Re: In response to alleged vulnerabilities in Microsoft Visual C++ security checks feature

From: Crispin Cowan (crispinat_private)
Date: Thu Feb 14 2002 - 18:33:51 PST

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    Brandon Bray wrote:
    
    >[2] Cigital alleges that the /GS security check feature was a port of
    >StackGuard. This happens to be untrue, as both technologies were
    >invented independently.
    >
    I challenge that. The StackGuard paper was written in summer 1997, and 
    published in early 1998. The Microsoft /GS paper appeared in mid-2001, 
    and bears a STRIKING resemblance to the StackGuard paper. It is 
    theoretically possible that /GS was an independent invention, but only 
    by being astonishingly ignorant of the literature.
    
    >[1] "Writing Secure Code" is the prescriptive guide to Microsoft
    >developers for, oddly enough, writing secure code.
    >
    Funnily enough, this book (published in November 2001) actually refers 
    to the stack ornaments that provide for overflow detection as 
    "canaries," a term coined in the StackGuard 1998 paper. See the book's 
    index and search for "canary" 
    http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/index/5612.asp#Index
    
    If it was independent invention, there are a lot of surprising coincidences.
    
    Crispin
    
    -- 
    Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
    Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com
    Security Hardened Linux Distribution:       http://immunix.org
    Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html
    
            The Olympic Games: A Century of Corruption and Graft
    	     The FIS: Crushing the soul of snowboarding
    



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