[ISN] Security: The root of the problem

[InfoSec News]

http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=160

By Marcus J. Ranum 
ACM Queue vol. 2, no. 4 
June 2004 

Security bug? My programming language made me do it! 

Failing Miserably

It doesn't seem that a day goes by without someone announcing a
critical flaw in some crucial piece of software or other. Is software
that bad? Are programmers so inept? What the heck is going on, and why
is the problem getting worse instead of better?

One distressing aspect of software security is that we fundamentally
don't seem to "get it." In the 15 years I've been working the security
beat, I have lost track of the number of times I've seen (and taught)  
tutorials on "how to write secure code" or read books on that topic.  
It's clear to me that we're:

* Trying to teach programmers how to write more secure code

* Failing miserably at the task

We're stuck in an endless loop on the education concept. We've been
trying to educate programmers about writing secure code for at least a
decade and it flat-out hasn't worked. While I'm the first to agree
that beating one's head against the wall shows dedication, I am
starting to wonder if we've chosen the wrong wall. What's Plan B?

Indeed, as I write this, I see that Microsoft, Intel, and AMD have
jointly announced a new partnership to help prevent buffer overflows
using hardware controls. In other words, the software quality problem
has gotten so bad that the hardware guys are trying to solve it, too.  
Never mind that lots of processor memory-management units are capable
of marking pages as nonexecutable; it just seems backward to me that
we're trying to solve what is fundamentally a software problem using
hardware. It's not even a generic software problem; it's a runtime
environment issue that's specific to a particular programming
language.

Normally, when someone mentions programming languages in an article
about software quality, it's an invitation for everyone to jump in
with useful observations such as, "If we all programmed in [my
favorite strongly hyped programming language], we wouldn't have this
problem!" That might be true in some cases, but it's not reality.

We tried legislating a change of programming languages with Ada back
in the 1990s. Remember Ada? That was an expensive disaster. Then we
tried getting everyone to switch to a "sandboxed" environment with
Java in the late 1990s, and it worked better—except that everyone
complained about wanting to bypass the "sandbox" to get file-level
access to the local host. In fact, Java worked so well, Microsoft
responded with ActiveX, which bypasses security entirely by making it
easy to blame the user for authorizing bad code to execute. Please,
let's not have any more alternative programming languages that will
solve all our problems!

What's Plan B? I think that Plan B is largely a matter of doing a lot
more work on our compiler and runtime environments, with a focus on
making them embed more support for code quality and error checking.  
We've got to put it "below the radar screen" of the programmer's
awareness, just as we did with compiler optimization, the creation of
object code, and linking. We've done a great job building programming
environments that produce fast executables without a lot of
hand-holding from the programmer. In fact, most programmers today take
optimization completely for granted—why not software security analysis
and runtime security, too? For that matter, why are we still treating
security as a separate problem from code quality? Insecure code is
just buggy code!

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