Re: Graphing: Don't believe everything you see.

["George Ou" <george_ou () lanarchitect net>]

Ok this is really stupid.  Why is it that Apache has so many more critical
flaws than IIS 6.0 then?

IIS 6.0
http://secunia.com/product/1438/?task=advisories

Apache 2.0
http://secunia.com/product/73/?task=advisories

Note that a lot of those Apache advisories are MULTIPLE exploits.


Also note that Windows Server 2003 has had a fairly solid track record on
security when you count the number of critical exploits over its lifetime
compared to Linux.

Take a look at Microsoft SQL 2005 and you'll see that's been ROCK SOLID with
ZERO vulnerabilities.
http://secunia.com/product/6782/?task=advisories
Compare that to the mess of Oracle over the same time period.


So let's not base our analysis on some stupid trumped up diagram and let's
not make stupid generalizations about platforms.  Let's try and be objective
and factual.  There are times one can bash Microsoft but this so called
picture "analysis" just isn't one of them.


George Ou

-----Original Message-----
From: dailydave-bounces () lists immunitysec com
[mailto:dailydave-bounces () lists immunitysec com] On Behalf Of Dave Aitel
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2007 4:57 PM
To: dailydave () lists immunitysec com
Subject: [Dailydave] Graphing: Don't believe everything you see.

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Graphs can be quite misleading. They make people think they see something
which is blindingly obvious, but totally wrong.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/threatchaos/?p=311
(Check out the pictures.)

"""
Windows is inherently harder to secure than Linux. There I said it.
The simple truth.

Many millions of words have been written and said on this topic. I have a
couple of pictures. The basic argument goes like this. In its long
evolution, Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure.
Well these images make the point very well. Both images are a complete map
of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of
html with a single picture. The same page and picture. A system call is an
opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to
see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do
QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater
potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure
applications.

"""

As soon as I saw those pictures, I was like "Hey, Sana Security guys spend
hours staring at this stuff" and lo and behold, that's where they come from.
The more system calls, the harder to secure with Sana's particular flavor of
HIDS. But not "the greater potential for vulnerability".

You don't get to see the syscall names here, but there's a few large
segments of IIS you don't get to see anywhere in Apache are as follows (I've
read the source code for both, so bear with me):
1. The metabase - essentially a registry of configuration data that works on
a per-directory or per-page basis. This is rather complex stuff, requiring
MSRPC calls and all sorts of craziness. But it doesn't necessarily add to
the insecurity of the product.
2. Threading and impersonation. My bet is that the syscall graph he
generated for Apache was in forking mode. No need to thread or handle
asynchronous operations at all. Just read(data); handle(data).

Complexity only correlates with insecurity; it doesn't let you make
order-of-magnitude judgment calls. Especially not based on graphs like that.

For the record, or at least, as a reminder to the record, anything based
solely on system call ordering is going to have a bugger of a time dealing
with CreateThread(). On Windows you might be better off ignoring system call
ordering entirely and dealing only with system call arguments. Having more
system calls might make the entropy of the arguments of any one system call
much smaller (ioctl() has very high argument entropy). Based on that,
Windows might actually be MORE secure, just looked at from a different angle
than the call graph he chooses to represent.

- -dave
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