What a failure of Secure by Design looks like: Web Browsers

[Dave Aitel via Dailydave <dailydave () lists aitelfoundation org>]

I know it's in vogue to pick on enterprise hardware marketed to "Secure
your OT Environment" but actually written in crayon in a language made of
all sharp edges like C or PHP, with some modules in Cobol for spice. This
is the "Critical Infrastructure" risk du jour, on a thousand podcasts and
panels, with *Volt Typhoon* in the canary seat, where once only the
"sophisticated threat" Mirai had root permissions.

As embarrassing as having random Iranian teenagers learn how to do systems
administration on random water plants in New Jersey is, it's *more*
humiliating to have systemic vulnerabilities right in front of you, have a
huge amount of government brain matter devoted to solving them, and yet not
make the obvious choice to turn off features that are bleeding us out.

And when you talk about market failure in Security you can't help but talk
about Web Browsers, both mobile and desktop. Web Browsing technology is in
everything - and includes a host of technologies too complicated to go
into, but one of the most interesting has been Just in Time compiling,
which got very popular as an exploitation technique (let's say) in 2010
<http://www.semantiscope.com/research/BHDC2010/BHDC-2010-Slides-v2.pdf> but
since then - for over a decade! - has been a bubbling septic font of
constant systemic, untreated risk.

Proponents of having a JIT in your Javascript compiler say "Without this
kind of performance, you wouldn't be able to have GMail or Expedia!" Which
is not true on today's hardware (Turn on Edge Strict Security mode today
and you won't even notice it), and almost certainly not true on much older
hardware. The issue with JITs is visible to any hacker who has looked at
the code - whenever you have concepts like "Negative Zero
<https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2020/09/jitsploitation-one.html>"
that have to be gotten perfectly every time or else the attacker gets full
control of your computer, you are in an indefensible space.

I would, in a perfect world, like us to be able to get ahead of systemic
problems. We have a rallying cry and a lot of signatories on a pledge, but
we need to turn it into clicky clicking on the configuration options that
turn these things off on a USG and Enterprise level, the same way we banned
Russian antivirus from having Ring0 in our enterprises, or suspiciously
cheap subsidized Chinese telecom boxes from serving all the phone companies
across the midwest.

The issue with web browsers is not limited to JITs. A Secure By Design
approach to web browsing would mean that most sites would not have access
to large parts of the web browsing specification. We don't need to be
tracked by every website. They don't all need access to Geolocation or
Video or Web Assembly or any number of other parts of the things our web
browsers give them, largely in order to allow the mass production of
targeted advertising.

If we've learned anything in the last decade, it is that the key phrase in
Targeted Advertising is "Targeted", and malware authors have known this for
as long as the ecosystem existed. The reason your browser is insecure by
default is to support a parasitic advertising ecology, enhancing
shareholder value, but leaving our society defenceless against anyone
schooled enough in the dark arts.

Google's current solution to vulnerabilities in the browser is Yet Another
Sandbox. These work for a while until they don't - over time, digital
sandboxes get dirty and filled with secrets just like the one in your
backyard gets filled with presents from the local feral cat community. I
know Project Zero's Samuel Groß is better at browser hacking than I am, and
he personally designed the sandbox, but I look out across the landscape of
the Chinese hacking community and see only hungry vorpal blades and I do
not think it is a winning strategy.

-dave

References:

   1. Microsoft's Strict mode turns the JIT off (kudos to Johnathan Norman)
   
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/enhance-your-security-on-the-web-with-microsoft-edge-b8199f13-b21b-4a08-a806-daed31a1929d
   2. The Sandbox: https://v8.dev/blog/sandbox

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