'Penetrate and patch' e-business security is grim

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/24133.html

By John Leyden
Posted: 19/02/2002 at 20:05 GMT

Application security flaws introduced early in the design life cycle
are giving rise to easily exploitable defects that can readily be
prevented.

That's the main conclusion of an evaluation of 45 e-business
applications by security consultancy @stake.  It says the current
state of application security is "grim".

@stake found that nearly half of application security defects - 47
percent - are both readily exploitable and could cause significant
loss of reputation or customer revenue, but the defects were entirely
preventable. The consultancy found that the best-designed e-business
applications have 80 per cent fewer security defects than the worst.

A selection of wireless applications, off-the-shelf packages and
Web-transactional apps supplied by @stake's clients were put through
their paces during its security evaluation.

The methodology involved a code review; a look at the architecture and
design of applications; and attack simulations. As security testing
was carried out under non-disclosure agreements it is unclear when
issues will be highlighted to the wider community.

@stake's testing reveals some worrying trends in application
insecurity.

These include insufficient rigour in checking user input, a problem
that can give rise to buffer overflow attacks, and a lack of secure
authentication and access control features within applications. User
session security proved to be the "Achilles heel" of many of the apps
analysed.

Nine classes of common security flaws can make applications insecure,
according to @stake's research. These are: administrative interfaces
authentication/access control, configuration management, cryptographic
algorithms, information gathering, input validation, parameter
manipulation, sensitive data handling and session management.

Avi Corfas, vice president for @stake in EMEA, said the problems are
more to do with the way applications were designed rather than the
platform they run on. Somewhat controversially, he claimed 70 per cent
of the problems @stake identified were in their design and only 30
percent were in implementation.

Anecdotal evidence from other security consultants suggests the vast
amount of security risks is caused by incorrect implementation, for
example the interaction between applications or how applications are
installed. That's to say nothing of failure to apply patches, of
course, which @stake points out would be far less of an issue if
developers addressed security problems early in the design process.

"Many companies treat security as 'penetrate and patch' rather than
employing secure software engineering practices that would have
produced a safer application from the start," said Andrew Jaquith,
program director, @stake.

In order to benchmark application security best practices, @stake
compares and contrasts the top and bottom performers in its study as
measured by business risk.

The six areas that differentiate the best from the rest are: early
design focus on user authentication and authorisation; mistrust of
user input; end-to-end session encryption; safe data handling;  
elimination of administrator backdoors; mis-configurations and default
settings and security quality assurance.

[Related link:  
http://www.atstake.com/research/reports/atstake_app_unequal.pdf ]



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