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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."
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?
I don't see think Java the platform is a security nightmare, but if someone doesn't need then don't install it, reduce your chances of being attacked with software you don use.
Every Chrome/Firefox release has security vulnerabilities fixes, sometimes bugs as critical as this one, and I don't see people screaming "Remove Chrome, Disable Firefox...". All software has bugs, the problem with Java is the slow response of Oracle (and Sun at that time) fixing things, the update cycles are too long and only when a critical bug very loud on the media is found you see them pushing a fix.
in short, 'mobile code' (stuff that runs and is sent across from them to you, to be run on YOUR platform) is untrustable by nature.
I never liked the idea of it, not once. I think its all a security fail.
'here, here's some binary code. run this. no, don't ask questions, just execute this, please'.
why people thought that was a good idea is beyond me.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Sure, Java will be dead in 5 years.. just like COBOL.
Yes, but when a bug is found in either of them (Firefox or Chrome) devs race to plug the whole. On the other hand Oracle knew about this since August and did nothing about it..
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.
They did not do nothing about it, they did release a patch. (That patch was insufficient and that is a valid point to criticize Oracle.)
Java != Javascript
"Trying to use 'todays' internet with Java disabled is not a viable option. A realistic estimate is that over 70% of all common websites require Java to function correctly.
It is unfortunate that so many web developers use Java in places where it just isn't required. While I agree that Java Script does provide needed functionality in some situations, that is not the case in many (most) applications."
Really? This day and age someone not knowing the difference between Java and Javascript?
70% of pages do not use Java. Javascript yes but they are completely different.
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.)
yes, we already blacklist Java across the company where I work due to this.
in general they're quite liberal about letting employees manage their own computers (it's a software dev studio) but Java is blacklisted because of the Ask bundling, which is considered Spyware at corporate level and difficult to remove cleanly.
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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This is absolutely not true. This vulnerability was a zero-day exploit. Zero-day means, by definition, nobody knew about it except the guys who wrote the exploit. We learned about this exploit last Thursday and had a fix on Sunday. Folks were up working around the clock to get the fix out.
We take security exploits incredibly seriously. Three times a year Oracle produces "critical patch updates" and we're working hard to clear out every bug from our backlog related to security, at the expense of new feature development. The suggestion that Oracle doesn't care about fixing these security problems is simply not true.
No, no, no and no.
That is a terrible logical fallacy and everytime it comes up it gets to +5 insightful. This is simply just as broken as the "broken windows" fallacy (nothing to do with Microsoft Windows btw). And for whatever reason, even smart people fall for it.
The fallacy you're falling for is basically the "shades of gray" fallacy. Instead of having two choices (black or white) you argue that it's all gray. But hence you're restricting the issue to something even more simplistic than before: now instead of two colors, there's only one (gray, no matter the shade).
So instead of saying that there are technologies inherently more secure than others (for example OpenBSD hasn't been "rooted" nearly as many times as Windows XP), you're saying: "But OpenBSD had *two* remote-root bugs already found in 12 years and there are probably others, but we haven't found them yet. So it is impossible to create something secure".
And by doing you're implying that OpenBSD or Windows XP: it doesn't matter, it's all gray. Because nothing is truly secure.
And it's very sad. And it's a terrible fallacy to fall for.