Alan wrote: >On Tuesday 09 April 2002 02:06 pm, Jere Retzer wrote: > >>Seems like everyone is going to philosophize so I might as well join: >> >>1) Security holes are proportional to bugs is proportional to lines of code >>-- Win 2000 is what--30 million lines? >> >Sometimes I think this "estimate" is used as an excuse for bad code. It makes >it seem as if security flaws are inevitable, so why bother. With proper >attention, this sort of problem should be a minor problem, not a regular >occurrence. > I'm not sure I get your point. W2K was about 30 MLOC (Million Lines Of Code). XP is more like 45 MLOC. These numbers are "estimates" in that they may be off by a million lines, here or there :) It is indisputable that bugs happen. It's not an excuse for bad code, bugs always happen. Dilligence can reduce the rate at which bugs happen, but a very, VERY low rate would be 1 per thousand lines of code. That means 45,000 bugs in XP. And that, in turn, is why I'm ranting about bad design. The equivalent piece of code in Linux (the kernel) is about 1 MLOC. So if we just assume equivalent code quality (which is pretty generous considering Microsoft's record) then XP will have approximately 45 TIMES as many vulnerabilites as Linux. Of course its not that simple. In large part, comparing the size of the kernels is meaningless, because most security vulnerabilities are in the applications, not the kernel. So we would need some way to compare the MLOCs of code running as root or as children of inetd on Linux against the MLOCs of code that XP offers as services. That, in turn, is so subject to configuration vagueries that we inevitably end up with an apples/orange situation. >>2) Microsoft philosophy of embrace, >>extend, 3rd party developers makes it inherently easy to hack >> >Microsoft makes a number of rules for developers as to what they can and >cannot do. Unfortunately, they ignore those rules when it is to their own >advantage. For example, in order to get MS Office to work on NT Terminal >Server, you need to give everyone WRITE access to the system directory. > That's another one of those failures to apply the Principle of Least Privilege: Office should not require write access to such a sensitive directory. Note also, that this is a security defect in Office, not Windows. 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
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