Responsibility is Everyone's Job

The software developers constantly talk about responsible disclosure.

Responsible disclosure is basically defined as informing the software developer of a vulnerability so that the vulnerability can be researched and fixed. This is compared to full disclosure where the vulnerability is announced to everyone without giving the software developer a chance to fix the vulnerability. Contrast this with the economic pressure for a software developer to reveal a vulnerability, which is none.

The spectrum consists of Full Disclosure (tell everyone), Responsible Disclosure (tell the developer), and Non-Disclosure (tell no one). Without going into details suffice it to say the responsible disclosure is currently mainstream.

The question is how the developers handle fixing the vulnerability. The general thought is that a responsible company would put resources into fixing these as soon as possible, but these comercial developers are, for the most part are in business to make a profit. I am not including open source developers in this post.

Now for two examples of how Microsoft has handeled responsible disclosures.

The ANI exploit, which I wrote about in Vista Smista& ANI Exploit. The vulnerability was disclosed in December of 2006 and not fixed until exploits where released in March. An quote from my previous blog is below and more details are in my other post mentioned above:

In short this was disclosed to Microsoft in December of 2006. Apparently the first report of this vulnerability was used as an exploit was March 28th. Due to the wide spread use of the exploit several third parties released interim patches... Microsoft
reacted, as it tends to do when third party patches are released, and the news
media starts to publish... Microsoft released the official patch out-of-cycle on
Tuesday the 3rd of April (instead of today the 10th of April).

Just recently, the end of May 2007, a vulnerability in Microsoft Web Server IIS 5.X where authentication can be bypassed, was announced. However this vulnerability was discovered December 15th 2005 (no this is not a typo) and was subsiquently responsibly disclosed to Microsoft. Apparently Microsoft finally decide to publically disclose the vulnerability, but without a fix. Unless you consider paying for an upgrade to Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0 a patch.

Keeping in mind thath these are just two examples where:

1. Microsoft failed to fix a known vulnerability for several months until an exploit was released.
2. Kept a vulnerability secret for over a year and then releases the information and requires a paid upgrade to the latest code for a fix.

I think Microsoft should re-evaluate their responsibilities as a good citizen or netizen.

Windows Please Phone Home!

I have talked about patching a few times.

I have also discussed how I have found Microsoft Windows systems that where configured for automatic downloading of security patches, but where not patched in Cup of Hot Cocoa: Patch Warfare II.

Now it appears that Microsoft has taken notice and has released patches to fix the problems with the automatic updates, and manually using Microsoft and Windows Update sites for that matter which is great, but except for an announcement on their blog (Welcome to the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog!) it has received very little fanfare. See Two Advisories on Non-Security Updates for details.

Now the scary part is that it is being distributed be the very mechanism that it is designed to fix. If a PC is not getting updates due to the problems these updates fix, then the system will not get the fix! Now to compound the problem these fixes are distributed separately and each one requires a reboot.

In other words the broken update mechanism must download and install the first update. Can you say if your internet connection is down please visit our web site to report a problem... or how about please cal the phone company if your phone is not working...

Then it has to do the same thing for the second update!

Now if Microsoft wanted to be a good internet citizen they would announce this all over the place and encourage users to visit the update sites to download these manually or if that fails to directly download them per the knowledge base articles: Microsoft Security Advisory (927891) and Microsoft Security Advisory (937696).

The One, The Only, The Vulnerable Vista

Lets start this out by saying that Vista was designed to be more secure, and it appears to be headed in the right direction there. Just don't get me started on DRM.

Once again Vista, the impenetrable, that is according to the marketing hype has been proven vulnerable. There was the ANI vulnerability that MS rushed a patch out for last week, and now during the regular update there is a second vulnerability designated as critical by MS for Vista.

Once the all the hype is removed it is just another operating system by Microsoft that has it's flaws. Once is has had time to mature I'll consider adding it to one of my systems. For now I'll only "play" with it as a virtual machine.

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

...or do I hear a train coming?

Microsoft has announced (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/advance.mspx) that there will be no Black Tuesday (no security patches) this month. Have we finally turned the tide? I think not.

SANS Internet Storm Center keeps a list of knows security vulnerabilities that are not patched "The missing Microsoft patches." (http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=1940&dshield=5dcab42dbdd98865096b12b60165295c) So if it was a light month why not catch up on unpatched vulnerabilities before another one becomes critical?

In my opinion Microsoft is giving battered IT workers a break due to their Daylight Savings Time (DST) patch requirements. The new US DST starts this weekend (three weeks earlier than previously).

The real problem is the herculean tasks required to up grade all but the latest Microsoft products (Windows XP, 2003 Server and Exchange 2007). As an example Windows 2000 requires manual registry settings, but that is not as bad as Exchange.

For any version prior to Exchange 2007, and how many ran out and updated to that yet? Microsoft supplies utilities that must be run against every Exchange users mailbox. Now these utilities are resource intensive and have been causing total outages on Exchange while running the utility at worst, and apparently intermittent outages on some servers.

While I don't claim to have insider information on all the companies running Exchange what I have seen and heard all point to companies scrambling this week to be prepared for the time change.

You might think shame on the companies for waiting for the last minute, but on the other hand think about:

• Lean and mean IT departments
• Microsoft must be coming out with a less painful method...

Right now I don't know if I condone or condemn Microsoft's actions, But I do think in a perfect world a better course of action would have been to delay Black Tuesday by a week.