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Message-ID: <41C2CE2C.4060406@cs.ru.nl> Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 13:16:44 +0100 From: cees-bart <ceesb@cs.ru.nl> MIME-Version: 1.0 To: bugtraq@securityfocus.com In-Reply-To: <653D74053BA6F54A81ED83DCF969DF08CFA2AA@pivxes1.pivx.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Thor Larholm wrote: >This small group of students highlights how individuals outside the >security industry without special security prerequisites can still >manage to outperform the average Bugtraq poster in sheer quantity of >discoveries. This adequately validates the typical estimate of between 5 >and 15 errors in every thousand lines of code. > > Most of the 44 posted "security" advisories are about software bugs with a very low security risk. See for example the posted bug on NASM (http://tigger.uic.edu/~jlongs2/holes/nasm.txt): what's the chance of an evil asm file being sent to an ignorant user that calls nasm to compile this file? And this nasm bug is then called a "remotely exploitable security hole". If I mail out a shell script that does "rm -rf $HOME/*", this can also be considered a remotely exploitable security hole. A proper (wide-scale) remotely exploitable security hole is one than can be exploited without any ignorant user on the other side: for example, the bug Windows Messenger service which was enabled by default, making every user vulnerable, regardless of their stupidity. >With a class of 25 students discovering 44 vulnerabilities most students >now expect to fail the course >(http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/15/2113202). > > I think punishing students that have actually found security holes does not make the world a better place ;) -- cees-bart.
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