When you think about it, time really is all we have. It’s what you have at your disposal, to do anything and everything. It seems that we’re better off not knowing when it comes to security–for our own good. Can it really be so utilitarian?
To anybody out there writing exploits: make sure you’re doing it just for fun. Currently, there are no outlets for any financial gain that will accurately measure your time investment or fairly compensate your hard work.
Security Objectives’ own Shane Macaulay “owned” Vista SP1 in the PWN2OWN contest at CanSecWest 2008 by exploiting a bug in Adobe Flash. As a result of the contest’s categorization of the bug as third-party, the exploit was grossly under-appraised (especially when considering cross-platform targets and the fact that it would work well into the future with Vista’s new Service Pack.) Sure, it technically was a bug in a third-party application, but this particular third-party application happens to be installed on just about every Internet-enabled PC. According to Adobe, “Adobe® Flash® Player is the world’s most pervasive software platform, used by over 2 million professionals and reaching over 98% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices.”
Even if Shane was unfairly compensated, it doesn’t matter because at least he used “responsible disclosure” — or does it? I highly doubt that the people in charge of the companies writing buggy software and brokering bug information have any idea about the amount of work and skill that goes into discovering an exploitable bug, let alone writing a proof-of-concept for it. As it stands, software companies are setting themselves up for a black market in digital weapons trading of unprecedented proportions.
Here’s something else to think about.. I expect Adobe to patch this one rather quickly given all the publicity. How long does it take for a vendor to fix a given vulnerability when it is reported to them directly? Even some of the brokered “upcoming advisories” on 3Com’s ZDI site are many months or even years stale. This “patchtile dysfunction” will increase the value of a 0-day exploit exponentially.
Time is money and to make up for lost time, Mr. Macaulay decided to sell the laptop he had won on eBay. An innocent bystander at the contest dubbed this decision “from pwn to pawn.” So why not? Laptops get sold on eBay everyday–but not this one. It wasn’t long before eBay pulled Mr. Macaulay’s item from auction on the first of April, ostensibly as an April Fool’s shenanigan. This came as a surprise to me. Things to consider here:
- The laptop may or may not have had forensic evidence of the controlled attack that occurred during the contest.
- Even so, Mr. Macaulay is a responsible discloser and would not have shipped the laptop until the bug was patched.
- Mr. Macaulay’s and Mr. Sotirov’s autographs should have increased the laptop value, regardless.
This incident, in a way, reminded me of eBay’s great fearwall debacle from a few years ago (CVE-2005-4131.) In that case, there were several key differences: an information broker such as ZDI was not involved, a pseudonym was being used, the code statements where the memory corruption occurred were disclosed, and no computer hardware was for sale. Nevertheless, I respect eBay’s decision to discontinue the auction as this is obviously a very controversial issue.
Brokering information? How can you do it? From experience, the idea of using an escrow service and 3rd party verification is largely ineffective. It would appear that ZDI is the only show in town. Of course there’s that auction service, but you have to send them your exploit first so how does that work? It appears that they’re still trying to do business by the way, despite alleged legal troubles. I’m subscribed to their mailing list and they send out an e-mail every time new information goes up for auction; they put up a dozen or so new exploits last week but it would appear that few if any were sold. Where do we go from here? Is brokering information even possible?
Imagine for a moment a scenario where a dozen or so exploits of critical severity related to a single software company are posted to Full Disclosure with rumors of many more circulating in the underground and exploits actively being carried out in the wild. Now imagine shareholders shorting that company’s stock. I suppose that the vulnerability information might be more realistically valued in a situation such as this. Anyone have any other ideas?
System of Systems 