Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack
From: Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu
Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2004 06:09:05 -0400
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 21:08:27 CDT, Paul Schmehl <pauls () utdallas edu> said:
I attended a presentation yesterday for a security product in the application firewall field. During the presentation, the CISSP stated that "in every 1000 lines of code there will be 15 errors". I don't know if I'd agree with that - I suspect most coders are a bit better than that - but I had to chuckle, because, of course, I immediately thought, "So you admit that your code is riddled with holes!"
Actually, I suspect most coders are *worse* than that. Sendmail 8.13.0 weighs in at just about 90K lines of C code for the main program. By that metric, there should only have been 135 bugs in it. In fact, there are 441 occurrences of 'Problem noted by' in the release notes. BIND 9.2.3 has 1,525 entries in the CHANGELOG file, of which 774 are listed as '[bug]' entries. I'm fairly sure that BIND9 is well under 510,000 lines of code, so again we're running well above 15 bugs per KLOC. So either (a) Sendmail and BIND were written by people who were *incredibly* worse than "the average programmer", or 15 errors/KLOC is a vast understatement. Now although Sendmail may not be a paragon of excellent programming practice, it would be hard to argue that it's literally 4 times as buggy as code written by "the average programmer" - think back to your "intro to programming" class and ask what the *lower* half of the class would have done if they had done a rewrite of Sendmail... ;) I might be willing to accept 15 *security-critical* errors per 1,000 - the vast majority of bugs are *not* a security issue.
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Current thread:
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Frank Knobbe (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Paul Schmehl (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Frank Knobbe (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Denis Dimick (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Aditya, ALD [ Aditya Lalit Deshmukh ] (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Frank Knobbe (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Denis Dimick (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack (fully off topic!) Aditya, ALD [ Aditya Lalit Deshmukh ] (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Valdis . Kletnieks (Jul 01)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Raj Mathur (Jul 01)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Maarten (Jul 01)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Akos Szalkai (Jul 05)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Paul Schmehl (Jun 30)
- Re: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Denis Dimick (Jun 30)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Stuart Fox (DSL AK) (Jun 30)
- RE: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Denis Dimick (Jul 01)
- RE: [OT] Web sites compromised by IIS attack Eric Paynter (Jul 01)
- Re: [OT] Web sites compromised by IIS attack codec (Jul 01)
- Re: [OT] Web sites compromised by IIS attack Denis Dimick (Jul 01)
- Re: [OT] Web sites compromised by IIS attack ken (Jul 01)
- RE: Web sites compromised by IIS attack Denis Dimick (Jul 01)