WebApp Sec mailing list archives
RE: The Right Approach to Web Developer Education
From: "Burke, Charles" <Charles_Burke () HomeDepot com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 16:37:56 -0400
Respectfully, I have developed applications for retail, manufacturing, telecom, software, and security software! Only a fraction of the projects considered security important enough (from a development standpoint) to allow time and resources for it $$$$. What about the many 'good' and 'bad' programmers who are 'driven' to 'crunch' out code hour to hour. These programmers cannot write security frameworks from scratch. They need help. Developers don't write GUI controls from scratch anymore. They use toolkits. GUI Toolkits, Security Toolkits, far from failures! -----Original Message----- From: Yvan Boily [mailto:yboily () seccuris com] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 1:20 PM To: 'Mark Curphey' Cc: webappsec () securityfocus com Subject: RE: The Right Approach to Web Developer Education Respectfully, why should it be easy? Making things easy rarely improves security, and generally reinforces a false sense of security. Take a look, for example, at modern airport security. To test if a piece of electronics works they ask you to turn it on. Anyone with a minimal understanding of electronics and machine level programming could implement a fake system which would be enough to mimic the power on test. This practice gives a nice fuzzy blanket to the individual passenger, and raises the bar for the most limited offenders, but will do nothing to stop a determined attacker. This may not be an apt comparison to most web applications, however a recent billing system that I worked with could have been compromised and abused in a fashion that would result in termination of services for non-payment. Given that some of the clients handled by the billing services reside in northern communities who rely on the electrical services provided to generate heat a successful attack in the middle of January at -40C weather could result in this billing front end affecting a life-critical system. This was not a fear-uncertainty-doubt vulnerability or risk identified as an external auditor, but rather a legitimate concern discovered internally that resulted in an ongoing training and education plan put in place to keep the organizations software developers aware of security concerns. Allowing ignorance to be compensated for by technologies which require the implementor to make subjective decisions about the usage explicitly reduces the reliability of the application because you now have two unreliable components where before you had one. A bad programmer is a bad programmer. A bad programmer with a security framework, and the responsibility to use it as they see fit is a recipe for disaster. I do not mean to imply that creating a security framework that can be readily used as a basis to implement secure software is a Bad Thing, but it is can definitely be a step in the wrong direction. Unless it is a heavily reviewed, open framework it just adds yet another black box to the process of implementing security. In my opinion a toolkit like this at a low level to 'raise the bar' is a failure in the implementation of security. Yvan Boily
-----Original Message----- From: Mark Curphey [mailto:mark () curphey com] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:34 AM To: webappsec () securityfocus com Subject: The Right Approach to Web Developer Education Well said. If you want people to do the right thing, you have to make it easy for them to do the right thing ! -----Original Message----- From: Madsen, Villy [mailto:Villy.Madsen () atcoitek com] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 10:19 AM To: Mads Rasmussen; Mark Curphey Cc: webappsec () securityfocus com; Jeff Williams Subject: RE: Finally - Curphey award 2004 to SPI Dynamics While I do not advocate that Developers be allowed to get lazy about security, I also feel that providing a standard tool that they can use to filter input is a bad thing. Way back a couple of decades ago, I was involved in a Telco project to
rewrite an application used by Long Distance Telephone operators to manage "Time and Charges" calls. The application was finally shut down in 2000. One of the "breakthroughs" that we pioneered was the heavy use of what was we called Table Driven IO. All data input or output from the system was defined by a set of mapping tables, that defined what the data could look like, how long it was, and where it was mapped to in the application data schema. The "mapping" applications were general purpose, checked for proper type - performing whatever data conversions where necessary, guarded against overflows etc etc. Sounds very similar to me. I thought it was a great idea then, and I still do... One application to vet (the mapping routine), and a bunch of tables to
validate. Easier than validating all of the code snippets that are "accepting Input" from the external world.... Villy Villy Madsen ISP GSEC Information Security ATCO I-Tek Bus: (780) 420-5093 Cell: (780) 975-0110 Fax: (780) 420-3916 Mailto:Villy.Madsen () atcoitek com The information transmitted is intended only for the addressee and may
contain confidential, proprietary and/or privileged material. Any unauthorized review, distribution or other use of or the taking of any
action in reliance upon this information is prohibited. If you received this in error, please contact the sender and delete or destroy this message and any copies. -----Original Message----- From: Mads Rasmussen [mailto:mads () opencs com br] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 5:47 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 approvingmundane mails towebappsec about XSS after XSS and along comes a shininglight. At lastan "application security" company that gets it ! Hats of tothe folksat SPI and the Curphey Award for 2004 for leading the industry down the right path ! http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040628/clm006_1.htmlHere 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
Current thread:
- RE: The Right Approach to Web Developer Education Burke, Charles (Jun 29)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- RE: The Right Approach to Web Developer Education Burke, Charles (Jun 29)
- RE: The Right Approach to Web Developer Education Cronican, John (Jun 29)
- RE: The Right Approach to Web Developer Education Wolf, Yonah (Jun 30)