[Infowarrior] - Schneier: Quickest Patch Ever

[Richard Forno]

(this speaks volumes.....rf)

Quickest Patch Ever

 
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71738-0.html


By Bruce Schneier| Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Sep, 07, 2006

If you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its
software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet
Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines.
Just crack Redmond's DRM.

Security patches used to be rare. Software vendors were happy to pretend
that vulnerabilities in their products were illusory -- and then quietly fix
the problem in the next software release.

That changed with the full disclosure movement. Independent security
researchers started going public with the holes they found, making
vulnerabilities impossible for vendors to ignore. Then worms became more
common; patching -- and patching quickly -- became the norm.

But even now, no software vendor likes to issue patches. Every patch is a
public admission that the company made a mistake. Moreover, the process
diverts engineering resources from new development. Patches annoy users by
making them update their software, and piss them off even more if the update
doesn't work properly.

For the vendor, there's an economic balancing act: how much more will your
users be annoyed by unpatched software than they will be by the patch, and
is that reduction in annoyance worth the cost of patching?

Since 2003, Microsoft's strategy to balance these costs and benefits has
been to batch patches: instead of issuing them one at a time, it's been
issuing them all together on the second Tuesday of each month. This
decreases Microsoft's development costs and increases the reliability of its
patches.

The user pays for this strategy by remaining open to known vulnerabilities
for up to a month. On the other hand, users benefit from a predictable
schedule: Microsoft can test all the patches that are going out at the same
time, which means that patches are more reliable and users are able to
install them faster with more confidence.

In the absence of regulation, software liability, or some other mechanism to
make unpatched software costly for the vendor, "Patch Tuesday" is the best
users are likely to get.

Why? Because it makes near-term financial sense to Microsoft. The company is
not a public charity, and if the internet suffers, or if computers are
compromised en masse, the economic impact on Microsoft is still minimal.

Microsoft is in the business of making money, and keeping users secure by
patching its software is only incidental to that goal.

There's no better example of this of this principle in action than
Microsoft's behavior around the vulnerability in its digital rights
management software PlaysForSure.

Last week, a hacker developed an application called FairUse4WM that strips
the copy protection from Windows Media DRM 10 and 11 files.

Now, this isn't a "vulnerability" in the normal sense of the word: digital
rights management is not a feature that users want. Being able to remove
copy protection is a good thing for some users, and completely irrelevant
for everyone else. No user is ever going to say: "Oh no. I can now play the
music I bought for my PC on my Mac. I must install a patch so I can't do
that anymore."

But to Microsoft, this vulnerability is a big deal. It affects the company's
relationship with major record labels. It affects the company's product
offerings. It affects the company's bottom line. Fixing this "vulnerability"
is in the company's best interest; never mind the customer.

So Microsoft wasted no time; it issued a patch three days after learning
about the hack. There's no month-long wait for copyright holders who rely on
Microsoft's DRM.

This clearly demonstrates that economics is a much more powerful motivator
than security.

It should surprise no one that the system didn't stay patched for long.
FairUse4WM 1.2 gets around Microsoft's patch, and also circumvents the copy
protection in Windows Media DRM 9 and 11beta2 files.

That was Saturday. Any guess on how long it will take Microsoft to patch
Media Player once again? And then how long before the FairUse4WM people
update their own software?

Certainly much less time than it will take Microsoft and the recording
industry to realize they're playing a losing game, and that trying to make
digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.

If Microsoft abandoned this Sisyphean effort and put the same development
effort into building a fast and reliable patching system, the entire
internet would benefit. But simple economics says it probably never will.

---
Bruce Schneier is the CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and the author of
Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. You can
contact him through his website.