Thinking of Security Vulnerabilities As Defects

SecureThroughObscure writes "ZDNet Zero-Day blogger Nate McFeters has asked the question, 'Should vulnerabilities be treated as defects?' McFeters claims that if vulnerabilities were treated as product defects, companies would have an effective way of forcing developers and business units to focus on security issue. McFeters suggests providing bonuses for good developers, and taking away from bonuses for those that can't keep up. It's an interesting approach that if used, might force companies to take a stronger stance on security related issues."

Comments

Of course vulnerabilities are defects

[ardle]

If they weren't, they would be in the program design.

Re:Of course vulnerabilities are defects

[magisterx]

Sometimes they are. Remember that there are some times when a vulnerability is a technical exploit of something subtle, and those possibilities are always bugs and defects and should be treated as such. But there are many other times when there is a trade off to get that additional security. There is very often a balancing act between usability and security.

This example is certainly not ideal as it does not involve software design, but it is analogous and one that I have personally seen happen. Consider a small company where literally everyone knows everyone and let us say it is a highly technical company so we can assume that everyone knows the basics of what they are doing. They may choose given everyone system administrator priveleges on the database and give everyone a domain admin account even if they normally log in on a lower privileged account. They have absolutely no security in the sense that any user can mess up the system in any way they chose. But they also have none of the usability problems that comes with security. They never have to wait for the network admin to be available if some setting needs to be changed, and never have to worry about a user not being able to get a document they need.

As the company grows, this will become unacceptable. But once security is laid on, now you have to make sure that everyone has the right permissions to read the documents they need. It adds layers of overhead and usability. It increases security, but that security comes at the price of tremendous man hours for a select few domain admins and often forcing users to wait for a designated admin when they need basic things like software installed.

Was the lack of security and the potential vulnerabilities a defect or a design flaw for the small company?

For something more immediately applicable there can also be a trade off between security and efficiency. For instance, I write a lot of SQL scripts that use dynamic SQL. Adding code to protect against SQL Injection requires more of my time to write, more of the computers time to process, and makes the code more complex for someone else who has to maintain it. It comes at a trade off. When I write something that will be used by a broad audience, I always favor security, but when I am writing scripts that will only be used by my internal team I often favor the efficiency and readability.

Clearly, there are cases where a vulnerability is a definite defect, but there are other times when vulnerabilities are consciously accepted for usability, performance, or code maintainability reasons. I will agree that performance and code maintainability become less compelling when it is a commercial product being sold, but they can be major factors within a company where you can often give the user at least a certain minimum level of trust, and usability can be a valid reason to consciously permit small security risks in even a commercial package.

Re:Of course vulnerabilities are defects

[spidr_mnky]

If the code works as designed, and that's how it's designed, then that's a mental defect.

TFA Author is Inexperienced

[awitod]

"The problem of course is I'm saying how the companies should handle them, and I have no authority at any of these places, save people actually valuing my ideas. Personally, I've done some development in the past, and there was the concept of defects. Your bonus would depend on how many defects were in your application at delivery time. These were feature-based defects, but shouldn't vulnerabilities be considered defects as well?"

So, the author freely admits he is neither a developer or a manager. If he was a developer he'd know that these are defects and everyone treats them as such.

If he was a manager, he'd know that one of the surest ways to wreck a good shop is to start doing comp based on defects. Here is what invariably (in my experience) happens when a shop includes defect counts in there comp plans.

1. Relationships between Dev, QA, Product Management and Operations get worse because the terms 'defect' and 'bug' become toxic. In reality these things always exist in software. The last thing you want to do is create barriers to dealing with them. Making the acknowledgment of a defect cost someone money means you will have arguments over every one of them unless they cause an out right crash.

2. Culture becomes overly risk-averse - No one wants to take on difficult problems or blaze new territory. The smartest people will naturally pick the easiest work to minimize the risk of defects.

3. Over-dependence on consultants - More CYA behavior. If it's too complex people will outsource to keep the defects away. This is a very bad thing if the nasty problems are because of business and not technical challenges. Now the people who know enough about the problem domain to understand the risk are hiring proxies who know nothing to avoid responsibility for 'defects'.

Treating security issues as defects depends on...

[SamP2]

...the nature of the security issue.

A defect, by definition, is an unintended behavior of a program. Something was designed to work, but for whatever reason, doesn't. Compare this to a lack of a feature, which means that something doesn't work because there was never the intention for it to work in the first place.

A buffer overflow or SQL injection related issue is almost definitely a defect, since there is a dedicated, designed parsing mechanism to process input, and if some types of inputs are not processed as intended, it is a defect of the software.

On the other hand, for example, a security issue arising from plaintext transmission of sensitive data over the net, is not necessarily a defect. If the site in question was never designed to use SSL or another encryption mechanism, then it's a lack of a feature. If the site in question is an online banking site, then it is a blatantly poor and inexcusable design shortcoming, but nontheless, not a defect. (Of course, if the site DID intend SSL to work properly, but for whatever reason there is a hole allowing to crack or circumvent the encryption, then it IS a defect).

Besides, assigning a "defect" status to a security issue is not necessarily useful for it's own sake. The understanding is that a responsible company should treat a security issue with much higher priority than a non-security related one, defect or not (compare "we released an emergency hotfix to download" to a "we'll ship the patch in the next release cycle"). Saying a security issue is a defect, is like saying that a cardiac arrest is "organ numbness" - true, but not very useful.

Great Idea On Paper...BUT...

[darkPHi3er]

In the RW, i'd suggset that we should consider the following;

You are Programmer Sian (notice the trendily androgynous name), you work for a gigantic software company, or conglomerate or industrial that does all its own major development inside, you are potentially confronted with;

1. Antiquated Developer Tools -- in general, the larger the development environment, unless you're Disgesting Your Own Pet's Nutrition, you are very likely to be using multi-year and/or multi-generation old development platforms and tools.

The question here is then, how can you effectively hold poor Sean accountable for vulnerablities, that are intrinsic to many older tools?

Who's more accounatable here? Sian or the managers who make the procurement decisions?

2. "Science Fiction" Application Programming Interfaces - depending on whether you are programming on a well-established product or not, if you are, Poor Sian is probably stuck with API's that were developed many years before and have been the victim of Design Creep, and its, Lunatic Cousin, Design Implosion.

In many instances the APIs, while they may once have had a large degree of Paradigmatic and Philosophic Design Integrity, as their initial Designers and Implementers have moved on to other; products, companies or, Worst Case, Inpatient Mental Health Facilities. Many New Designers have come in to add "Their Own Programming Uniqueness" to the APIs, frequently rendering the API's a jumble of radically different approaches to similar algorithms.

Should Sian be subjected to having their pay docked because 9/10 Functions implement a Library Call one way, and some "Johnny-Come-Lately" API function implements a similar looking, but substantially different in output function?

Shouldn't the API Designers/Architects be held more responsible for this one?

3. PHB Stupidity - As QC forwards endless application/OS defect notices to the Development/Maintenance Team, these defects are reviewed by the Team Managers and Supervisors. It's understandable, given the 11 hours per day of Absolutely Vital Meetings that most PHBs love to, i mean are forced to attend, that Defect Prioritization will suffer.

Sian can't choose what defects to repair, and in what order to repair them.

This is a management function, and one, in my experience, that Mgt usually jealously and zealously guards.

SOOOO, it's been the case in every Development project that i've worked on and know about, that PHB's have a well-understood tendency to prioritize Defect repair, according to external pressures, especially from Sales and Marketing.

Sales and Marketing organizations are usually likely to priortize according to their immediate impact on quarterly projections.

Vulnerablities are only likely to affect quarterly results when they are CATASTROPHIC defects, i.e. App or OS Killers. Otherwise, the majority of vulnerablities, which are usually well submerged in the Defect numbers, tend to get shoved aside for the higher priority defects that S&M believe impact immediate sales.

There are numerous other considerations here; including Contract Programmers, Legacy Compatability (ask the Vista Team about that one), Vendor Driver Teams that don't even know what to do with a new code base, etc, etc..

But it seems to me, that, while financial incentives CAN BE, useful as a Mgt tool for improving product quality, they should, to be even-handed, applied across the entire product team, with specific ***POSITIVE*** incentives used to take care limited, high priority problems across the product line.

There's already a tendency to "blame the programmer", and my Best Guess is, that any attempt to lay the responsiblity for vulnerabillites, THAT AREN'T CLEARLY THE RESULT OF SLOPPY/POOR/INCOMPETENT CODE PRODUCTION, at the feet of the programmer, will merely increase the employee turnover in the Development Team. Something that already is a problem most places.

from my experience: "The Fault, Horatio, Usually Lies Not In Our Code, But In Our Process"

Re:Black robes and Black Hats

[dvice_null]

Actually you really need just one person in the company with "haxor" skills to test the security of the products that others make. A single person can very quickly find a lot of common holes. That person doesn't need to a developer. He/She can be there just for testing or even just for supervising others that make the testing, to make sure that they test for security vulnerabilities also.