threw your garbled mesh of spaghetti, when in reality making software that actually works if far more job securing. But then again I would probably be out of work if the "developers" of the world actually did their shit right since organizations would need people like me to clean it all up.
Fuck the karma, some one had to finally clear this up, too bad no one in a position to actually change things will read this.