According to a news item from the U.K. Institution of Engineering and
\nTechnology, a team organised by the SANS Institute analysed 7000 detected
\nsecurity vulnerabilities from 1996 (the item says “the 7000” but doesn’t say
\nfurther how they were identified), and found that 85% of them were caused by
\nthree phenomena:<\/p>\n
* Failure to check user input
\n * Allowing buffer overflows (that is, failing to hinder them)
\n * Handling integer type checks or overflows incorrectly<\/p>\n
SANS spotted an opportunity and put together a course and practical exam
\nabout secure programming, leading to a certificate.<\/p>\n
A few observations.<\/p>\n
1. Security is not taken as seriously as safety, despite that computer
\nsecurity problems probably cause more total resource damage than
\naccidents. I have long believed, with others, that the phenomena in both
\nareas are similar and thus that similar techniques may be used to assure
\nsystems vulnerable to these sorts of phenomena. Devising a threat model is
\nvery similar to hazard identification, but whereas hazard identification is
\npartly internationally normed, I suspect that people programming software on
\nnetworks, especially WWW-based SW, rarely have anything like a professional
\nengineering qualification or status and maybe do not feel as bound to
\ndiscover and adhere to norms that cover their tasks.<\/p>\n
It might help to revise international standards on safety to use the word
\n“dependability” instead of safety, and to use the “specified loss”
\nformulation of the notion of accident rather than the “physical injury or
\ndeath” formulation, and then security vulnerabilities would be covered. Then
\nagain, rather than leading to a higher standard of programming, this might
\ninstead just serve to lower the standard of argument for dependability to be
\nfound in the required documentation.<\/p>\n
2. Working in a strongly-typed programming language would have avoided 85%
\nof the security vulnerabilities discovered (according to some unspecified
\ncriteria) in 1996.<\/p>\n
It is astonishing to me that 47 years after strong typing was invented and
\nrecognised, and after the Turing Award has been presented to such proponents
\nas Dijkstra, Hoare, Wirth, Dahl, Nygaard and Naur, professionals not using
\nthis technology caused 85% of significant errors in a specific area of
\ncomputing. I think it is disgraceful.<\/p>\n
One could always hope that things have changed in the last 10 years. But
\nobviously the SANS Institute doesn’t think so.<\/p>\n
3. The social phenomena in program construction are overwhelmingly more
\ninfluential than technical progress. Nothing else could account for
\nphenomenon 2.<\/p>\n
[url=http:\/\/www.iee.org\/oncomms\/sector\/informationpro\/SectionNews\/Object\/92520512-96A3-7299-40BC84823F900F5F]http:\/\/www.iee.org\/oncomms\/sector\/informationpro\/SectionNews\/Object\/92520512-96A3-7299-40BC84823F900F5F[\/url]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Typing saves your skin!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4bBYZ-75","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deepquest.code511.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}