Re: Finally - Curphey award 2004 to SPI Dynamics

[Mads Rasmussen <mads () opencs com br>]

Mark Curphey wrote:
> Here I am, depressed at the prospect of filling in mountains of expense
> claims from weeks of traveling and approving mundane mails to webappsec
> about XSS after XSS and along comes a shining light. At last an "application
> security" company that gets it ! Hats of to the folks at SPI and the Curphey
> Award for 2004 for leading the industry down the right path !
>
> http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040628/clm006_1.html

Here is another link http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1617901,00.asp

I don't know about you guys but I have a bad feeling about this. I am 
not sure this is the right path.

The article quotes Caleb Sima, founder and chief technology officer of 
SPI Dynamics saying "It doesn't require developers to learn about 
security," - "You really just need to validate input to eliminate most 
application vulnerabilities."

Shouldn't you at least have a feeling for where the developers makes 
their mistakes to be able to insert the right piece of secure code?

By all means it looks like a cool product, but how much can we trust it?

One of its features is, qoute
"Input Validation objects will check incoming data on web forms to
validate user-supplied input against a set of rules and prevent
parameter manipulation exploits, such as SQL Injection attacks."

Can we trust these "set of rules".
If they opened their technology, the OWASP team could contribute rules 
to such a database and then we just might get somewhere by having a list 
of f.ex regular expressions for using the validator classes in .Net or 
input validation in general but that would probably not happen.

I am concerned that products like this just leads to lazy developers.

Jeff what do you think about this? You wanted to start an input 
validation project based on filters, a database like described above 
would be quite handy :o)

Just my two bits

--
Mads Rasmussen, M.Sc.
Open Communications Security
www.opencs.com.br
+55 11 3345 2525