NSA Says Its Secure Dev Methods Are Publicly Known

Trailrunner7 writes "Despite its reputation for secrecy and technical expertise, the National Security Agency doesn't have a set of secret coding practices or testing methods that magically make their applications and systems bulletproof. In fact, one of the agency's top technical experts said that virtually all of the methods the NSA uses for development and information assurance are publicly known. 'Most of what we do in terms of app development and assurance is in the open literature now. Those things are known publicly now,' Neil Ziring, technical director of the NSA's Information Assurance Directorate, said in his keynote at the OWASP AppSec conference in Washington Wednesday. 'It used to be that we had some methods and practices that weren't well-known, but over time that's changed as industry has focused more on application security.'"

Comments

Here's proof that...

[Anonymous Coward]

...it is definitely possible to write secure software if you just simply follow sound and smart development methods and practices... and don't write half-assed, slipshod, thrown-together-in-a-hurry code.

Of course they say that

[dkleinsc]

If the NSA has something that really is Schneier-proof, they wouldn't tell the public. And understandably so, since part of their job is in part to ensure signal security for US agencies that deal in classified information.

Re:Of course they say that

[hedwards]

But it's almost certainly true. Just look at OpenBSD's record. They went for a full decade without any vulnerabilities in the base system before one was eventually found. And that's from a group of mostly volunteers. Just imagine what you could get from programmers that are both paid and required to use secure coding practices.

What's really embarrassing is that most of it has been known about for quite some time, but for one reason or another the organization funding the programming doesn't feel like paying for it to be done securely. It's a similar problem to programming style.

Re:Of course they say that

[drsmithy]

But it's almost certainly true. Just look at OpenBSD's record. They went for a full decade without any vulnerabilities in the base system before one was eventually found.

Remote vulnerabilities. In the default install. Which isn't that hard to achieve when your default install doesn't really do much and hardly anyone uses your system.

Just imagine what you could get from programmers that are both paid and required to use secure coding practices.

Who didn't have to work towards any specific deadlines or goals ? And had essentially nothing to lose if they didn't get there ? I'd expect much the same.

When you have nothing in particular to achieve, all the time in the world to achieve it, and no real consequences if you don't, then you'd expect anything that was done would be done well. However, the real world doesn't work like that.

practical application

[Tom]

Security, especially in software development, doesn't suffer from the "we don't know how to do it" problem. It suffers from the "we don't have time/budget/patience/interest in doing what we know we should be doing" issue.

Re:I see it more like a proof that

[Applekid]

That's a closed source/open source distinction. It has nothing to do with development methodology... except that there are more eyes when it's open.

Depending on whose eyes for closed source, I'm pretty sure the NSA has plenty of great eyes looking over code.

Re:I see it more like a proof that

[icebike]

security doesn't come from obscurity

Exactly right.

The best security is the kind where everyone knows how it works, but even given the source code, you can't beat it, or you can't beat it in any useful length of time.

That being said, the automated code inspection packages you can buy these days look only for the obvious noobie programmer mistakes.

SELinux, originally from NSA, solves many of the problems of running untrusted code on your box, but even that is not 100% secure, and the maintenance problems it introduces mean that it is seldom used in real life.

The problem is not how this agency (the NSA) cleans up their code.

The problem is that we don't know about what backdoors exist in our hardware and our operating systems. Because so much code is embedded in silicon, and so few people actually look at that code, its easy to imagine all sorts of pownage living there.

A compromised Ethernet card (just sayin by way of example), would be both Obscure, and hard to detect, and have access to just about everything going in and out of your machine.

Security does not come from obscurity, but insecurity often does.

Social engineering always wins

[boristdog]

The Soviets almost never used to crack codes. They just social-engineered (blackmail, sex, gifts, schmoozed, etc) to get all the information they wanted.

It's how Mitnick did most of his work as well.

Security is about preventing unintended outcomes

[Anonymous Coward]

Writing bulletproof code isn't really all that hard, but it does take discipline. Discipline to use only those constucts which have been verified with both the compiler and linker.

Some simple things that coders can do:
- avoid the use of pointers.
- Initialize all variables to known values.
- Perform comparisons with the LHS using a static variable, so you don't accidentally get an assignment instead of a comparison
- When you are done with a value, reset it to a "known" value. Zero is usually good.
- Keep functions less than 1 page long. If you can't see the entire function on a single editor page, it is too long.

Simple.

BTW, I wrote code for real-time space vehicle flight control systems. When I look at OSS and see variables not set to initial values, I cringe. Sure, it is probably ok, but there isn't any cost to initializing the variables. This is a compile-time decision. Without knowing it, many programmers are counting on memory being zero'ed as the program gets loaded. Not all OSes do this, so if you are writing cross platform code, don't trust it will happen. Do it yourself.

Oh, and if you want secure programs, loosely typed languages are scary.