Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: How Are So Many Security Vulnerabilities Possible?
dryriver writes: It seems like not a day goes by on Slashdot and elsewhere on the intertubes that you don't read a story headline reading "Company_Name Product_Name Has Critical Vulnerability That Allows Hackers To Description_Of_Bad_Things_Vulnerability_Allows_To_Happen." A lot of it is big brand products as well. How, in the 21st century, is this possible, and with such frequency? Is software running on electronic hardware invariably open to hacking if someone just tries long and hard enough? Or are the product manufacturers simply careless or cutting corners in their product designs? If you create something that communicates with other things electronically, is there no way at all to ensure that the device is practically unhackable?
>> are the product manufacturers simply careless or cutting corners in their product designs?
Yes.
I've been a software security guru for more than ten years, and none of the companies I worked for, whether Fortune 100 or commercial companies shipping commercial software, fixed all the vulnerabilities we found before shipping. (Some set the bar at "high" and some as "critical", but no one halted the presses for "medium".) For all I know, most of the vulnerabilities we found perished on a disbanded team's backlog years ago to the delight of hackers everywhere.
But the bigger problem would be the code that shipped that we never saw, whether it was an intern's "hackathon" project shat onto the web, something that crawled out of a pool of H1Bs, or a third-party app grafted in to fake reporting enough to get past the demo with the big client. I have more horror stories than I can relate involving things like this.
I think most companies don't know how to produce reasonably secure software cost-effectively. They aren't motivated enough to spend a ton of money on security. So they give up on trying all that hard, to varying degrees.
Some companies try educating programmers a bit about security. That's good, but not sufficient. Programmers are constantly learning new frameworks, new libraries, new languages, new systems they have to integrate with ... They aren't going to be security experts too.
In my experience, the main cost-effective way to improve security is to have a security professional consult with developers at three points in the process of a software project. Then integrate part of what's learned into automated parts of the DevOps build and release process. One hour from a security person at each of these three points can really make a difference, not only in the current project, but in future projects. Have the security person join a meeting and be part of the discussion at these three points:
The initial overall design / architecture
This will allow the security professional to point out spots where security issues commonly occur, "be sure to use TLS (ssl) for this connection". It will also catch major architectural decisions that lead to big security problems that are very hard to fix later (such as an ISP planning on managing customer modems over their public IPs).
Finalizing the design details
Similar to the above, but at a finer-grained level
Pre-release testing and approval
Around the time you're starting integration testing, your security person can review the implementation based on notes they took in the two earlier stages. For some of these code-level things they can add to your existing pipeline, so from then on Git will warn you immediately when you try to commit code that follows a dangerous pattern such as use of std::process::Command with variables influenced by user input, or improper reuse of mutable buffers. (Here I use Rust terminology, the same errors can be made in most languages. Few bugs are langauge-specific).
Not only will this catch issues in the current project, but everybody learns from the interaction in order to avoid creating similar problems in the next project. Instead of studying 2,000 pages about security, the developers are being made aware of the specific issues that they tend to create in the specific domain the company is writing software for.
This process allows one security professional to effectively serve many programmers on many projects, much like your database expert might work with developers on many projects. You can get a lot of security improvement for not much money.
* Before somebody says "2,000 pages is ridiculous. Security is easy, all you need is the OWASP Top 10â, I'm a member of OWASP. I know very well the quick "rules of thumb" we publish. I've personally read over 10,000 pages about security and I don't know anywhere NEAR all that there is to know.