Michal Zalewski On Security's Broken Promises

Lipton-Arena writes "In a thought-provoking guest editorial on ZDNet, Google security guru Michal Zalewski laments the IT security industry's broken promises and argues that little has been done over the years to improve the situation. From the article: 'We have in essence completely failed to come up with even the most rudimentary, usable frameworks for understanding and assessing the security of modern software; and spare for several brilliant treatises and limited-scale experiments, we do not even have any real-world success stories to share. The focus is almost exclusively on reactive, secondary security measures: vulnerability management, malware and attack detection, sandboxing, and so forth; and perhaps on selectively pointing out flaws in somebody else's code. The frustrating, jealously guarded secret is that when it comes to actually enabling others to develop secure systems, we deliver far less value than could be expected.'"

Comments

Re:Not so much in ix and ux environments

[lgw]

Modern Microsoft OSs aren't really any more "inherently vulnerable" than anyone else that might be viable in the consumer space. At this point it's more about getting the apps onboard with the security model. In the server space, Win2008 r2 gets most things right - just about everything is off by default, the kernel itself is quite secure, there's a good model for running as a non-admin and escalating when needed.

The biggest problems with Windows right now are apps that pointlessly need to run as admin, and apps that don't sandbox even narrower than "all the current user's data". All OSs are equally vulnerable to social engineering trojans - if you can trick the user into giving you the root password, you win - but outside of that Windows itself is only particularly weak in that a lot of the code is still new.

The real trick for security - for Windows and everyone else - is to adopt a model more like SE Linux where you just agressively limit what each app has access to. SE Linux is too hard to configure for the broad market, but a simpler approach where each app is sandboxed in a VM with just the resources it needs will shut down the "drive by" attacks involving flash, PDF, and similar apps. You can't do much about social engineering trojans, but you can fix the rest with sandboxing/jailing that doesn't require the end user to configure stuff.

The Web browser shouldn't be special in this regard - every app should be jailed automatically, requiring effort from app developers to broaden an app's scope, instead of the current model where app developers are asked to do extra work to narrow an app's scope.