Full Disclosure mailing list archives
Re: Re: Security Bug in MSVC
From: "Dave Korn" <davek_throwaway () hotmail com>
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:54:03 -0000
Jason Coombs wrote in news:43CEA75C.5080009 () science org
Dave Korn wrote:Nice thinking, Donnie. This must be the "new class of vulnerability" that was hinted at by Microserfs a few months ago... The attacks are launched by way of source code distributions rather than binary code.Why is this a terrible insecure microsoftism, when GNU make does exactly the same?Just after Donnie reported this issue to Microsoft (September) we started seeing Microserfs suggest that their security team was working on a never-before-encountered novel class of vulnerability,
And for some reason you assume that this was the often-before-encountered and non-novel vulnerability that you had just reported, rather than any of the presumably million-and-one vulnerabilities of varying levels of seriousness or insignificance that they are routinely having reported and dealing with?
-- since it would be politically valuable for Microsoft to be able to claim that sharing source code is an unsafe behavior, and since there have been no other vulnerabilities disclosed since that time which might have appeared to Microsoft to be entirely new and far-reaching, I suspect that this disclosure prompted those previous statements about work being done by Microsoft.
Well, that's a massive assumption. For a start, there's nothing new about it - remember the trojaned configure scripts? For a continuance, maybe they're just still working on this whatever-it-is?
and the implication was that Microsoft's security competency had finally surpassed both the black hats and all other white hat groups
Heh. Any possible reputation M$ might have been hoping to acquire for "security comptency" has been *utterly* blown out of the water by the WMF bug. After all, they had this big refocusing, after slammer, and audited all their code and started putting security first and foremost, remember? Heh, yeh, sure they did. It's a stunning indictment of the worth of M$'s code audit that they had this accept-a-pointer-to-code-from-a-file design flaw right out there in the open beneath their noses and they didn't even see what was in front of them. Presumably the rest of their audit can be assumed to have been equally thorough!
How many other attacks can you point to where Microsoft's development tools are exploited to specifically target the unwary programmer who still thinks it's perfectly safe to download arbitrary data from an untrusted source and then open it in a text editor?
Umm, perhaps if you think that Dev Studio is a "text editor", that would explain your misunderstandings. My question to you is, what kind of programmer doesn't know that building code involves running all sorts of arbitrary executables with arbitrary data? And in any case, opening the data in dev studio *is* entirely safe. The batch commands aren't executed unless you choose the relevant menu commands or f-key to build the project. Of course, you know perfectly well that it's safe to simply _open_ the file, and you know perfectly well that DevStudio is FAR more than "a text editor", so I must assume the above paragraph to have been dishonest rhetoric/polemic rather than a serious line of argument.
My guess is that Donnie got Microsoft thinking about this very risk, and they started talking internally about it being an entirely new class of vulnerability. Yes, if my supposition is correct it would be quite pathetic and give us another reason to laugh at Microsoft; but you can probably see how much benefit Microsoft is going to be able to milk out of this and related attacks that exploit bugs in programmers' tools that are launched by the simple act of opening or attempting to compile a source code distribution.
Well, you can't run *anything* with arbitrary data and expect to be safe. Except, of course, a plain, no-features-no-frills ASCII text editor.
Source code is just as dangerous as binary code.
Absolutely.
Clearly, the only way to be safe is to rely on Microsoft's programmers to create and digitally-sign software for us. Go Microsoft. Yeah!
Well, I suppose it's conceivable that M$ are attempting a massive FUD over nothing, but I think they'd want at least a *bit* more substance to back up the pure hype... cheers, DaveK -- Can't think of a witty .sigline today.... _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/
Current thread:
- Security Bug in MSVC Morning Wood (Jan 17)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC ad () heapoverflow com (Jan 17)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Stan Bubrouski (Jan 17)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Jason Coombs (Jan 17)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Dave Korn (Jan 18)
- Re: Re: Security Bug in MSVC Jason Coombs (Jan 18)
- Re: Re: Security Bug in MSVC bkfsec (Jan 18)
- Re: Re: Security Bug in MSVC Dave Korn (Jan 19)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Dave Korn (Jan 18)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC ad () heapoverflow com (Jan 17)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Joachim Schipper (Jan 18)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Morning Wood (Jan 18)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Pavel Kankovsky (Jan 19)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC redsand (Jan 19)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Stan Bubrouski (Jan 19)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC ad () heapoverflow com (Jan 19)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC redsand (Jan 19)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC ad () heapoverflow com (Jan 19)
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC redsand (Jan 19)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Security Bug in MSVC Otter E (Jan 19)