On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
They do have a lousy track record. I'm convinced, though, that they're sincere about wanting to improve, and they're really trying very hard. In fact, I hope that some other vendors follow their lead.
Of course we need to be honest with ourselves and recognize this has been going on for a long time before Microsoft was even a glimmer in Bill Gates eye. Multics security. Bell Labs answer: Unix. Who needs all that "extra" security junk in Multics. We don't need to protect /etc/passwd because we use DES crypt and users always choose strong passwords. We'll make the passwd file world readable so we can translate uid's to usernames. Multi-level security? Naw, its simplier just to make everything Superuser. FORTRAN/COBOL array bounds checking. Bell Labs answer: C. Who wants the computer to check array lengths or pointers. Programmers know what they are doing, and don't need to be "constrained" by the programming language. Everyone knows programmers are better at arithmatic than computers. A programmer would never make an off-by-one error. The standard C run-time library. gets(char *buffer), strcpy(char *dest, char *src), what were they thinking?
My big worry isn't the micro-issues like buffer overflows -- it's the meta-issue of an overall too-complex architecture. I don't think they have a handle on that yet.
The strange thing about complexity is its much harder to design a "simple" system than a Rube Goldberg contraption.