Microsoft Security Bulletin
MS08-010 – Critical CVE-2008-0076
None of the flaws I’ve ever found on Microsoft platforms have ever been public (that is, they have all been derived from internal projects) and it’s nice to see at least in this round of fixes that my bug scored a perfect 10.0 (a dime) on the bulletin. I actually did not test as many platforms and configurations as Microsoft. For those of you that are unaware, bug regression and the overall triage process can become quite intensive. I knew that this vulnerability/flaw/bug/exploit/whatever had wide reaching appeal, fairly easy to see from the fact that all architectures and versions as far back as possible are marked critical.
As with all doings in the security space, walking a line between disclosure and tight-lipped mums, the word practice is not easy. So, what can be said here? Nothing? Something? I guess I have to write something, the marketoid’s wouldn’t be happy if I did not.
Before I digress into any technical discussion, I will take this opportunity to say something about the exploit sales “industry?”. In this world, everything and everybody has their place, that said, any individual that thinks exploits are worth any money, has another thing coming. Look at it this way, if you’re in the business of purchasing information (exploits), by definition you are unaware of the value of that information thereby inherently you are in a position to devalue the time and emotional investment into the derivation of that work. So this means, you’re never going to get back enough cash to make up for your time, EVER!! Where I do see some value in exploit brokers, is exclusively in the capacity of having them take the burden of dealing with uninformed software vendors (the Microsoft/IBM/others process is fairly straight forward).
Now that that’s all done with, I don’t really want to talk about the exploit, at least until some poorly constructed version winds up in metasploit. I will say though that the bulletin is correct in its description and synopsis.
The fact that there are no mitigating factors or workarounds possible, gives me some incentive and reassurance that the tools and methodologies that we’re building into our product offering works.
We’re ramping up development for a big push this quarter and will be uploading some more screenshots and related minutia in the coming months.
Our product in brief is an automated tool for native application flaw finding. It can assess, at runtime in a dynamic way, the integrity of a given binary application. This process then produces test cases and reproductions of what is necessary to trigger the flaw for a developer (this way, reducing regression rates due to bug fixes as it’s much easier to fix something when you can interact with it as opposed to a simple warning message).
We’re working on a management interface (on top of the technical one), that will also enable the lay person to identify architectural problems in arbitrary software also. This is actually quite simple (with the support of our engine), in essence, a landscape or tomography view is laid out before the user, with associated peaks and valleys, this then changes over time (4D), and represents the surface area of your application binary’s response to input. That is, a dynamic environment that is rooted by a system of systems methodology. What becomes apparent is that (if you are in the capacity to fix these issues yourself), as time goes on, and you assign various resources (people) to fix the peaks and turn them into valley’s. The rate at which you push down the peaks (bugs), across the application is not constant, some issues are harder to fix than others and persist. This way, a self-relative understanding of where problem area of code exist poignantly reveal themselves as architectural flaws and appropriate steps can be taken to drive the business case that will support a rewrite.
Whew, that’s a mouthful. Needless to say, we’re working to create the best platform around for software sovereignty.
System of Systems 