Re: Of the three expensive vulnerability scanners

["Jim+Lisa Weiler" <lisajimbo () rcn com>]

One of the benefits we expect to get is certification by VISA, Mastercard 
and AMEX that we have met their security criteria. The criteria are designed 
to move you toward better security on lots of levels, one of which is 
application security. If you don't certify, they can fine you hundreds of 
thousands of $ for security incidents that involve their credit cards. One 
of the accepted artifacts for certification is application vulnerability 
scans that show reduction in vulnerabilities over time, which is taken as an 
indicator that other efforts, such as secure code reviews and developer 
training in secure coding, are actually working. We all know this won't fix 
everything 100%, and is not proof of security; the goal is some measureable 
progress toward better app security. The return is clearly removed risk of 
financial penalty.
We want to move toward 'prevention in depth'. Scans can be scheduled to run 
against the daily dev server code, which is available before QA starts, 
continue thru QA and be run periodically against production. We expect scan 
and report customization to increase
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Silk" <michaels () phg com au>
To: "Adam Shostack" <adam () homeport org>
Cc: <ban.marketing.bs () hushmail com>; <webappsec () securityfocus com>
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 5:35 PM
Subject: RE: Of the three expensive vulnerability scanners


Hi,
Well the easiest of "benefits" to measure is the reduce cost of
experts at the end (offset by the cost of Alice), the reduced time and
cost of developing patches to fix problems. Of course, most companies
will charge for these patches in one way or the other ...

But really, all "security" problems pretty much come down to
bugs (aside from just plain bad designs) so if you try and market it (to
management) from the p.o.v. of writing "correct" code rather then
"incorrect" it's a bit of a different approach. And correct code is
going to be more maintainable then incorrec too; so there is advantages
from this pov.

Consider if companies really put in effort to get the software
right, and have no bugs. They can then begin to guarantee that their
software will just *work*. More specifically, they can make themselves
liable if it doesn't. This might not matter in some cases (i.e.
"notepad.exe") but with larger applications, specifically financial
ones, it's nice to be able to say that. (One big bank here has said that
to me).

But yes, that this strategy isn't appropriate for every type of
software, and that's okay, however it *should* be applied to appropriate
projects.

Lets also note, however, that one of the most important factors
in selling something is the customer trusting your company. And no-one
will trust you (or at least hopefully they won't) if your software has
critical bugs which lead to security problems. (shh, lets not talk about
Microsoft). So having a line of products which have very minimal
problems and are far outweighed by their benefits and features (okay,
lets talk about Microsoft now) then customers will trust you and your
company and buy future products of yours.

So to summarise: the benefit of Alice is to reduce the amount of
security problems and generally poor code, increase trust in your
product and company, reduce patch development time, and entertain the
company with her stories from her time in wonderland.

-- Michael


-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Shostack [mailto:adam () homeport org]
Sent: Tuesday, 23 November 2004 9:10 AM
To: Michael Silk
Cc: ban.marketing.bs () hushmail com; webappsec () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Of the three expensive vulnerability scanners

Sounds lovely, and I've been in places where we tried to make it work,
with more developer training, more resources to answer questions early,
etc.  But who's going to pay for it?  If you're an exec who's being
asked to sign off on an extra resource for securing the new product,
what's the ROI?  Who's going to make promises about how much more secure
something will be?  If I add Alice to a team of 10 developers, and
Alice's job is security, what measurable benefit does that have?

The "test at the end" has short-term economic and political benefits for
the people who get to make a cheap end run around their security people.

I'm not arguing for this approach. I'm looking for business-driven
arguments to beat it.

Adam

On Tue, Nov 23, 2004 at 08:50:01AM +1100, Michael Silk wrote:
| Hi,
|
| How about this crazy idea ... Analyse it *AS* it is being
developed,
| not after.
|
| Companies should really stop processing out "millions of lines
of
| code" and then "securing" it by analysing it with some tool or
| bringing it some "expert" to review it before it's deployed. There
| would be many political issues with such analysing before deployment
.. (i.e:
| "we found bugs". "I don't care, it needs to go live, we promised the
| customers ...").
|
| If, instead, it's analysed at the time of development it solves
all
| these problems. And then sure, these analysers could be used
| occasionally through-out the development cycle to pick up the
| oversight from some developer, but at least they wouldn't be the last
line.
|
| -- Michael
|
| -----Original Message-----
| From: Adam Shostack [mailto:adam () homeport org]
| Sent: Monday, 22 November 2004 6:47 AM
| To: ban.marketing.bs () hushmail com
| Cc: webappsec () securityfocus com
| Subject: Re: Of the three expensive vulnerability scanners
|
| I know of companies that deploy millions of lines of new code
annually.
| (Both in house and outsourced code)  Deciding what to have an expert
| look at is hard and slow.  Adding any automation makes their experts
| more effective.
|
| So you need do decide between static testing, dynamic testing, or some

| mix.  Static testing is very good at finding some things, but not
| others.  It finds strcats, but doesn't find a lack of authentication.
| (I like to think of these as sins of commission vs. sins of
| ommission.)
|
| I'm not going to argue for or against the commercial dynamic test
| tools...I just don't know enough about them.  But dynamic testing is
| not fundamentally flawed, its a potentially useful part of a toolset.
| Would you not nmap and nikto boxes before they go out, just as a
| sanity check?
|
| Adam
|
|
| On Tue, Nov 16, 2004 at 06:14:28PM -0800,
| ban.marketing.bs () hushmail com
| wrote:
| | OK what am I missing here? Why use a fundamentlaly floored technique

| | for finding the issue? Why not look at the source? Its pretty damn
| | obvious where you are reading or writing unvalidated data....please
| | please no "source is not always available"
| | junk.....this is the web and 99% your looking at bespoke apps. You
| | have to ask or educate the client at worse.
| |
| | Its about time the industry started taking software security
| | seriously
|
| | and continuing down this futile route of refining pen testing
| | techniques to make up for the obvious limitations of this technique
| | is
|
| | not it IMHO.
| |
| | Newsflash - Most serious XSS issues in the real world are stored not

| | refelcted and unless you can trace data to the reflection point this

| | technique will NEVER find them !
| |
| |
| |
| | In-Reply-To: <003801c4c9c6$e5f39530$8d8606d1@rockstar>
| |
| | Jim,
| |
| | The problems you've mentioned with regard to the Cross Site
| | Scripting tests point to a functionality area where the major
| | players in the App
|
| | security market need major improvement. As Jeremiah pointed out, the

| | problem is broader than XSS policies alone, but it certainly affects

| | them.
| |
| | One reason the XSS policies yield diminishing returns and are poorly

| | organized in reports is due in part I believe to a lack of proper
| | detection mechanisms. Both products use a plethora of fault
| | injection techniques, yet neither seems sensitive to whether or not
| | the injected
|
| | script is returned within the context of the app's response in a
| | form that is executable by a browser. As a result, when one form
| | field is vulnerable to XSS, you can get into situations where
| | virtually every XSS test returns with a positive detection.
| |
| | As you've no doubt noticed, each product checks for various kinds of

| | XSS, some of these kinds are distinguished on the basis of the
| | delimiter that is used. Despite the technical differences, each
| | delimiter type has a sophisticated name (i.e Double Quote Single
| | Quote
|
| | Bracket kung fu,
| | etc.)
| |
| | ">&lt;script ....
| | '>&lt;script ....
| | ">">&lt;script ...
| | <--&lt;script ...
| | <textarea>&lt;script ...
| | etc.
| |
| | While the main vulnerability condition is whether or not an
| | application will "echo back" the script sequences, real problem is
| | that the different delimiters are important because some will
| | execute when returned by the application, and others will not,
| | depending upon the HTML/Script code of the application. This is why
| | it is important to audit the application's logic, but there really
| | is no reason to test for 12 different types of cross site scripting
| | scenarios using different delimiters and script types if the
| | detection mechanism can't
|
| | account for which sequences actually yield results that are
| | executable.
| |
| | The optimal solution in my opinion would be to emulate a browser and

| | trap for alerts (or other events) and then to organize the report
| | data
|
| | based on which delimiters successfully generated the desired pop-ups

| | (or whatever event is trapped for). The rest could be classified as
| | warnings.
| | This would
| | help to minimize the multiple alerting problems that plague the XSS
| | tests and produce frequently confusing results. While this wouldn't
| | fix the reporting problems, it would help to attenuate the signal.
| |
| | -tom
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
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