Full Disclosure mailing list archives
RE: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap PatchTuesday for Critical flaws
From: "William Lefkovics" <william () lefkovics net>
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2006 18:53:36 -0800
Indeed. You don't want to release a bad patch (who does?) and you also want to work on critical issues in an ASAP manner, not tied to any schedule like 7 to 14 days. "The worst scenario for us is that we release an update which has quality problems. We believe the downstream problems of releasing patches too quickly are even more serious than not putting in the quality that they deserve." - Ben English, Security Leader, Microsoft Australia Furthermore, Microsoft has an exception policy in place for addressing vulnerabilities with greater customer risk. "Microsoft will make an exception to the above release schedule if we determine that customers are at immediate risk from viruses, worms, attacks or other malicious activities. In such a situation Microsoft may release security patches as soon as possible to help protect customers." http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/revsbwp.mspx -----Original Message----- From: full-disclosure-bounces () lists grok org uk [mailto:full-disclosure-bounces () lists grok org uk] On Behalf Of Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2006 6:23 PM To: n3td3v Cc: full-disclosure () lists grok org uk Subject: Re: [Full-disclosure] Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap PatchTuesday for Critical flaws On Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:12:23 GMT, n3td3v said:
You Microsoft must officially agree that all flaws marked as "Critical" must have a patch within 7 to 14 days of public disclosure.
OK... Nice try. Too bad you didn't add a requirement that the patch actually be *correct*. Also, you're totally overlooking the fact that *sometimes*, fixing a problem requires some major re-architecting - for instance, if an API has to be changed, then *every* caller has to be updated, and quite possibly re-designed, and the changes have an annoying tendency to ripple outward (if subroutine A has a 7th parameter added, then everybody who calls A has to be updated. And it's likely that you'll find routines B, C, and D that have no *idea* what the correct value of the parameter should be, because they don't have access to the data - so now callers of B, C, and D have to pass another parameter that gets passed to A). Any company that will commit to a "must" on this one is nuts. It's a good target, but making it mandatory is just asking companies to ship a half-baked patch that seems to fix the PoC rather than the underlying design flaw. And going back and reviewing the patch history on IE is instructive - more than once, Microsoft has released a patch for a known Javascript flaw, only to find out within a week that a very slight change would make the exploit work again. Is that *really* what you want? It's certainly not what *I* want. Waiting another 3-4 days past your arbitrary 14-day limit for a *good* patch is certainly preferable for those of us who actually have to deal with this stuff for a living, rather than hide out on a Yahoo group. _______________________________________________ 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:
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrapPatchTuesday for Critical flaws, (continued)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrapPatchTuesday for Critical flaws n3td3v (Mar 25)
- RE: Industry calls on Microsoft toscrapPatchTuesday for Critical flaws William Lefkovics (Mar 25)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrapPatchTuesday for Critical flaws Valdis . Kletnieks (Mar 25)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrapPatchTuesday for Critical flaws GroundZero Security (Mar 26)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrapPatchTuesday for Critical flaws MR BABS (Mar 26)
- Message not available
- Fwd: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrapPatchTuesday for Critical flaws nick johnson (Mar 27)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap PatchTuesday for Critical flaws Morning Wood (Mar 25)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap Patch Tuesday for Critical flaws ad () heapoverflow com (Mar 26)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap Patch Tuesday for Critical flaws ad () heapoverflow com (Mar 26)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap Patch Tuesday for Critical flaws Rob "Nexis" Nelson (Mar 27)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap PatchTuesday for Critical flaws Nick Withers (Mar 25)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap PatchTuesday for Critical flaws n3td3v (Mar 25)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap Patch Tuesday for Critical flaws n3td3v (Mar 25)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap Patch Tuesday for Critical flaws Stan Bubrouski (Mar 25)
- Re: Industry calls on Microsoft to scrap Patch Tuesday for Critical flaws Javor Ninov (Mar 26)