From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Crispin Cowan
Sent: Fri 2/3/2006 12:12 PM
To: Gary McGraw
Cc: Kenneth R. van Wyk; Secure Coding Mailing List
Subject: Re: [SC-L] Bugs and flaws
Gary McGraw wrote:
> To cycle this all back around to the
original posting, lets talk about
> the WMF flaw in particular. Do
we believe that the best way for
> Microsoft to find similar design
problems is to do code review? Or
> should they use a higher level
approach?
>
> Were they correct in saying (officially) that flaws
such as WMF are hard
> to anticipate?
>
I have heard
some very insightful security researchers from Microsoft
pushing an abstract
notion of "attack surface", which is the amount of
code/data/API/whatever
that is exposed to the attacker. To design for
security, among other things,
reduce your attack surface.
The WMF design defect seems to be that IE has
too large of an attack
surface. There are way too many ways for
unauthenticated remote web
servers to induce the client to run way too much
code with parameters
provided by the attacker. The implementation flaw is
that the WMF API in
particular is vulnerable to malicious
content.
None of which strikes me as surprising, but maybe that's just me
:)
Crispin
--
Crispin Cowan,
Ph.D.
http://crispincowan.com/~crispin/
Director
of Software Engineering, Novell http://novell.com
Olympic Games: The Bi-Annual Festival of
Corruption
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