Apparently, both Eeye Digital Research (US software security company) and NGS Software Ltd (a UK based research firm) claim credit for discovering the recent vulnerability in RealPlayer. This might not be as interesting as the fact how the two companies decided to inform about the vulnerability. While NSG took responsible approach, quote:
> NGSSoftware are going to withhold details about these flaws for three > months. Full details will be published on the 6th of January 2005. This > three month window will allow users of RealPlayer the time needed to apply > the patch before the details are released to the general public. This > reflects NGSSoftware's new approach to responsible disclosure. Eeye went ahead and released technical details about the vulnerability just a few days after the vendor made the patch available. Many of you may remember another vulnerability disclosure made by Eeye in March 2004 when they released technical information about a flaw in ISS security products (ICQ parsing module) that was followed by a "zero-day-attack", when in 36 hours a particularly damaging âWittyâ worm struck users of ISS products (The worm damaged usersâ data by writing over random hard disk sectors). Considering the scope of RealPlayerâs vulnerability - multiple products, multiple target user groups (from home users to enterprises), multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux), this early release of technical data about the vulnerability gives hackers again a great window of opportunity to attack vulnerable systems. While I completely believe in "full disclosure" as the only way to ensure that software vendors take security seriously and act quickly to resolve security issues, even if it means that cyber criminals are given instructions how to write malicious code and attack, the security industry needs to cultivate the way how vulnerabilities are published. Vendors often need more than the typical 30 days ultimatum given by security researches. Depending on the scope and nature of the vulnerability a vendor may need more time to test the patch and make sure that it works correctly. And then there is the whole issue of delivering the patch to the customers. Even in the ideal case when the patch can be delivered relatively quickly via some kind of automated update system, many companies opt to test the patch internally and delay its deployment (as we saw with XP SP2). What I am calling for is that security researches take responsible approach in releasing information about security vulnerabilities, similar to NSG release policy. With zero-day-attacks, it is no longer possible that technical details are published about the same time the patch is made available. An industry accepted standard defining information release steps and time constrains is necessary here so that both vendors and customers are given enough time to make sure that they are secure before technical details (=instructions how to write malicious code) are released. Martin Viktora _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html