Security Research and Blackmail

harryjohnston alerts us to a story picked up by a few bloggers in the security space. A Russian security research company, Gleg, has discovered a zero-day in the latest version of RealPlayer 11. But they won't reveal details to Real, or to CERT, despite repeated requests. Details are available only to their clients who pay a lot of money for early access to such knowledge. To describe Gleg's business model Daniweb rather cautiously puts forward the word "blackmail." The story was first exposed in Ryan Nariane's Securitywach blog.

Comments

Intellectual Property

[thebear05]

Seems fair they have information and want to be paid for it

Re:Intellectual Property

[clarkkent09]

If I knew how to break into your house, then told you that I was able to but won't tell you how unless you paid up a fee? I'm sure that you'd easily come up with a lot of reasons why it isn't cool.

Honestly, I couldn't. I am sure there are security experts out there who would be able to improve security of my house but I certainly wouldn't expect them to do it for free. This idea that if you find bugs in a software product, you have the responsibility to give that information to the company that makes it, and therefore help them improve their product, for free is completely bogus.

Sorry, but there's a distinct lack of responsibility and ethics going on here, no matter how much you think the primary target may deserve it.

I don't see any ethical problems here and its completely irrelevant who the party involved is. I would actually argue that there is more of an ethical problem with testing a company's product for free, as it devalues the work of their own QA personnel, and it encourages companies to release shoddy products too early, with expectation that paying customers will help them fix the bugs.

It's called capitalism

[enos]

It's called capitalism, and it's been breaking out in eastern Europe ever since the USSR fell. In unregulated areas (i.e. new markets) they have a much more "pure" concept of it than the west. The public good is a socialist idea. This same thing happens in a lot of places in the west where there are shops that specialize in IP of some sort. They have to make their living somehow. It's just that people are used to security companies giving this stuff away for free.

chilling effects of free market capitalism

[drspliff]

I don't call it blackmail, I call it a free market...

Companies have a financial incentive for keeping their products secure, open source projects have less of an issue because the money just isn't in it.
All this is - is one company spending real money, hiring well paid analysis to plow through machine code or source code and analyse vulnerabilities.
The reason they can afford to do this is because the market is full of companies willing to pay for this stuff...

Thats where your code of ethics goes out of the window!

With open-source projects, there is still a market of companies using that software but at the same time there's a limited timespan before it's usually discovered by somebody else.
You know very well that if you advertise you've found a security flaw in open source XX product you're going to have hundereds of people scrutinising it and to develop a fix - because it's benificial to everybody (so the code of ethics lives strong).

It doesn't help that `Real' has a bad reputation, but by doing this and with holding it, Gleg are doing exactly what they set out to do in the first place and doing as any successful business man/woman does: identifying the market and targeting it appropriately.

This happens every day not just in software security, but in every other industry yet people just consider it a normal day in the office and maybe grumble a bit about it.

In an ideal situation ethics and social benifit would come first though... yet this is in practice incompatible with the free market, just for the reasons above.

Blackmail?

[clarkkent09]

If this is valuable information (as in there are people willing to pay money for it) why should they give it for free? Companies pay good money to consultants to come over and fix problems with their business, why shouldn't they have to pay people who help them fix problems with their software products.

Re:I for one ...

[mysidia]

Not blackmail. But poorly designed software tends to have security bugs.

These bugs pose a problem for users of the software. It makes sense that third party services exist that scour software for bugs like this, for the benefit of the software's users and prospective users.

So they can know whether to use the software or whether to take extra precautions/refrain from using it.

The cost of performing this type of analysis is high. Much time and energy is required.

It makes sense that you need to pay to review their findings in detail, or to review them before they are publicly released (for free).

If they merely submit their findings to the software vendor, then they have provided the vendor with high-quality, costly labor for free.

Why should the software vendor get free labor from security researchers, and be able to freely follow poor design practices in the design of their software, while relying on the public to find and report the issues gradually? (For them to lazily fix _after_ the defect is drawn to their attention)

If the security researcher wishes to serve the community, then they have the option of practicing full disclosure, but they may be more fairly compensated for their work by providing paying customers with key information in advance, so their customers can mitigate the problem, before it has become public (and known to the bad guys).

One way you mitigate the problem is very simple: uninstall the defective real player 11. Re-install the fixed version, when it becomes available.

Re:Blackmail eh?

[QuantumG]

huh? Call me crazy, but isn't extortion where you demand someone pay you to keep quiet? These guys are not demanding a silence payment.. they're just selling their proprietary information to whoever wants to pay for it.