Re: DJB's students release 44 *nix software vulnerability advisories

Thor Larholm wrote:

> This small group of students highlights how individuals outside the
> security industry without special security prerequisites can still
> manage to outperform the average Bugtraq poster in sheer quantity of
> discoveries. This adequately validates the typical estimate of between 5
> and 15 errors in every thousand lines of code.
>  
Most of the 44 posted "security" advisories are about software bugs with 
a very low security risk. See for example the posted bug on NASM 
(http://tigger.uic.edu/~jlongs2/holes/nasm.txt): what's the chance of an 
evil asm file being sent to an ignorant user that calls nasm to compile 
this file? And this nasm bug is then called a "remotely exploitable 
security hole". If I mail out a shell script that does "rm -rf $HOME/*", 
this can also be considered a remotely exploitable security hole.

A proper (wide-scale) remotely exploitable security hole is one than can 
be exploited without any ignorant user on the other side: for example, 
the bug Windows Messenger service which was enabled by default, making 
every user vulnerable, regardless of their stupidity.

> With a class of 25 students discovering 44 vulnerabilities most students
> now expect to fail the course
> (http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/15/2113202).
>  

I think punishing students that have actually found security holes does 
not make the world a better place ;)



--
cees-bart.