Entries Tagged "computer security"

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Howard Schmidt on Software Vulnerabilities

Howard Schmidt was misquoted in the article that spurred my rebuttal.

This essay outlines what he really thinks:

Like it or not, the hard work of developers often takes the brunt of malicious hacker attacks.

Many people know that developers are often under intense pressure to deliver more features on time and under budget. Few developers get the time to review their code for potential security vulnerabilities. When they do get the time, they often don’t have secure-coding training and lack the automated tools to prevent hackers from using hundreds of common exploit techniques to trigger malicious attacks.

So what can software vendors do? In a sense, a big part of the answer is relatively old fashioned; the developers need to be accountable to their employers and provided with incentives, better tools and proper training.

He’s against making vendors liable for defects in their products, unlike every other industry:

I always have been, and continue to be, against any sort of liability actions as long as we continue to see market forces improve software. Unfortunately, introducing vendor liability to solve security flaws hurts everybody, including employees, shareholders and customers, because it raises costs and stifles innovation.

After all, when companies are faced with large punitive judgments, a frequent step is often to cut salaries, increase prices or even reduce employees. This is not good for anyone.

And he closes with:

In the end, what security requires is the same attention any business goal needs. Employers should expect their employees to take pride in and own a certain level of responsibility for their work. And employees should expect their employers to provide the tools and training they need to get the job done. With these expectations established and goals agreed on, perhaps the software industry can do a better job of strengthening the security of its products by reducing software vulnerabilities.

That first sentence, I think, nicely sums up what’s wrong with his argument. If security is to be a business goal, then it needs to make business sense. Right now, it makes more business sense not to produce secure software products than it does to produce secure software products. Any solution needs to address that fundamental market failure, instead of simply wishing it were true.

Posted on November 8, 2005 at 7:34 AM • View Comments

Sony Secretly Installs Rootkit on Computers

Mark Russinovich discovered a rootkit on his system. After much analysis, he discovered that the rootkit was installed as a part of the DRM software linked with a CD he bought. The package cannot be uninstalled. Even worse, the package actively cloaks itself from process listings and the file system.

At that point I knew conclusively that the rootkit and its associated files were related to the First 4 Internet DRM software Sony ships on its CDs. Not happy having underhanded and sloppily written software on my system I looked for a way to uninstall it. However, I didn’t find any reference to it in the Control Panel’s Add or Remove Programs list, nor did I find any uninstall utility or directions on the CD or on First 4 Internet’s site. I checked the EULA and saw no mention of the fact that I was agreeing to have software put on my system that I couldn’t uninstall. Now I was mad.

Removing the rootkit kills Windows.

Could Sony have violated the the Computer Misuse Act in the UK? If this isn’t clearly in the EULA, they have exceeded their privilege on the customer’s system by installing a rootkit to hide their software.

Certainly Mark has a reasonable lawsuit against Sony in the U.S.

EDITED TO ADD: The Washington Post is covering this story.

Sony lies about their rootkit:

November 2, 2005 – This Service Pack removes the cloaking technology component that has been recently discussed in a number of articles published regarding the XCP Technology used on SONY BMG content protected CDs. This component is not malicious and does not compromise security. However to alleviate any concerns that users may have about the program posing potential security vulnerabilities, this update has been released to enable users to remove this component from their computers.

Their update does not remove the rootkit, it just gets rid of the $sys$ cloaking.

Ed Felton has a great post on the issue:

The update is more than 3.5 megabytes in size, and it appears to contain new versions of almost all the files included in the initial installation of the entire DRM system, as well as creating some new files. In short, they’re not just taking away the rootkit-like function—they’re almost certainly adding things to the system as well. And once again, they’re not disclosing what they’re doing.

No doubt they’ll ask us to just trust them. I wouldn’t. The companies still assert—falsely—that the original rootkit-like software “does not compromise security” and “[t]here should be no concern” about it. So I wouldn’t put much faith in any claim that the new update is harmless. And the companies claim to have developed “new ways of cloaking files on a hard drive”. So I wouldn’t derive much comfort from carefully worded assertions that they have removed “the … component .. that has been discussed”.

And you can use the rootkit to avoid World of Warcraft spyware.

World of Warcraft hackers have confirmed that the hiding capabilities of Sony BMG’s content protection software can make tools made for cheating in the online world impossible to detect.

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EDITED TO ADD: F-Secure makes a good point:

A member of our IT security team pointed out quite chilling thought about what might happen if record companies continue adding rootkit based copy protection into their CDs.

In order to hide from the system a rootkit must interface with the OS on very low level and in those areas theres no room for error.

It is hard enough to program something on that level, without having to worry about any other programs trying to do something with same parts of the OS.

Thus if there would be two DRM rootkits on the same system trying to hook same APIs, the results would be highly unpredictable. Or actually, a system crash is quite predictable result in such situation.

EDITED TO ADD: Declan McCullagh has a good essay on the topic. There will be lawsuits.

EDITED TO ADD: The Italian police are getting involved.

EDITED TO ADD: Here’s a Trojan that uses Sony’s rootkit to hide.

EDITED TO ADD: Sony temporarily halts production of CDs protected with this technology.

Posted on November 1, 2005 at 10:17 AM • View Comments

Liabilities and Software Vulnerabilities

My fourth column for Wired discusses liability for software vulnerabilities. Howard Schmidt argued that individual programmers should be liable for vulnerabilities in their code. (There’s a Slashdot thread on Schmidt’s comments.) I say that it should be the software vendors that should be liable, not the individual programmers.

Click on the essay for the whole argument, but here’s the critical point:

If end users can sue software manufacturers for product defects, then the cost of those defects to the software manufacturers rises. Manufacturers are now paying the true economic cost for poor software, and not just a piece of it. So when they’re balancing the cost of making their software secure versus the cost of leaving their software insecure, there are more costs on the latter side. This will provide an incentive for them to make their software more secure.

To be sure, making software more secure will cost money, and manufacturers will have to pass those costs on to users in the form of higher prices. But users are already paying extra costs for insecure software: costs of third-party security products, costs of consultants and security-services companies, direct and indirect costs of losses. Making software manufacturers liable moves those costs around, and as a byproduct causes the quality of software to improve.

This is why Schmidt’s idea won’t work. He wants individual software developers to be liable, and not the corporations. This will certainly give pissed-off users someone to sue, but it won’t reduce the externality and it won’t result in more-secure software.

EDITED TO ADD: Dan Farber has a good commentary on my essay. He says I got Schmidt wrong, that Schmidt wants programmers to be accountable but not liable. Be that as it may, I still think that making software vendors liable is a good idea.

There has been some confusion about this in the comments, that somehow this means that software vendors will be expected to achieve perfection and that they will be 100% liable for anything short of that. Clearly that’s ridiculous, and that’s not the way liabilities work. But equally ridiculous is the notion that software vendors should be 0% liable for defects. Somewhere in the middle there is a reasonable amount of liablity, and that’s what I want the courts to figure out.

EDITED TO ADD: Howard Schmidt writes: “It is unfortunate that my comments were reported inaccurately; at least Dan Farber has been trying to correct the inaccurate reports with his blog. I do not support PERSONAL LIABILITY for the developers NOR do I support liability against vendors. Vendors are nothing more then people (employees included) and anything against them hurts the very people who need to be given better tools, training and support.”

Howard wrote an essay on the topic.

Posted on October 20, 2005 at 5:19 AM • View Comments

Tax Breaks for Good Security

Congress is talking—it’s just talking, but at least it’s talking—about giving tax breaks to companies with good cybersecurity.

The devil is in the details, and this could be a meaningless handout, but the idea is sound. Rational companies are going to protect their assets only up to their value to that company. The problem is that many of the security risks to digital assets are not risks to the company who owns them. This is an externality. So if we all need a company to protect its digital assets to some higher level, then we need to pay for that extra protection. (At least we do in a capitalist society.) We can pay through regulation or liabilities, which translates to higher prices for whatever the company does. We can pay through directly funding that extra security, either by writing a check or reducing taxes. But we can’t expect a company to spend the extra money out of the goodness of its heart.

Posted on October 13, 2005 at 8:02 AM • View Comments

Microsoft Questions

Windows OneCare is the next-generation pervasive security program that will be part of Microsoft Windows. I know nothing about it. Does anyone have any comments or opinions?

And the current rumor is that Ballmer and Nash are speaking at a Microsoft event in Munich. They’re supposedly outlining Microsoft’s security roadmap. Anyone have any inside information?

Posted on October 4, 2005 at 2:10 PM • View Comments

Privacy Enhanced Computer Display

From the Mitsuibshi Research Laboratories:

The privacy-enhanced computer display uses a ferroelectric shutter glasses and a special device driver to produce a computer display which can be read only by the desired recipient, and not by an onlooker. The display alternately displays the desired information in one field, then the inverse image of the desired information in the next field, at up to 120 Hz refresh. The ferroelectric shutter glasses allow only the desired information to be viewed, while the inverse image causes unauthorized viewers to perceive only a flickering gray image, caused by the persistence of vision in the human visual system. It is also possible to use the system to “underlay” a private message on a public display system.

Posted on September 13, 2005 at 1:22 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.