Many Popular Windows Apps Ignore Security Options

eldavojohn writes "The latest versions of Microsoft Windows have some good security options available — now if only they could get their most popular third-party applications to use them. A report from Secunia takes a look at two such options — DEP and ASLR — and Brian Krebs breaks down who is using them and who is not. A security specialist noted, 'If both DEP and ASLR are correctly deployed, the ease of exploit development decreases significantly. While most Microsoft applications take full advantage of DEP and ASLR, third-party applications have yet to fully adapt to the requirements of the two mechanisms (PDF). If we also consider the increasing number of vulnerabilities discovered in third-party applications, an attacker's choice for targeting a popular third-party application rather than a Microsoft product becomes very understandable.' Among those with neither DEP or ASLR: Apple Quicktime, Foxit Reader, Google Picasa, Java, OpenOffice.org, RealPlayer, and AOL's Winamp. While Flash player can't implement DEP, it does have ASLR. Google Chrome is the only popular third-party application listed with stars across the board." It's worth noting that several apps highlighted in the Secunia research paper have added support for those security options in recent patches, or are in the process of doing so. Examples include Firefox, VLC, and Foxit Reader.

Comments

DEP yes, ASLR no

[Animats]

Data execution prevention is a no-brainer. Unix has had that since the 1970s.

ASLR, though, is iffy. Randomizing the position of code in memory is a form of security through obscurity. If there's a bug that's exploitable with ASLR, it's a bug that can crash the program without it. It also makes debugging harder. No two crash dumps for the same bug are the same. Not even close.

What's more useful is running applications with very limited privileges. If the browser's renderer can't do much except render the single page it's supposed to be rendering, then corruption within it isn't a big deal. Firefox's approach to running plugins in a separate process is a big step forward, and the more jail-like that process becomes, the better. You really need a mandatory security model like SELinux to make this work, and Windows doesn't have that.

Re:DEP yes, ASLR no

[abigsmurf]

By that logic, encryption is also security through obscurity, therefore there's no point in encrpyting data.

The point of ASLR isn't to provide absolute security, it's to provide an additional layer of security to make it harder to produce meaningful exploits from vulnerabilities.

Re:"app"

[Anonymous Coward]

"App" has been short for "application" for a long time. I'm more annoyed by people who think it's specific to the iPhone (an intranet blog at work not long ago claimed (with no iContext, it was about the progress of technology rather than anything directly Apple-related) that the "first app" appeared in 2008).