UNIX / Linux keyboard.

Software Security Tools

How to develop software that is more secure

It is extremely difficult to create trustworthy software. The difficulty and slow production leads to much higher price. That means that most software produced will be fairly insecure, because security is a fairly low priority for most producers and consumers of technology. As an example of the difficulty, the NSA asked Praxis High Integrity Systems to develop part of Tokeneer, a secure system. The key statistics were:

9939 lines of code were produced, in
260 days of work, for a production rate of
38 lines of code per day, and with
2 defects discovered since delivery.

A lot of the difficulty goes back to the fundamental differences in secure design. Ross Anderson's book Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems is an excellent explanation of the issues of designing trustworthy systems.

I think a lot of the problem is philosophical. A typical system design is based on what features you want to include. The most important question for most designers is of the form, "Does this do what I want it to?" Unfortunately, they overlook the important question "Does this refuse to do what I want it to not do?" Could there be some way to get the system to do something helpful to the attacker and overlooked by the designer?

Put another way: A design should specify that the system should have only a narrowly defined set of functions: precisely that and no more. That means that the design analysis and implementation testing need to address failure modes and the handling of unexpected input.

This is an area where Microsoft seems to do an especially poor job. Microsoft products tend to be very good as long as you do exactly what they expected you to do with them. The problem is when error or misunderstanding or bad luck or malice presents inputs or situations not of interest to and therefore not considered by the designers.

Complexity Decreases Security

More complexity means more opportunities for bugs and greater difficulty finding them. Frederick Chang was Directory of Research at NSA. In his November 2013 testimony to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology of the U.S. House of Representatives he said:

When it comes to security, complexity is not your friend. Indeed it has been said that complexity is the enemy of security. This is a point that has been made often about cybersecurity in a variety of contexts including technology, coding, and policy. The basic idea is simple: as software systems grow more complex, they will contain more flaws and these flaws will be exploited by cyber adversaries.

I downloaded the source code for the Apollo Guidance Computer, which provided computation and electronic interfaces for guidance, navigation, and control of the Apollo program spacecraft. There are 363,397 lines of "code", some of which are comment headers inserted by the project that scanned this. Download yaAGC-dev-20100220.tar.bz2, extract the archive, and:
$ wc $( find . -name '*.agc' )

The Linux kernel as of kernel 4.4.3 had 18,862,918 lines of code:
$ cd /usr/src
$ wc $( find linux-4.4.3 -name '*.cc' -o -name '*.c' -o -name '*.h' )

The entire OpenBSD operating system, kernel plus user-space tools, had 20,154,846 lines of code. (Download and extract src.tar.gz and sys.tar.gz)

Windows XP had 45 million lines of code.

Automobiles by 2014 had about 100 million lines.

All of Google's software services are estimated to have about 2 billion lines.

Writing More Secure Code

David Wheeler's Secure Programming HOWTO is a great reference for security software development. Much of it applies to programming in general. It's nicely written, both broad and detailed, and a free download. Many other things at his web site are very helpful.

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and similar attacks have become the largest category of threat, surpassing buffer overflow attacks. Wikipedia and others have good descriptions of these programming errors and pointers to further resources:

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) Whitehat Security's XSS paper Cross-Site Request Forgery ([CX]SRF) SQL Injection Code Injection Format String Attacks Buffer Overflow Attacks in general Stack Overflow Heap Overflow Aleph One's "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" Detailed description of Buffer Overflow and many more

A group of industry experts has defined a list of the 25 most dangerous programming errors, see the lists at the SANS Institute and MITRE.

SAFECode, the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code

SAFECode, the Software Assurance Forum for Excellence in Code, has this mission statement: "SAFECode is dedicated to increasing trust in information and communications technology products and services through the advancement of proven software assurance methods."

Safecode has released a very good document, Fundamental Practices for Secure Software Development: A Guide to the Most Effective Secure Development Practices in Use Today. To summarize it:

Secure Development for Cloud Platforms

SAFECode and the Cloud Security Alliance have written a paper, "Practices for Security Development of Cloud Applications".

C/C++ Security

Robert Seacord's Secure Coding in C and C++ and Vladimir Kushnir's Safe C++ address a vital topic, as most applications and pretty much all operating systems are written in those languages. C and C++ are used to create pretty much everything, but at the same time they are rather insecure languages. This goes back to the original design philosophy — Kernighan and Ritchie made it the programmer's job to very carefully use arrays. "Nevertheless, C retains the basic philosophy that programmers know what they are doing; it only requires that they state their intentions explicitly."

Bjarne Stroustrup has said, "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot." C permits undesirable operations, and many simple and common programming errors are not detected by the compiler and may remain subtle at runtime.

Compilers silently drop code when optimizing and this can lead to security and stability problems. "Towards Optimization-Safe Systems: Analyzing the Impact of Undefined Behavior" is a paper from the 24th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 2014. (and also see Xi Wang's other papers) The paper examines optimization-unstable code which is unexpectedly discarded by compiler optimization due to undefined behavior within the program. They present the following common example of a pointer overflow check found in several code bases. Optimizing drops the second if statement, leaving the code vulnerable to overflow.

char *buf = ...;
char *buf_end = ...;
unsigned int len = ...;
if (buf + len >= buf_end)
	return; /* len too large */
if (buf + len < buf)
	return ; /* overflow, buf+len wrapped around */
/* write to buf[0..len-1] */

They present a list of undefined behaviors in C, both within the language itself and in library calls, and a table of varieties of unstable code optimized away by various commonly used compilers. Their Stack bug-finding tool discovers these vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel; the Python interpreter; the Chrome browser; the QEMU and Xen hypervisors; the Kerberos, OpenSSH, and OpenSSL security tools and libraries, and many other critical systems.

Also see MSC06-C Beware of compiler optimizations at CERT's secure coding site.

The following are from David Wheeler's paper, and they are all free software except as noted.

PHP Security

PHP is a powerful server-side scripting language, but with the power and the execution on the server comes risk.

Python Security

A Bite of Python is a good look at important Python security issues.

PyChecker checks for common Python bugs.

RATS (Rough Auditing Tool for Security) scans C/C++, Perl, PHP, and Python code for common problems.

Java Security

Node.js Security

Node.js is server-side JavaScript for creating web sites. It includes its own HTTP server. Security concerns here include:

Don't run the web server as root. Duh. But if creating a web server is suddenly so easy, many will be created by people who haven't heard the basics.

Set the secure and httpOnly flags on session cookies. Confusingly, this limits them to being sent over HTTPS and preventing script access to the cookie client side.

Add security focused server HTTP headers. As this page explains, the following server settings improve security. The following would be good on any web server, not just one based on Node.js, but the helmet middleware in Node.js makes its easy to add them.

Protect against CSRF/XSRF with the express.csrf() middleware.

The X-axis of weevil

A different measure of buggyness

ActiveX Must Be Disabled

Microsoft's ActiveX is fundamentally insecure and you should disable it. That is, if you are so daring as to use Explorer. Really you should be using any other browser.

Some people complain that their organization has foolishly built business practices around pages that only function using ActiveX.

What's next, requiring all personnel to smoke at least one pack of cigarettes each day?

Windows Source Code

The Kuro5hin site had some interesting comments about the leaked Windows source code.

Writing Your Own Exploit Code

The Metasploit Project is an open-source code library for developing and running exploits.

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