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Most of the software you use is complete and utter shit full of shoddy, high-risk code. Do we need to bring that up every time when we are talking about somethi

by mhurron 10y ago

Most of the software you use is complete and utter shit full of shoddy, high-risk code. Do we need to bring that up every time when we are talking about something specific? The lack of hooks into the browser is brought up because without them AV has to do these weird things to scan the content browsers are happily loading from untrusted sources. If you use an AV product that scans network activities that is.

tcoppi 10y ago
Most software you use doesn't inject shoddy, high-risk code into nearly every running process on your system and the kernel, though.
- smcl 10y ago
  ... and on top of it, most software doesn't claim to make things safer while demonstrably making them worse
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Yes, this. Most software is crappy, and much if it is insecure, but most of it adds value somewhere. If my music player compromises my computer, at least it plays music the rest of the time. If my antivirus compromises my computer... well, adding security was its only job. I'm happy to criticize shoddy code when it causes the product to fail at its sole purpose.
staticassertion 10y ago
> Most of the software you use is complete and utter shit full of shoddy, high-risk code. Do we need to bring that up every time when we are talking about something specific? Most software doesn't run with full system privileges, go out of its way to interact with malicious content, and inject itself all over the system. The difference between AV and any other shitty software is that AV is massively more useful and abundant as attack surface. The hooks into the browser are nothing. It isn't the hooking, though that's not great. Imagine Chrome provided an API. OK, so now the AV listens to the API. It sees you open some file in the browser that's XML - it parses the XML. It gets exploited, trivially, because many vendors explicitly disable security features like stack cookies. Now the attacker went from a sandboxed environment to a full system privileges process.
- mhurron 10y ago
  So because of a future possibility of exploit, don't do anything which is one cause of the existing argument. I suggest you uninstall Chrome if that is your view, it too will lead to a full system compromise in the future, I mean it will in the future yet again. > Most software doesn't run with full system privileges For most people, yes it does. > go out of its way to interact with malicious content Your browser also does. > difference between AV and any other shitty software is that AV is massively more useful and abundant as attack surface. The browser pretty much wins here too. But no, it's AV vendors fault your browser is such a risk.
  - witty_username 10y ago
    > For most people, yes it does. Examples? > I suggest you uninstall Chrome if that is your view, it too will lead to a full system compromise in the future, I mean it will in the future yet again. > The browser pretty much wins here too. Chrome is tightly sandboxed; any exploit in Chrome is very unlikely to compromise your OS.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    So many responses here, but mostly: "Most software doesn't run with full system privileges", "For most people, yes it does." That's not even a little true. Even inexperienced Windows users have to click that little "permission to make changes" button, and sometimes "run as administrator". Winamp, Solitaire, and all your other random not-totally-secure programs don't offer kernel access to whoever compromises them. AV is a singularly good source of privilege escalation attacks for exactly that reason.
  - staticassertion 10y ago
    > I suggest you uninstall Chrome if that is your view, it too will lead to a full system compromise in the future, I mean it will in the future yet again. Chrome developers take active measures (sandboxing, research, patching, bug bounties) to secure their browser. They have done amazing work and really, in my mind, pushed some solid technology that we've all benefited from (seccomp, as an example). AV has gone out of its way to disable modern security technologies like ASLR/Stack Cookies. There is no comparison here in terms of effort to avoid exploitation. As Justin said - find me a single AV that sandboxes its parsers. > For most people, yes it does. Even if this were true, and it is not, Chrome doesn't - it runs in a sandbox. Therefor a compromise of an AV is not just a jump to Admin but a jump out of the sandbox. > The browser pretty much wins here too. Not really. The majority of attack surface in a browser like Chrome is isolated and hardened. Web browsers avoid malicious content where possible. AV goes out of its way to interact with malicious content. > But no, it's AV vendors fault your browser is such a risk. It's AV vendors fault that they avoid writing secure software. And, yeah actually, it is AV vendors fault that the browser is vulnerable when the browser takes every step to stay secure and AV vendors shit all over that.
mfukar 10y ago
No, you're wrong, and like Vess, you're deflecting the issue. Lack of hooks into anything in the system is completely orthogonal to: - increasing code that runs with elevated privileges in a system - running untested, buggy parsing code with elevated privileges in the system - inject ROP gadgets in every process in the system - isolating your code's components to contain the risk of vulnerabilities in your own code
- mhurron 10y ago
  AV has to do what it does to inject itself between the internet and the browser because the browser provides no better way to work with it. If there was a better way and AV continued to do these things, complaining that AV is doing these things would be valid.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    I think the premise is that broken AV doing nothing would be better than broken AV injecting itself into the browser. So to get past that premise, you have to remove the "broken" part before the method of injection matters.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      Yep, this is it. AV is fundamentally a security product. If my music player is insecure, it's still playing music and I'll lose that feature by uninstalling it. If my AV is insecure, there's really no downside to uninstalling it.
  - acdha 10y ago
    Those are separate issues: security experts would worry less about AV software hooking things if the AV developers were demonstrably following secure coding practices. Instead, they're generally shipping 90s-style C code and not following good practice like using sandboxing or other defense in depth measures, which is how you get things like a single exploit in a format decoder granting kernel access: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-compromise-enterprise-endpoint.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-compro... Contrast with the kind of exploit chains usually required on securely-designed systems like iOS or modern apps like Chrome where they need to chain multiple exploits together to escape from the sandbox before being able to attack something else. The AV industry has earned that bad reputation by generally being unwilling to spend the money needed to apply modern practice.

by mhurron 10y ago

tcoppi 10y ago

Most software you use doesn't inject shoddy, high-risk code into nearly every running process on your system and the kernel, though.

smcl 10y ago
... and on top of it, most software doesn't claim to make things safer while demonstrably making them worse
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Yes, this. Most software is crappy, and much if it is insecure, but most of it adds value somewhere. If my music player compromises my computer, at least it plays music the rest of the time. If my antivirus compromises my computer... well, adding security was its only job. I'm happy to criticize shoddy code when it causes the product to fail at its sole purpose.

staticassertion 10y ago

> Most of the software you use is complete and utter shit full of shoddy, high-risk code. Do we need to bring that up every time when we are talking about something specific? Most software doesn't run with full system privileges, go out of its way to interact with malicious content, and inject itself all over the system. The difference between AV and any other shitty software is that AV is massively more useful and abundant as attack surface. The hooks into the browser are nothing. It isn't the hooking, though that's not great. Imagine Chrome provided an API. OK, so now the AV listens to the API. It sees you open some file in the browser that's XML - it parses the XML. It gets exploited, trivially, because many vendors explicitly disable security features like stack cookies. Now the attacker went from a sandboxed environment to a full system privileges process.

mhurron 10y ago
So because of a future possibility of exploit, don't do anything which is one cause of the existing argument. I suggest you uninstall Chrome if that is your view, it too will lead to a full system compromise in the future, I mean it will in the future yet again. > Most software doesn't run with full system privileges For most people, yes it does. > go out of its way to interact with malicious content Your browser also does. > difference between AV and any other shitty software is that AV is massively more useful and abundant as attack surface. The browser pretty much wins here too. But no, it's AV vendors fault your browser is such a risk.
- witty_username 10y ago
  > For most people, yes it does. Examples? > I suggest you uninstall Chrome if that is your view, it too will lead to a full system compromise in the future, I mean it will in the future yet again. > The browser pretty much wins here too. Chrome is tightly sandboxed; any exploit in Chrome is very unlikely to compromise your OS.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  So many responses here, but mostly: "Most software doesn't run with full system privileges", "For most people, yes it does." That's not even a little true. Even inexperienced Windows users have to click that little "permission to make changes" button, and sometimes "run as administrator". Winamp, Solitaire, and all your other random not-totally-secure programs don't offer kernel access to whoever compromises them. AV is a singularly good source of privilege escalation attacks for exactly that reason.
- staticassertion 10y ago
  > I suggest you uninstall Chrome if that is your view, it too will lead to a full system compromise in the future, I mean it will in the future yet again. Chrome developers take active measures (sandboxing, research, patching, bug bounties) to secure their browser. They have done amazing work and really, in my mind, pushed some solid technology that we've all benefited from (seccomp, as an example). AV has gone out of its way to disable modern security technologies like ASLR/Stack Cookies. There is no comparison here in terms of effort to avoid exploitation. As Justin said - find me a single AV that sandboxes its parsers. > For most people, yes it does. Even if this were true, and it is not, Chrome doesn't - it runs in a sandbox. Therefor a compromise of an AV is not just a jump to Admin but a jump out of the sandbox. > The browser pretty much wins here too. Not really. The majority of attack surface in a browser like Chrome is isolated and hardened. Web browsers avoid malicious content where possible. AV goes out of its way to interact with malicious content. > But no, it's AV vendors fault your browser is such a risk. It's AV vendors fault that they avoid writing secure software. And, yeah actually, it is AV vendors fault that the browser is vulnerable when the browser takes every step to stay secure and AV vendors shit all over that.

mfukar 10y ago

No, you're wrong, and like Vess, you're deflecting the issue. Lack of hooks into anything in the system is completely orthogonal to: - increasing code that runs with elevated privileges in a system - running untested, buggy parsing code with elevated privileges in the system - inject ROP gadgets in every process in the system - isolating your code's components to contain the risk of vulnerabilities in your own code

mhurron 10y ago
AV has to do what it does to inject itself between the internet and the browser because the browser provides no better way to work with it. If there was a better way and AV continued to do these things, complaining that AV is doing these things would be valid.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I think the premise is that broken AV doing nothing would be better than broken AV injecting itself into the browser. So to get past that premise, you have to remove the "broken" part before the method of injection matters.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Yep, this is it. AV is fundamentally a security product. If my music player is insecure, it's still playing music and I'll lose that feature by uninstalling it. If my AV is insecure, there's really no downside to uninstalling it.
- acdha 10y ago
  Those are separate issues: security experts would worry less about AV software hooking things if the AV developers were demonstrably following secure coding practices. Instead, they're generally shipping 90s-style C code and not following good practice like using sandboxing or other defense in depth measures, which is how you get things like a single exploit in a format decoder granting kernel access: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-compromise-enterprise-endpoint.html https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2016/06/how-to-compro... Contrast with the kind of exploit chains usually required on securely-designed systems like iOS or modern apps like Chrome where they need to chain multiple exploits together to escape from the sandbox before being able to attack something else. The AV industry has earned that bad reputation by generally being unwilling to spend the money needed to apply modern practice.