6 ms·

No. A thousand times. A bit more creativity should be allowed when handling a vulnerability of this magnitude. For example, publish a patch that escapes all i

by moe 14y ago

No. A thousand times. A bit more creativity should be allowed when handling a vulnerability of this magnitude. For example, publish a patch that escapes all input in curious ways, presumably to prevent SQL injection. Pad it, obfuscate the actual fix with code-noise, make it annoying to read. Then release it as some handwavy, semi-plausible "follow-up" to the previous SQL-injection, urging everyone to upgrade in small caps. Yes, a handful of blackhats will see through the bluff. However, it will likely be the exact same blackhats that already had discovered the issue after the initial SQL injection advisory. This would have given the Rails-community a head-start, rather than unleashing every script-kiddy on the planet at once.

m0nastic 14y ago
So you're advocating releasing a "decoy" patch that's intentionally obtuse and doesn't actually fix the issue? And then downplaying the severity by not encouraging developers to take the follow-up patch seriously? That's a flat out terrible idea.
- moe 14y ago
  No. I was advocating to release a patch that fixes the issue in an obfuscated, non-obvious way. And labeling it as a boring-yet-important follow-up to the previous SQL-injection vulnerability, rather than yelling "LOOK, REMOTE CODE INJECTION HERE -->.<-- !!" on all available news-channels.
  - m0nastic 14y ago
    Would you invest time in a framework where the developers knowingly lie about security vulnerabilities and provide fixes that are intentionally complicated? That seems like something that would ruin any future credibility of the project. No further security vulnerabilities could be trusted as being accurate (and any further patches would just be begging for additional scrutiny).
    - moe 14y ago
      That "concern" is absurd. You're making no sense.
      - m0nastic 14y ago
        If a Linux distro released a kernel patch for a super-critical security vulnerability that lied about its nature, AND downplayed its importance, users would go apeshit (justifiably).
        moe 14y ago
        You're still making no sense. Various large projects, including the kernel, have seen silent security patches (yes, even by Linus himself). Also there is no "downplaying" in declaring any kind of problem as a remote SQL injection vulnerability. That is still obviously urgent enough for everyone to patch immediately. Yet it doesn't attract blackhats in the same way as blarting "remote code injection".
        m0nastic 14y ago
        Mis-labeling a Remote Code Execution vulnerability as SQL-I is absolutely downplaying the severity. SQL-I is a bad finding, RCE is tantamount to the worst thing you could possibly find in an application. There were people on this very site who were commenting about whether they should concern themselves with this patch (initially because people erroneously attributed the vuln to SQL-I, and then later because they "weren't using XML anyway") Those kinds of things happen when you don't clearly describe what a vulnerability is, and when you try to mask how big of a deal something is. This was a huge vulnerability. It was critically important that everyone running a Rails app fix it immediately. Shouting that from the rooftops was absolutely the right approach. Cloak and Dagger bullshit to try and hide that is unequivocally a bad idea.
        tptacek 14y ago
        In fairness, while I'm specifically not a fan of that Phusion post, it was referring to a bug that wasn't an RCE.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    How much time do you think that would have bought? At least a few minutes, but definitely not days. And at what cost would it be? I'm all in favor of giving people more time to upgrade, but this issue was very unusual. Multiple groups were all finding it at the same time and who knows when the first "full disclosure is always the right answer" group would have started singing? Like it or not, full-disclosure people exist in the world, and responsible-disclosure people need to be aware of their existence. If just one person/group had found this, RoR could have done a better "get ready to upgrade next Tuesday at 6am" followed by a "here is the patch, details to follow tomorrow" on Tuesday at 6am.
tptacek 14y ago
I was actually pretty upset because I thought that might have been what the Rails team was trying to do --- to come up with an occlusive patch, like you're advocating. Because that plan was. not. going. to. work. When multiple teams flag the same RCE on the same day, the only reasonable conclusion to come to is that the cat is out of the bag. What needed to happen is what happened: a patch and a series of workarounds were produced as soon as possible. Nobody got to choreograph this one. The control you think the Rails team had over this, they did not have.
bradleyland 14y ago
I was actually pretty pissed that it wasn't explicitly labeled as a "remote code execution" vulnerability in the CVE post title. This is open source, you don't get to hide. The code is there. Trying to be clever about releasing a patch isn't going to help, because every patch gets looked at by a large community of security people. Some of those people are the good guys, but some are the bad guys. Nothing about this situation was good, but hiding it would have only made it worse. When you're serving shit sandwiches for lunch, it's best to let everyone know that's what's on the menu. End of story.
tedunangst 14y ago
This is terrible. The OpenBSD/SSH team tried this once, with the channel bug. They released the privsep version of ssh which didn't fix but mitigated the bug, and told everybody there was a critical bug and you really, really wanted to upgrade. What happened next? Everybody from Alan Cox on down started complaining about how they weren't going to dance to somebody else's tune and they were going to wait to see the real fix, thank you very much.
- moe 14y ago
  Now that's an interesting reference! I actually remember this incident (albeit blurredly, hell, was that really 10 years ago...). I dug up a few snippets[1] and I think the main sources of the animosities back then were certain regressions caused by privsep (not a hassle-free change) and a bit of ego-clashing (Alan Cox, Theo). Your summary of the events may be about right, but is "not wanting to dance to someone else's tune" really a good argument against an attempt at responsible disclosure? [1] http://www.baylisa.org/pipermail/baylisa/2002-June.txt http://www.baylisa.org/pipermail/baylisa/2002-June.txt (at the bottom) [1] http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2002/Jun/300 http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2002/Jun/300

by moe 14y ago

m0nastic 14y ago

So you're advocating releasing a "decoy" patch that's intentionally obtuse and doesn't actually fix the issue? And then downplaying the severity by not encouraging developers to take the follow-up patch seriously? That's a flat out terrible idea.

moe 14y ago
No. I was advocating to release a patch that fixes the issue in an obfuscated, non-obvious way. And labeling it as a boring-yet-important follow-up to the previous SQL-injection vulnerability, rather than yelling "LOOK, REMOTE CODE INJECTION HERE -->.<-- !!" on all available news-channels.
- m0nastic 14y ago
  Would you invest time in a framework where the developers knowingly lie about security vulnerabilities and provide fixes that are intentionally complicated? That seems like something that would ruin any future credibility of the project. No further security vulnerabilities could be trusted as being accurate (and any further patches would just be begging for additional scrutiny).
  - moe 14y ago
    That "concern" is absurd. You're making no sense.
    - m0nastic 14y ago
      If a Linux distro released a kernel patch for a super-critical security vulnerability that lied about its nature, AND downplayed its importance, users would go apeshit (justifiably).
      - moe 14y ago
        You're still making no sense. Various large projects, including the kernel, have seen silent security patches (yes, even by Linus himself). Also there is no "downplaying" in declaring any kind of problem as a remote SQL injection vulnerability. That is still obviously urgent enough for everyone to patch immediately. Yet it doesn't attract blackhats in the same way as blarting "remote code injection".
        m0nastic 14y ago
        Mis-labeling a Remote Code Execution vulnerability as SQL-I is absolutely downplaying the severity. SQL-I is a bad finding, RCE is tantamount to the worst thing you could possibly find in an application. There were people on this very site who were commenting about whether they should concern themselves with this patch (initially because people erroneously attributed the vuln to SQL-I, and then later because they "weren't using XML anyway") Those kinds of things happen when you don't clearly describe what a vulnerability is, and when you try to mask how big of a deal something is. This was a huge vulnerability. It was critically important that everyone running a Rails app fix it immediately. Shouting that from the rooftops was absolutely the right approach. Cloak and Dagger bullshit to try and hide that is unequivocally a bad idea.
        tptacek 14y ago
        In fairness, while I'm specifically not a fan of that Phusion post, it was referring to a bug that wasn't an RCE.
- danielweber 14y ago
  How much time do you think that would have bought? At least a few minutes, but definitely not days. And at what cost would it be? I'm all in favor of giving people more time to upgrade, but this issue was very unusual. Multiple groups were all finding it at the same time and who knows when the first "full disclosure is always the right answer" group would have started singing? Like it or not, full-disclosure people exist in the world, and responsible-disclosure people need to be aware of their existence. If just one person/group had found this, RoR could have done a better "get ready to upgrade next Tuesday at 6am" followed by a "here is the patch, details to follow tomorrow" on Tuesday at 6am.

tptacek 14y ago

I was actually pretty upset because I thought that might have been what the Rails team was trying to do --- to come up with an occlusive patch, like you're advocating. Because that plan was. not. going. to. work. When multiple teams flag the same RCE on the same day, the only reasonable conclusion to come to is that the cat is out of the bag. What needed to happen is what happened: a patch and a series of workarounds were produced as soon as possible. Nobody got to choreograph this one. The control you think the Rails team had over this, they did not have.

bradleyland 14y ago

I was actually pretty pissed that it wasn't explicitly labeled as a "remote code execution" vulnerability in the CVE post title. This is open source, you don't get to hide. The code is there. Trying to be clever about releasing a patch isn't going to help, because every patch gets looked at by a large community of security people. Some of those people are the good guys, but some are the bad guys. Nothing about this situation was good, but hiding it would have only made it worse. When you're serving shit sandwiches for lunch, it's best to let everyone know that's what's on the menu. End of story.

tedunangst 14y ago

This is terrible. The OpenBSD/SSH team tried this once, with the channel bug. They released the privsep version of ssh which didn't fix but mitigated the bug, and told everybody there was a critical bug and you really, really wanted to upgrade. What happened next? Everybody from Alan Cox on down started complaining about how they weren't going to dance to somebody else's tune and they were going to wait to see the real fix, thank you very much.

moe 14y ago
Now that's an interesting reference! I actually remember this incident (albeit blurredly, hell, was that really 10 years ago...). I dug up a few snippets[1] and I think the main sources of the animosities back then were certain regressions caused by privsep (not a hassle-free change) and a bit of ego-clashing (Alan Cox, Theo). Your summary of the events may be about right, but is "not wanting to dance to someone else's tune" really a good argument against an attempt at responsible disclosure? [1] http://www.baylisa.org/pipermail/baylisa/2002-June.txt http://www.baylisa.org/pipermail/baylisa/2002-June.txt (at the bottom) [1] http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2002/Jun/300 http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2002/Jun/300