[SC-L] Tools: Evaluation Criteria

[Peter Amey]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sc-l-bounces at securecoding.org 
> [mailto:sc-l-bounces at securecoding.org] On Behalf Of Wall, Kevin
> Sent: 24 May 2007 12:45
> To: McGovern, James F (HTSC, IT)
> Cc: SC-L at securecoding.org
> Subject: Re: [SC-L] Tools: Evaluation Criteria
> 
> James McGovern wrote...
> 
> > Maybe folks are still building square windows because we haven't 
> > realized how software fails and can describe it in terms of 
> a pattern.
> > The only pattern-oriented book I have ran across in my 
> travels is the 
> > Core Security Patterns put out by the folks at Sun. Do you think we 
> > should stop talking solely about code and start talking about how 
> > vulnerabilities are repeatedly introduced and describe 
> using patterns 
> > notation?
> 
[snip

I am very happy to accept that we may not understand /all/ or even
/most/ of the ways software fails but we do know an awful lot.  Buffer
overflows, numeric overflows and division by zero have been wee
understood for years.  The first was limited by various versions of
Pascal ages ago.  Yet we are still clinging to techniques that hope we
can spot a buffer overflow "pattern" after construction (and hopefully
before an exploiter!).

There is a nice symmetry about my aeronautical analogy.  The Comet
disasters occurred just over 50 years after the Wright brothers first
flew; and we are still fiddling around with buffer overflows just over
50 years after Colossus (at the Bletchley Park crypto centre of Enigma
fame) signalled the start of the computer age.

That's all, back to the asylum!


Peter


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