Remember kids, if you're going to disclose, disclose responsibly!

If you pay any attention to the security universe, you're aware that Tavis Ormandy is basically on fire right now with his security research. He found the Cloudflare data leak issue a few weeks back, and is currently going to town on LastPass. The LastPass crew seems to be dealing with this pretty well, I'm not seeing a lot of complaining, mostly just info and fixes which is the right way to do these things.

There are however a bunch of people complaining about how Tavis and Google Project Zero in general tend to disclose the issues. These people are wrong, I've been there, it's not fun, but as crazy as it may seem to the ouside, the Project Zero crew knows what they're doing.

Firstly let's get two things out of the way.

1) If nobody is complaining about what you're doing, you're not doing anything interesting (Tavis is clearly doing very interesting things).

2) Disclosure is hard, there isn't a perfect solution, what Project Zero does may seem heartless to some, but it's currently the best way. The alternative is an abusive relationship.

A long time ago I was a vendor receiving security reports from Tavis, and I won't lie, it wasn't fun. I remember complaining and trying to slow things down to a pace I thought was more reasonable. Few of us have any extra time and a new vulnerability disclosure means there's extra work to do. Sometimes a disclosure isn't very detailed or lacks important information. The disclosure date proposed may not line up with product schedules. You could have another more important issue you're working on already. There are lots of reasons to dread dealing with these issues as a vendor.

All that said, it's still OK to complain, and every now and then the criticism is good. We should always be thinking about how we do things, what makes sense today won't make sense tomorrow. The way Google Project Zero does disclosure today was pretty crazy even five years ago. Now it's how things have to work. The world moves very fast now, and as we've seen from various document dumps over the last few years, there are no secrets. If you think you can keep a security issue quiet for a year you are sadly mistaken. It's possible that was once true (I suspect it never was, but that's another conversation). Either way it's not true anymore. If you know about a security flaw it's quite likely someone else does too, and once you start talking to another group about it, the odds of leaking grow at an alarming rate.

The way things used to work is changing rapidly. Anytime there is change, there are always the trailblazers and laggards. We know we can't develop secure software, but we can respond quickly. Spend time where you can make a difference, not chasing the mythical perfect solution.

If your main contribution to society is complaining, you should probably rethink your purpose.

Inverse Law of CVEs

I've started a project to put the CVE data into Elasticsearch and see if there is anything clever we can learn about it. Ever if there isn't anything overly clever, it's fun to do. And I get to make pretty graphs, which everyone likes to look at.

I stuck a few of my early results on Twitter because it seemed like a fun thing to do. One of the graphs I put up was comparing the 3 BSDs. The image is below.

You can see that none of these graphs has enough data to really draw any conclusions from, again, I did this for fun. I did get one response claiming NetBSD is the best, because their graph is the smallest. I've actually heard this argument a few times over the past month, so I decided it's time to write about it. Especially since I'm sure I'll find many more examples like this while I'm weeding through this mountain of CVE data.

Let's make up a new law, I'll call it the "Inverse Law of CVEs". It goes like this - "The fewer CVE IDs something has has, the less secure it is".

That doesn't make sense to most people. If you have something that is bad, fewer bad things is certainly better than more bad things. This is generally true for physical concepts brains can understand. Less crime is good. Fewer accidents is good. When it comes to something like how many CVE IDs your project or product has, this idea gets turned on its head. Less is probably bad when we think about CVE IDs. There's probably some sort of line somewhere where if you cross it things flip back to bad (wait until I get to PHP). We'll call that the security maginot line because bad security decided to sneak in through the north.

If you have something with very very few CVE IDs it doesn't mean it's secure, it means nobody is looking for security issues. It's easy to understand that if something is used by a large diverse set of users, it will get more bug reports (some of which will be security bugs) and it will get more security attention from both good guys and bad guys because it's a bigger target. If something has very few users, it's quite likely there hasn't been a lot of security attention paid to it. I suspect what the above graphs really mean is Free BSD is more popular than OpenBSD, which is more popular than NetBSD. Random internet searches seem to back this up.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with all this data. Part of the fun is understanding how to classify it all. I'm not a data scientist so there will be much learning. If you have any ideas by all means let me know, I'm quite open to suggestions. Once I have better data I may consider trying to find at what point a project has enough CVE IDs to be considered on the right path, and which have so many they've crossed over to the bad place.

Security, Consumer Reports, and Failure

Last week there was a story about Consumer Reports doing security testing of products.

Consumer Reports to Begin Evaluating Products, Services for Privacy and Data Security

As one can imagine there were a fair number of “they’ll get it wrong” sort of comments. They will get it wrong, at first, but that’s not a reason to pick on these guys. They’re quite brave to take this task on, it’s nearly impossible if you think about the state of security (especially consumer security). But this is how things start. There is no industry that has gone from broken to perfect in one step. It’s a long hard road when you have to deal with systemic problems in an industry. Consumer product security problems may be larger and more complex than any other industry has ever had to solve thanks to things such as globalization and how inexpensive tiny computers have become.

If you think about the auto industry, you’re talking about something that costs thousands of dollars. Safety is easy to justify as it’s going to be less than the overall cost of the vehicle. Now if we think about tiny computing devices, you could be talking about chips that cost less than one dollar. If the cost of security and safety will be more than the initial cost of the computing hardware it can be impossible to justify that cost. If adding security doubles the cost of something, the manufacturers will try very hard to find ways around having to include such features. There are always bizarre technicalities that can help avoid regulation, groups like Consumer Reports help with accountability.

Here is where Consumer Reports and other testing labs will be incredibly important to this story. Even if there is regulation a manufacturer chooses to ignore, a group like Consumer Reports can still review the product. Consumer Reports will get things very wrong at first, sometimes it will be hilariously wrong. But that’s OK, it’s how everything starts. If you look back at any sort of safety and security in the consumer space, it took a long time, sometimes decades, to get it right. Cybersecurity will be no different, it’s going to take a long time to even understand the problem.

Our default reaction to mistakes is often one of ridicule, this is one of those times we have to be mindful of how dangerous this attitude is. If we see a group trying to do the right thing but getting it wrong, we need to offer advice, not mockery. If we don’t engage in a useful and serious way nobody will take us seriously. There are a lot of smart security folks out there, we can help make the world a better place this time. Sometimes things can look hopeless and horrible, but things will get better. It’ll take time, it won’t be easy, but things will get better thanks to efforts such as this one.

What the Oscars can teach us about security

If you watched the 89th Academy Awards you saw a pretty big mistake at the end of the show, the short story is Warren Beatty was handed the wrong envelope, he opened it, looked at it, then gave it to Faye Dunaway to read, which she did. The wrong people came on stage and started giving speeches, confused scrambling happened, and the correct winner was brought on stage. No doubt this will be talked about for many years to come as one of the most interesting and exciting events in the history of the awards ceremony.

People make mistakes, we won’t dwell on how the wrong envelope made it into the announcer’s hands. The details of how this error came to be isn’t what’s important for this discussion. The important lesson for us is watch Warren Beatty’s behavior. He clearly knew something was wrong, if you watch the video of him, you can tell things aren’t right. But he just kept going, gave the card to Faye Dunaway, and she read the name of the movie on the card. These people aren’t some young amateurs here, these are seasoned actors. It’s not their first rodeo. So why did this happen?

The lesson for us all is to understand that when things start to break down, people will fall back to their instincts. The presenters knew their job was to open the card and read the name. Their job wasn’t to think about it or question what they were handed. As soon as they knew something was wrong, they went on autopilot and did what was expected. This happens with computer security all the time. If people get a scary phishing email, they will often go into autopilot and do things they wouldn’t do if they kept a level head. Most attackers know how this works and they prey on this behavior. It’s really easy to claim you’d never be so stupid as to download that attachment or click on that link, but you’re not under stress. Once you’re under stress, everything changes.

This is why police, firefighters, and soldiers get a lot of training. You want these people to do the right thing when they enter autopilot mode. As soon as a situation starts to get out of hand, training kicks in and these people will do whatever they were trained to do without thinking about it. Training works, there’s a reason they train so much. Most people aren’t trained like this so they generally make poor decisions when under stress.

So what should we take away from all this? The thing we as security professionals needs to keep in mind is how this behavior works. If you have a system that isn’t essentially “secure by default”, anytime someone find themselves under mental stress, they’re going to take the path of least resistance. If this path of least resistance is also something dangerous happening, you’re not designing for security. Even security experts will have this problem, we don’t have superpowers that let us make good choices in times of high stress. It doesn’t matter how smart you think you are, when you’re under a lot of stress, you will go into autopilot, you will make bad choices if bad choices are the defaults.