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Comment by ryao | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Schneier is well documented to equate failing to disclose vulnerabilities with making systems less secure, or as he put it in this interview, less safe:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/519336/bruce-schneier-nsa...

To his credit, he was talking about weakening encryption standards, but then elaborated that simply looking for security vulnerabilities and not telling anyone what they found was also doing that. I find that latter position ridiculous. It would be like saying studying malaria and not reporting your findings makes people less healthy.

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This isn't just "looking for security vulnerabilities". Tools were created to exploit the vulnerabilities. Both the archive of hoarded vulnerability knowledge and the archive of exploit tools is a valuable target... because it would be extremely useful for an attacker, thus making us less safe.

This isn't a hypothetical concern, because the Shadow Broker archive is an example of one - or more - of those archives falling into unknown hands. Hoarding vulnerability information concentrates risk which invites thieves.

Less safe than what? The tools could be developed by anyone who works long enough. These systems were always insecure and the idea that we should ignore that rather than replace them with systems that are less insecure by virtue of being developed with OSS best practices is ridiculous. People need to recognize bad decisions and start making good ones rather than find scapegoats to avoid the issue.

> Less safe than what?

World A contains an archive of concentrated vulnerability information. World B doesn't. World A is strictly less safe than World B, because concentrating information creates a more attractive target. Without that concentrated archive, the vulnerabilities would have to be discovered on their own.

Do you really want to argue that allowing the archive of stolen tools recently released by the "Shadow Brokers" didn't make people less safe? Even though it contained attacks on various routers that were previously unknown? Is it really your assertion that those same tools were never used before the "action" announcement?

> the idea that we should ignore that

Nobody is saying that. Where did you get the idea that we should ignore vulnerabilities?

> could be developed by anyone who works long enough

Obviously, which is why I also discussed the hoarding of vulnerability knowledge.

Maybe all of those vulnerabilities would have been discovered independently, but stealing the archive from the NSA would have been a lot easier and faster. These are not traits you can simply brush off as irrelevant, as most security is not about perfection, but instead about how long the security features will delay an attacker.

> scapegoats

This isn't about finding a scapegoat. The NSA making us less safe is the "bad decision" that needs to be recognized.

My point is that research or even exploitation is not causation of security flaws.

The flaws themselves are what make people insecure and ignoring that by complaining about people researching them for whatever reason suggests that we should ignore security flaws and just blame anyone who looks.

The release of the concentrated archive will help security in the long term the same way that a fire that burns down a city improves fire safety in the long term by encouraging changes to building codes. Ideally, such things should have been done already, but people tend to only fix things after something catastrophic happens.

Hopefully, people will realize that they need to adopt solutions that are more resilient. That means equipment running fully open source solutions such as PFSense, OpenBSD, LEDE, etcetera.

The NSA would have a cache of remote code exec exploits in PFSense if they actually cared about exploiting. But they don't.

PFSense is much easier to audit than the closed source stuff that the disclosed zero days targeted. Anything that they find in it is far more likely to be found by others and patched. It is a fundamental improvement that you only can get with OSS.

That being said, organizations doing what the NSA does will always exist. Making decisions based on that premise that will lead to a much better result than blaming them for flaws in the things people use ever will.

I definitely agree with your premise, that OSS can more easily be reviewed.

In reality, do you think/know that happens? (I'm genuinely intrigued). I know almost all major software shops generally have some kind of formalized process for internal and external security review; and often have automated tooling to also support that process. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's there, and catches a lot of bugs.

Running with PFSense as our example, do they have regular codebase-wide and change-specific code reviews and security assessments? I'd be delighted to know they do, but haven't seen much about it.

There are tools being such as coverity run on it:

https://www.google.com/#q=coverity+pfsense https://www.google.com/#q=coverity+freebsd

That is a rather good tool provided to open source projects for free that finds bugs, including exploitable bugs. FreeBSD and pfSense by extension has the benefit of Clang's various tools for catching issues (e.g. its static analysis, address sanitizer, etcetera). I also know that there was a TrustedBSD hardening effort. You probably would want to ask the pfSense and FreeBSD guys for details.

There are better people than me to ask, but given that it is open source the people doing things are under no obligation to talk about it, it is hard for anyone to know everything being done.

Anyway, my point is that these sorts of things only happen with OSS. If a search researcher has an idea for a new way of catching bugs, he is likely going to use it on OSS code rather than closed source software by virtue of it being easier to do experiments on it. The same goes for non-profits devoting money to auditing code (which the Linux Foundation announced last year). You definitely will not see that happen with proprietary software. This gives OSS an intrinsic advantage.

>given that it is open source the people doing things are under no obligation to talk about it, it is hard for anyone to know everything being done.

Actually, by nature of being Open source there's 100% increased likeliness they'll talk about it - they simply can. It's the thousands of security consultants working under NDA doing code review for software companies that legally cannot talk about it, even if they did want to.

> Anyway, my point is that these sorts of things only happen with OSS.

That's not correct. Software companies have much bigger budgets for security tooling than open source projects. They've got access to clang and coverity as well as a host of other tools that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

> The same goes for non-profits devoting money to auditing code (which the Linux Foundation announced last year). You definitely will not see that happen with proprietary software. This gives OSS an intrinsic advantage.

This is really awesome, I'm loving seeing this happen. But For every 1x security review of say truecrypt, you do realize that Microsoft and Apple would've had those exact same experts audit their own implementations several times a year, right?

Are those the same experts that missed gotofail? Static analysis should have caught that. Just because they can does not mean that they do. Having many developers sharing code means that they all have an incentive to do auditing.

By the way, there are definitely people who do things with OSS code and never tell others. I cannot know what everyone is doing. I am neither God nor the NSA.

> It would be like saying studying malaria and not reporting your findings makes people less healthy.

That isn't necessarily an absurd thing to say in some circumstances, but let's take a different angle.

A striking difference between information security and microbiology is that the information necessary to attack someone and the information necessary to defend against attacks are almost identical. (People can develop an exploit from a patch, or a patch from an exploit, in a matter of days or hours. And they expect to be able to do so; if we had a working exploit or a detailed vulnerability description, we'd be very critical if a vendor couldn't patch promptly solely on the basis of that information.)

In microbiology, there is a relationship between these two kinds of research or capability, and biomedical researchers sometimes produce more virulent pathogens as part of their research, but overall the relationship is dramatically more attenuated. There are pathogens that researchers have had samples of for decades that they still haven't produced a successful prophylaxis against. And just having drugs that treat infection, or vaccines, doesn't automatically allow someone to cause infections or epidemics.

Malaria is more akin to an exploit than a vulnerability.

However, if we are to persist with your example, what you are trying to say is more akin to "Studying malaria and developing, or buying, a genetically engineered infectious disease that uses malaria's infection vector, and stockpiling it in a warehouse, and sometimes secretly using it, and not telling anyone about this isn't making people any sicker."

Most of those activities do not make people sicker. The hoarding part certainly does not. We ought to be realistic in identifying each action for what it is, rather than labeling it all as one thing.

Maybe "increasing anyone's health risk"?

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