Re: Finally - Curphey award 2004 to SPI Dynamics

[Daniel Cuthbert <deeper () gmail com>]

I'm busy showing this to a bunch of developers here at work and the
general feeling is "err wow i didnt realise that was an issue"
The main issue is that when your taught to code/develop, security
never comes into the equation (perfect example is a friend is doing
his computer science degree and learning C and yet they still dont
mention anything about secure coding)

This product wont stop all the security holes, but should start
developers thinking about the whole security lifecycle when developing

and as for OWASP feeding input into it, yeah good idea.

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 09:25:48 -0400, Stan Guzik <sguzik () immediatech com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> In my option, whatever it is worth, developers are burdened with
> countless issues like security, performance, stability, and etc...
> Whenever we can encapsulate security items like input/output validations
> and not have the developer spend lots of time on it the better.
> Developers should spend time on features and functionality of software
> and less time on the above.
>
> As developers we need to get to a point where we have components and
> procedures that we plug into our software and it takes care of security
> for us.  In an idealistic world developers should not worry about
> security, one day we'll get there...  The more we use security
> components and the more time we spend improving our components will lead
> to more secure software.
>
> One of my developers attended the OWASP AppSec 2004 conference and came
> back to me saying "We already do this stuff but he never knew about
> it..."  I incorporated the OWASP Guide into our development procedures
> and my developers just followed our standards.  As a manager I felt
> proud.
>
> Does anyone know of any open source components like the one developed by
> SPI?
>
> Thanks,
> Stan Guzik
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mads Rasmussen [mailto:mads () opencs com br]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 7:47 AM
> To: Mark Curphey
> Cc: webappsec () securityfocus com; Jeff Williams
> Subject: Re: Finally - Curphey award 2004 to SPI Dynamics
>
> 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