Jason,
Thanks for the good thoughtful note.
I've thought quite a bit about the exact issues you bring up at the end--human
behavior being a far more serious problem and the security-infrastructure
complex which is profiting off of the industry's own sins of selling inadequate
equipment in the first place. You can see much of this coverage in the
column Alarmed online.
It's also nice to see someone with programming
experience not simply claim that programming is too creative, too complex
to secure. This is a myth perpetuated by programmers as an excuse not to
do their jobs in a secure way.
Also, you've read the piece (one hopes)
and thought seriously about the suggestions and commented on them. For
that I'm not ashamed, I'm pleased.
Cheers,
Scott Berinato
| Jason Coombs <jasonc@science.org>
03/21/2005 05:24 PM
|
Please respond to
jasonc@science.org |
|
|
To
| jericho@attrition.org
|
|
cc
| isn@c4i.org, Scott Berinato/CIO@CIO,
full-disclosure@lists.grok.org.uk, bugtraq@securityfocus.com
|
|
Subject
| Re: [ISN] How To Save The
Internet |
|
InfoSec News wrote:
> Forwarded from: security curmudgeon <jericho@attrition.org>
> Cc: sberinato@cio.com
> ... Big load of crap ...
> : http://www.cio.com/archive/031505/security.html
> : BY SCOTT BERINATO
> : serial numbers and control their distribution. James Whittaker says
> : programmable PCs are dangerous, so why not treat them like guns?
jericho@attrition.org wrote:
> In 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2004, how many deaths were attributed to
> computers?
Programmable PCs *are* dangerous, but only to themselves
and other
programmable PCs that aren't operated by skilled people who know how to
defend against the execution of unwanted machine code.
The problem with programmable PCs is that they execute
machine code
without considering whether any of the instructions are desired by the
owner of the CPU. A no execute (NX) stack and heap [1] is a step in the
right direction, but everyone in the computer industry who has given
this any thought already knows that the core problem with computer
security is that our CPUs make no effort to restrict the execution of
machine code to that very small subset of all possible machine code
which constitutes the code that the owner of the CPU desires it to run.
Until this security defect is solved, we will still
have problems caused
by rampant technical bugs in our programmable PCs. Insecure software
would not be a threat except in rare circumstances if there were only a
way for our CPUs to be configured to execute *only* the insecure
software that we desire, and block anything else that is added to our
boxes by buffers, bullies, or buffoons.
If anyone really cared about solving this core security
problem with
computing today, it would be solved in just a few months. We would then
be left with all of the wonderful array of security problems that are
caused by human behavior (theft, misuse, physical intrusion,
eavesdropping, scam artists, etc) and these are problems we can all live
with in relative harmony [7].
The marketplace is not demanding this solution, and
it appears from the
noise of the media and marketing and PR machines of our revered industry
leaders that nobody is even trying to build awareness of the problem
much less devise and deliver solutions.
Programmable CPUs are not suitable for use in data
communications
devices without hardware defenses that restrict the machine code
instruction sequences that the CPU will accept. Programmable CPUs are
barely suitable for anything without this simple security addition.
We're all so busy pushing bits around urgently we've
forgotten to care.
CIO should be ashamed to be perpetuating the pointless
and fraudulent
business ideas of an industry addicted to extracting profit from victims
by causing them unnecessary problems and then selling inadequate fixes.
Sincerely,
Jason Coombs
jasonc@science.org
[1] MSDN Security Developer Center: Execution Protection
http://msdn.microsoft.com/security/productinfo/XPSP2/memoryprotection/execprotection.aspx
[7] Why Was Intel a No-Show on No Execute?
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1599193,00.asp
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