Re: [ISN] What Billg's new security effort will cost

From: InfoSec News (isnat_private)
Date: Mon Jan 28 2002 - 00:38:26 PST

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    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 18:49:55 -0800
    From: Bill Frantz <frantzat_private>
    To: R. A. Hettinga <rahettingaat_private>, cryptographyat_private
    Subject: Re: [ISN] What Billg's new security effort will cost
    
    A serious attempt to address the many security flaws in current systems
    will result in major changes to Microsoft software or its culture.
    
    Microsoft has always been a features oriented company.  In the early days,
    this orientation served the company well.  Microsoft achieved its early
    successes by selling software to the corporate market.  This market is
    characterized by a desire to have company wide standard software packages
    to minimize support costs, and maximize the ability to transfer information.
    
    When a company was deciding which package is to be anointed the corporate
    standard, one of the measures used was a feature comparison chart.  The
    chart was used to ensure the chosen package has the features needed by all
    the users in the company.  Unfortunately, in general the people who
    selected the package did not know which features would be required in
    obscure corners of their company.  As a result, they tended to pick the
    package with the most features.
    
    Being the "firstest with the mostest" provider established Microsoft
    products such as Windows, Word, and Excel in the corporate market.  When
    people purchased computers for their homes, they tended to buy what they
    knew from work, and these packages then migrated to the home.
    
    Now Microsoft is attempting to make security a new feature of their
    software.  However, security is different from all the other features they
    have implemented.  It is not about what you can do, which can be
    implemented and demonstrated, but about what you can't do, which is usually
    the absence of implementation, and ducedly hard to demonstrate.  It is not
    about showing there is a path to achieve a result, but about showing that
    no such path exists.
    
    One of the things that makes security assurance much harder is having a
    complex set of features, which interact to effect the security of the
    system.  There are many more possible paths, and much more code where a
    flaw can bring the whole system down.
    
    Microsoft can chose to simplify by removing features, which will require a
    tidal shift in their culture, or they can make drastic changes in their
    implementation strategy in an attempt to maintain their feature set.  My
    bet is they try to maintain their feature set.
    
    The first step is to attack the easy problems.  Bruce Schneier and Adam
    Shostack, in their paper, "Results, Not Resolution, A guide to judging
    Microsoft's security progress" came up with an excellent list of areas to
    address first.  Presumably Microsoft will also address the simple coding
    problems, like buffer overruns, with improved languages or development
    procedures.  Even with these changes, they will still have a system where a
    bug in one feature can still break the security of the entire system.
    
    To maintain its feature set, and have a reasonable degree of security,
    Microsoft will have to adopt architectures where bugs in most of the
    features can not effect security.  These architectures will need much
    smaller and more flexible security compartments than systems such as
    Windows and Unix provide.  These compartments need to isolate the
    privileges given to feature implementations from those given to the users
    and those given to other parts of the application system.  This kind of
    compartment supports the principle of least privilege, which is the best
    path to limit the effect of bugs.
    
    
    Cheers - Bill
    
    
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