Cramming Software With Thousands of Fake Bugs Could Make It More Secure, Researchers Say (vice.com)

It sounds like a joke, but the idea actually makes sense: More bugs, not less, could theoretically make a system safer. From a report: Carefully scatter non-exploitable decoy bugs in software, and attackers will waste time and resources on trying to exploit them. The hope is that attackers will get bored, overwhelmed, or run out of time and patience before finding an actual vulnerability. Computer science researchers at NYU suggested this strategy in a study published August 2, and call these fake-vulnerabilities "chaff bugs." Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, assistant professor at NYU Tandon and one of the researcher on this study, told me in an email that they've been working on techniques to automatically put bugs into programs for the past few years as a way to test and evaluate different bug-finding systems. Once they had a way to fill a program with bugs, they started to wonder what else they could do with it. "I also have a lot of friends who write exploits for a living, so I know how much work there is in between finding a bug and coming up with a reliable exploit -- and it occurred to me that this was something we might be able to take advantage of," he said. "People who can write exploits are rare, and their time is expensive, so if you can figure out how to waste it you can potentially have a great deterrent effect." Brendan has previously suggested that adding bugs to experimental software code could help with ultimately winding up with programs that have fewer vulnerabilities.

Comments

Are you serious?

[mhkohne]

We can't manage to build the smallest bit of software without bugs, and now we're supposed to introduce large numbers of fake bugs that are, in fact, provably not exploitable.

Sure...that'll work.

Right up until the 'fake' bugs turn out to actually be exploitable (because, you know, we were wrong about them), and the bad guys win again.

Re:Are you serious?

[jellomizer]

This idea is like the Honey Pot idea for network protection.

This was popular 20 years ago, where most hacking was targeted at a network, by individuals. You get a system to similar an insecure pc, have the hackers break in think they are getting away with murder, while it collects information on who is hacking it and how. And using that information to protect your real network.

Hacking rarely works like that now. Either it is fully automated so a honey pot server would just be a statistical issue while the other servers are getting hit, or if it is more targeted it will often go in via stupid users on the inside of the firewall.

Most security glitches are not bugs in the traditional sense. For the most part buffer overflows have been fixed. But from lazy software development from developers not thinking about security at the time.

Re:Are you serious?

[bluefoxlucid]

Honeypots alert you to activity. A network scan hits them. There is nothing useful on this web server, yet someone tried to browse it. Someone tried to connect to the server's file share. You're able to identify malicious traffic and hosts.

Software bugs don't tell people anything. You put it on a non-networked machine, you probe at it, you take it apart, you crash it, you tell no one.

I don’t like to call people names, but

[93 Escort Wagon]

This guy is an idiot. An increase in complexity - which this most certainly would entail - will always lead to an increase in genuine bugs. And, as was said by someone further up... when programmers already can’t write bug-free code, how the heck are they going to make up 100% guaranteed non-exploitable false bugs which - at the same time - are indistinguishable from the real thing to a skilled hacker?

Given him some slack

[shayd2]

This might work. Right up until day 2 when someone leaks the list of "chaff bugs"

Few "Exploits" not "Vulerabilities"

[DalM]

"Brendan has previously suggested that adding bugs to experimental software code could help with ultimately winding up with programs that have fewer vulnerabilities."

This is not correct. His theory seems to be that you will get fewer exploits. The number of vulnerabilities will remain constant.

Re:Brilliant idea

[ShanghaiBill]

Once a critical nuber if bugs is introduced the software becomes unusable hence making it unattractive for hacz0rz to exploit.

The bugs are not at the UI level. The "bugs" are exploitable code that is never actually executed. Black hats would find them when scanning the code, and try to exploit them, but the exploits wouldn't work because the code never executes.

The "bugs" would add a trivial amount of bloat, but will otherwise not affect performance or behavior.

int
main(void) { // ...
    if (somethingThatWillNeverHappen()) {
        char buffer[20];
        gets(buffer); // Buffer overflow target
        mysql_query(buffer); // SQL injection target // ...
    } // ...
}

Disclaimer: I think this is a dumb idea. I am just explaining it, not endorsing it.

Re:Brilliant idea

[DarkOx]

Black hats would find them when scanning the code

unless we are talking about open source that someone might feed to an static analysis tool that is pretty unlikely.

Blackhats don't "scan" binaries they fuzz them - in other words they feed data to "ui level" inputs and than watch where those patterns land in memory. If you are talking about buffer over flow type bug where they can run software locally.

Logic bugs probably much more common today that over flows given the languages being used and the fact that everything is on the web again get exercised by things like crawlers and maybe directly parameter tampering. They key here again is the process STARTS by identifing inputs the application takes.

So if you stuff a bunch of unreachable code in the application odds are the blackhats won't ever see it and won't therefore spend any time on it. If someone does scan a binary tools like IDA are pretty good at identifying unreachable code too so its unlikely to be anything but a short lived arms race.

  Now if you put 'fake bugs' like say change all the strncpy calls back to old strcpy calls and than somehow move the bounds check to some far away part of the program while you write into a buffer inside an larger data structure you don't than use for anything you 1) risk screwing it up and creating an bug that is still exploitable 2) leave a useful gadget (code someone who has exploited an actual bug can now lever to help them gain even more control of execution 3) leave a nice hunk of process that can safely be replaced with larger shell codes 4) fail to fool anyone because you are dealing with people who will be able to spot the tells and won't be taken in.