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Security Expert Says Java Vulnerability Could Take Years To Fix, Despite Patch
An anonymous reader writes "After the Department of Homeland Security's US-CERT warned users to disable Java to stop hackers from taking control of users' machines, Oracle issued an emergency patch on Sunday. However, HD Moore, chief security officer of Rapid7, said it could take two years for Oracle to fix all the security flaws in the version of Java used to surf the web; that timeframe doesn't count any additional Java exploits discovered in the future. 'The safest thing to do at this point is just assume that Java is always going to be vulnerable,' Moore said."
What happened? Most of these exploits seem to rely on rewriting methods / accessing byte code ... how about disabling that access for applets as a temporary measure?
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
This might seriously impede the Year of Java on the Desktop
It looks like he randomly pulled a time frame. I cannot find an explanation for the two year estimate.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
The solution is to stop running untrusted code in your browser. If you are using a browser's default configuration, then any time you go to a website, the browser will automatically download and execute software from the website, in the form of Flash, Java applets, javascript, and Silverlight, if you have it installed.
And you think there aren't any vulnerabilities in any of those sandboxes?
That's not specific to Java, it applies to all software that's downloaded from an outside source and run on your local machine. That means Adobe Reader (PDF is simply a wrapper for a program written in Postscript), Flash (ditto, written in a special programming language) and even Javascript. It even includes downloaded TrueType fonts (the font hinting program they can include is just that, an executable program). Don't dismiss them just because they're sandboxed. Java was sandboxed, that didn't stop this vulnerability. Sandboxes are software and software has bugs in it, always. The only question is the number and severity of the bugs. The simpler the software, the fewer bugs there tend to be because there's fewer places for them to hide. Their favorite hiding place is in unexpected interactions between different parts of a piece of software, or between the software and the system it runs in, and simpler software has fewer and simpler interactions that're easier to get right.
This even applies to software you buy from a vendor. The difference is that with bought software you tend to download it only a few times and always directly from the source. Contrast this with the Web, where you're downloading multiple pieces of software on virtually every Web page you hit with no idea where they're coming from (and, in the case of advertising networks, the place you download them from may not even know who or where they're coming from).
Sure, Java will be dead in 5 years.. just like COBOL.
The idea is that you are at the same time providing a full language and a sandbox. Together. Java is not inherently more or less secure than any other language (well, mostly), but the above premise is extremely hard to pull off correctly. Think of an applet as some piece of code you download and execute. Would you trust doing that in any special language? Think of Flash, how many flash issues have we seen? And Flash is "less complex" than Java.
This guy isn't a security expert. He doesn't even know that Java is a programming language, and that Oracle's JVM is not "a version of Java used to surf the web". No self respecting expert would misuse terms the way he is, and he should be sued for doing it. It leads to ridiculous situations, where people think Java is inherently bad. I mean, isn't Android based on Java? OMFG ... don't get one of those! Haven't you heard. Java is vulnerable to attack! If the writer got what this guy said correct then his guy is either shilling for Apple or Microsoft against Google/Android, hates Oracle, or is phenomenally incompetent.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I find it strange that I can install a flash blocker that allows me to whitelist certain websites but that similar functionality seems to be missing for Java... the easy answer is to not allow java to run unless the site or even specific URL is in a whitelist.
The java engine should check whether the code it is about to execute is from a whitelisted location before it executes it. If the code is not, it should warn the user, perhaps prompting to add the site.
That way your banking and ecommerce sites would still work easily while the "bad guys" would at least have to successfully social-engineer you into adding their site, a situation much better than what we currently see where all you have to do is inadvertently browse to a web page with compromized java applets embedded.
Running programs from untrusted sources has always been unadvisable. I run java every day, and I'm not worried at all about getting compromised. Apps like ImageJ or UGENE, if they weren't written in Java would be written in a native language which would be just as dangerous to install. So don't be an idiot and run programs from random websites and you'll be fine.
The problem is, the default Java runtime install includes a browser plugin that allows Java applets embedded in a webpage to run automatically. Code delivered this way is supposed to run inside a strict sandbox, but that sandbox has been repeatedly shown to be full of holes.
(Desktop apps written in Java, including UGENE and ImageJ [and Eclipse, and the mostly-not-Java LibreOffice] do not use the browser plugin and will run fine even if the browser plugin is disabled or deleted completely. Your standard don't-be-an-idiot advice does indeed apply to these kinds of apps. But the JRE you installed to run ImageJ will install the browser plugin you never asked for and don't need.)
Oracle really should consider making the browser plugin a separate, optional, non-default installation.
The only way that number is within an order of magnitude of being correct is if it is a reference server-side Java, which isn't the issue. In-browser Java is the issue, and very few common websites require in-browser Java to function correctly (in-browser JavaScript, perhaps, but aside from artifacts of early-90s marketing in the naming, the two have nothing in common.)
Javascript has NOTHING to do with java.
To paraphrase a well known saying, I think it's time for the internet to start seeing oracle as damage and route around it.
One really simple thing that seems needed, and that should be extremely simple to do, would be a whitelist/blacklist plugin for java applets in firefox. The vast majority of java applet users are probably people who work in a bank, a law practice, or a medical office and only ever need to use a single applet. They need an option where they can blacklist all java applets by default, but allow applets from medicalrecords.com or whatever. These folks can't just disable the java plugin completely. Setting plugins.click_to_play to true is also a solution, but it breaks sites that use flash, and it doesn't protect the business against an office worker who clicks on stuff without thinking. (I tried setting this flag on my desktop box at home, and was too much of a nuisance. This is what I have flashblock for, and flashblock does the job better.)
Another helpful step would be to make it easier for people to find out which versions of java they have on their computers and easier for them to avoid unsafe versions. On my ubuntu box, managing this is a total mess. If I do "java -version", it tells me I'm running java 1.6, which would be immune to this vulnerability. But if I check inside the directory /usr/lib/jvm , it turns out I actually have 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 all installed. Well, which one is firefox using? I get zero results from dpkg --get-selections icedtea . In firefox, doing tools:add-ons:plugins tells me I have IcedTea-Web 1.2, which tells me nothing about the java version. Typing about:plugins in the url bar shows me literally two dozen version numbers. Googling turns up somebody's test app at http://javatester.org/version.html , but (a) how do I know this guy isn't a black hat, and (b) even if that showed I was currently running 1.6, what happens if a future apt-get upgrade bumps me into 1.7?
The final thing that should really happen IMO is that the OSS community should get off the java upgrade treadmill. The IcedTea project should designate some version such as 1.6 as a high-security, stable version and focus some real effort on making that version secure. Distros should stop packaging 1.7+ until the dust settles -- and if that take a couple of years, who the heck cares? Hell, I wouldn't care if it took a decade, or forever.
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Perhaps the time is right for a COBOL browser plugin?
Yes the point is that you can make it "later" instead of "sooner". Example of this is the Google Native Client which exposes OS services through only an API consisting of a handful of allowed methods compared to the thousands of the Java platform. It is a lot easier to make 10 methods secure than 1000.
Native Client can run C code inside the Sandbox, so you can still take advantage of existing libraries.