Watchdogs on Way Out?

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s=701&a=26381,00.asp

By Dennis Fisher 
May 6, 2002 

While much of the high-tech industry has spent the last several months
focusing on security - for their information as well as their physical
assets - a small but growing number of influential executives has been
working toward the long-term goal of making the security industry
obsolete.

"The security industry as we know it today goes away in 10 years,"  
said Chris Darby, CEO of @Stake Inc., a security consultancy and
research company in Cambridge, Mass.

As things stand now, the security market is a confusing and fractured
mélange of technologies with exotic-sounding names such as firewall
and IDS (intrusion detection system). Vendors in every segment tout
their wares as the final piece of the puzzle, the magic potion that
promises to make an IT manager's security headaches vanish.

They play on customers' fears, telling them there are dozens, if not
hundreds, of vulnerabilities in the software on which they're running
their enterprises and that the only way to keep corporate data safe is
to install yet another layer of security.

However, the dirty little secret of the security industry is that if
the big software vendors paid more attention to security, security
hardware and software vendors would be out of business, according to
experts.

And that's exactly the scenario that companies such as @Stake,
Microsoft Corp. and others are trying to bring about.

Microsoft has long been a favorite target of crackers, much to the
displeasure of customers that have been burned by vulnerabilities in
the company's broad line of software. Microsoft has been quick to
issue patches when someone identifies a new flaw in one of its
products, but this spring, the company launched Trustworthy Computing,
an all-out effort to improve the security of its products during the
design and development phase, something its critics have suggested for
years.

The main focus of the effort is training developers to write secure
code and eliminate common and easily exploitable vulnerabilities such
as buffer overruns. @Stake, which offers secure-coding training
services, has seen a lot of demand for those services in recent
months.

Such training and coding practices should lead to more secure products
in the short term and in the long term, to a marked decrease in the
number of vulnerabilities in corporate networks, which will mean fewer
successful attacks, security insiders claim.

And that, in turn, will mean less demand for security countermeasures
such as firewalls and IDSes.

"In the long term, over time, as we design more-secure products, what
we should see - what we'd better see—is fewer successful attacks,
better stability and better security," said Scott Charney, chief
security strategist at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash. "We should be able
to measure and say vulnerabilities are going down. Things should
improve."

But "should" is far different from "will." Many of the common
vulnerabilities that crackers use to invade corporate networks and Web
servers have been around for years, if not decades. Buffer overruns,
for example, were identified as early as the 1960s, and yet they
continue to show up in new software packages such as Windows XP.

This leads some security experts to challenge the notion that the
security industry is on the verge of collapsing.

"Today's simple-to-fix vulnerabilities, like buffer overflows, will
likely be gone [in 10 years]," said Steven Bellovin, AT&T fellow in
the Network Services Research Lab at AT&T Labs Research, in Florham
Park, N.J., and a pioneer in network security. "But more complex
semantic problems will remain. Most security holes are caused by buggy
code. Buggy code is the oldest problem in computer science, and I see
no reason to think that will change.

"We'll make progress - but it's fundamentally a very hard, and
possibly insoluble, problem," Bellovin said. "I also think that the
right approach for systems architects is to design their systems
differently. A lot more has to be done to understand what the
security-sensitive modules are so that they can be made as small as
possible and can be properly isolated from the rest of the system."

But in the end, @Stake's Darby said he believes that the changes being
made by companies such as Microsoft are moving the industry inexorably
toward a fundamental shift.

"The notion of overlaying security products on networks after the fact
is inefficient," Darby said. "And technology in the long run is about
efficiency."

The changes that Darby, Charney and others envision for the security
industry will not happen overnight. But if they do occur, users will
eventually be better off, experts say. "I think that Microsoft will
apply a lot of effort to fix their security problems because it seems
that they have been ridiculed to the point that they have finally
decided to get right with God," said Phil Zimmermann, chief
cryptographer at Hush Communications Corp., based in Dublin, Ireland,
and inventor of the PGP e-mail encryption program. "I think Linux,
FreeBSD and Apple [Computer Inc.] will try to reach parity with
OpenBSD in security discipline. These changes will take years but will
eventually bear fruit. Firewalls and IDS as add-on products will
become less needed."



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