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GoogHOle Exploits GMail, Picasa and 200K Other Sites
Giorgio Maone writes "Multiple Google-targeted exploits disclosed in the past 3 days could compromise your GMail account, steal your pictures from Picasa or impersonate you on almost 200,000 big sites which outsourced their search engines (vulnerabilities included in the price). If even Google, a very reactive company when web security matters, does face this kind of problems, how serious is the threat and what can you do, as a "normal" web user, to protect yourself?"
You'll never be safe.
Complex software designed for diverse interactions will always be vulnerable to some kind of attack, even if it's as simple as someone walking out of a data center with a thumb drive in their pocket. Almost every vulnerability stems from a "feature" implemented to make software easier/flashier/useful. Flexibility and expansiveness carry with them the price of vulnerability, and pretending otherwise is to wear blinders.
Of course developers should do their best to prevent security problems -- but there is only so much that can be done when you also need to implement Really Cool Stuff. Every door you make is a door than can be kicked in, no matter how good your locks. The real world has never offered perfect security because it can't -- why expect engineered items to be safe from all evil?
Treat software and computers with caution, like walking through a major city's downtown at midnight. Sure, it's dangerous at times -- but it can also be exciting. Just don't pretend that danger doesn't exist...
All about me
If even Google, a "very reactive" company faces these issues, what can be done? The answer: Nothing can be done.
There is no way (unless you're writing something with hundreds, rather than thousands of lines of code) that every code path is going to be audited carefully enough to catch every possible bug. Good coding practices aside, programmers are human and make errors. You do your best to catch as many as you can, and that's all you can do. When you're a "consumer" of code, you look for an organization that seems to be doing this and use their stuff. There's no complete, proactive solution to bugs.
The important thing is that you want someone "very reactive." An organization that acknowledges these flaws up-front, publicly announces vulnerabilities with a work-around until they're patched, and then corrects problems in a timely manner. Some companies are more like this than others.
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But I didn't build my car, my house, amy of my white goods, in fact 99% of what I use every day was built by third parties. I can and should demand that the good I purchase reach certain standards - in the UK this is enforced by law.
However, anything I accept for free, anything where there isn't some sort of agreed contract between my and the supplier, then caveat emptor (pun intended)
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Neither can you if you hire people to implement it on your own company.
And if you do it yourself, you can be sure that the security will not be higher than your own skill set.
If you want to trust nobody, you might as well retreat to am isolated island somewhere, as you will be unable to function in a society. The key to functioning in a society isn't distrust, but to to be able to judge who to trust and who not to. Which is quite annoyingly mostly a social rather than a technical skill.
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I personally trust the people at Google more than I trust the people and products responsible for our internal mail solution (which is also available as web mail). Especially with regards to competence (as opposed to integrity). So I would love for us to switch.
This is true, however, there is one very large difference between Google and everything that you listed. While Google build the apps, similar to case of your car, house, etc, they are also operating and maintaining the product. The car manufacturer doesn't *run* your car, or maintain it. If it break, you go somewhere and pay a different third party to fix it, or you fix it yourself. In Google's case, they have your car, and keep it running, and they come around and drive you places when you want them to.
I don't let websites keep my credit card info, or any password other than the one needed to unlock their own site, or any other personal info that is valid outside their own realm, unless their service won't work otherwise.
The Web would be a lot more secure if my browser had a keyring integrated with my own computer, and I kept my secrets on my own computer under my own control. When challenged by any server for a secret, my browser or other client SW I'm using should pull the secret from the keyring and supply it to the server. That service should let me use a master key from any remote terminal to query my own computer, over my home broadband or wherever I keep the secrets. All by a standard protocol that lets me just fill web forms (and other challenges) as I do now, possibly entering the master key and maybe an additional confirmation challenge to let the 3rd parties communicate, but otherwise just as transparent as just filling in the forms.
If a 3rd party server is going to store my secrets, I want it to be my bank. I don't know why banks haven't gotten into this business already, after well over a decade watching their profits multiply from the Web, along with many risks. Maybe Google will push a key distribution protocol like this in partnership with some banks. That would also finally get Google into the payment business to challenge eBay's PayPal, which I hate precisely because its (mostly unregulated) global Internet bank is a monopoly, and I don't trust PayPal with my secrets. If Google does recover from this crack, they might be solid enough to trust.
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make install -not war