But developers don't need to make any code changes or redeploy anything to mitigate those security issues. It all happens through patches on the server, 99% of which happen automatically via windows update.
If they're doing security patches and bug fixes it's a maintained codebase.
As opposed to:
2011: deploy website, turn on windows update
2011-2019: lead life as normal
2019: website is up and running, serving webpages, and not part of a botnet.
That's reality today, and if it helps to refer to it as "maintained", that's fine. The point is that it's preferable to the alternative.
Installing security patches for a Microsoft stack requires turning on windows update.
There's a BIG difference. Once you write your msft stack app, is done. Microsoft apps written decades ago still work today with no code changes.
So many open source hackers do not know the basic tecniques for backwards compatibility (e.g. don't reaname a function, just intoduce a new one, leaving the old available).
I'm spending very significant efforts maintaining an OpenSSL wrapper because OpenSSL constantly remove / rename functions. I hoped to branch based on version number, but they even changed the name of the function which returns version number.
And that's only one example, lot of people do such mistakes costing huge efforts from users.
And this popular semantic version myth, that you just need to update major version number when you chane the API incompatibly to save your clients from trouble.
I'd dispute this, or at least I think this doesn't capture the whole picture. Microsoft makes money with backwards compatibility and can afford to spend significant effort on to the ever-growing burden of remaining backwards-compatible indefinitely. Open source volunteers are working with much more limited resources and I think that it comes down much more to intentional tradeoffs between ease of maintenance and maintaining backwards compatibility.
If you have a low single-digit number of long-term contributors, maybe the biggest priority to keep your project moving at all is to avoid scaring off new contributors or burning out old contributors, and that might require making frequent breaking changes to get rid of unnecessary complexity asap. Characterizing that as "they don't know that you can just introduce a new function" doesn't seem like it yields instructive insights.
The mistake here is that in 99% of cases backwards compatibility costs noting - no efforts, no complexity.
Of two equally costing choices the people breaking backwards compatibility just make a wrong choice.
> maybe the biggest priority to keep your project moving at all
When you rename function SSLeay to OpenSSL_version_num, where are you moving? What does it give to your project?
Ok, if you like the new name so much, what prevents you from keeping the old symbol available?
unsigned long (*SSLeay)(void) = OpenSSL_version_num
When developers do such things, they break other open source libraries, which in turn break other. It's a huge destructive effect on the ecosystem. It will take many man-days of work for the dependent systems to recover. And it may take years for the maintainers to find those free days to spend on recovery, and some projects will never recover (e.g. no active maintainer).
With a lift of a finger you can save humanity from significant pain and efforts. If you decided to spend your efforts on open source, keeping backwards compatibility by making the right choice in a trivial situation will make you contribution an order of magnitude bigger, efficient.
So, I believe people don't know what they are doing when they introduce breaking changes.
So please, just keep the old function name. It will be cheaper for you and for everyone.
That's a good way of putting it, and it gets to a key difference between open source and proprietary software.
In the open source world where a million eyes make all bugs shallow, developer hours are thought of as free. So if you change something it's no big deal because all the developers using your thing can simply change their code to accommodate it. It doesn't matter how many devs or how many hours, since the total cost all works out to zero.
In the proprietary world, devs value their time in dollars. The reason they're using your thing is because it's saving them time. They paid good money because that's what your thing does. Save time. Get them shipped. As a vendor, you're smart enough to realize that if you introduce a change that stops saving your customers time or, worse, costs them time or, god forbid, un-ships their product, they'll do their own mental math and drop you for somebody who understands what they're selling.
In the end, all we're talking about here is the end product of this disconnect in mindset.
I don't believe it. Most security issues are not just an implementation issue in the framework but an API that is fundamentally insecure and cannot be used safely. Most likely those developers' programs are rife with security issues that will never be fixed.
You think about these things in layers. If X, then Y, and if Y, then Z, and if X, Y, and Z do we just accept that some problems are more expensive than they're worth or get some kind of insurance?
Keeping stuff up to date is exactly the kind of "simple thing" that no amount of sophistry will replace; in practice it has a better cost/benefit ratio than any amount of "thinking holistically". Those who only their things up to date and do nothing else may be foolish, but those who don't keep their things up to date are even more foolish.
The discussion is about the difference between updates when there's a valid reason and updates that are imposed by cloud providers, nobody advocates sticking with old software versions.
In my experience that's what any policy that doesn't include staying up to date actually boils down to in practice. Auditing old versions is never going to be a priority for anyone, and any reason not to upgrade today is an even better reason not to upgrade tomorrow, so "understanding and mitigation" tends to actually become "leave it alone and hope it doesn't break".
Ever time I run an audit (which is monthly) I see at least a dozen conversations in NPM packages we use. Sure, some of them don't apply to our usage, and others can't really impact is, but occasionally there is one we should be concerned about.
We server admins can push buttons to upgrade, but that doesn't mean developer code will keep working.
Many developers live in this world were they think server admins will protect their app... But we're more likely to break things by forcing your neglected package upgrades
Right, so all deployed Active X based software magically became both secure and continued working as before after everyone installed the latest Windows patches?
The trivial patching only works for security issues due to implementation not design defects. If you have a design defect, your choice is typically either breaking working apps or usage patterns or breaking your users security. Microsoft has done both (e.g. Active X blocking, vs continued availability of CSV injection) and both have negatively affected millions.
Is it resonable to postpone the upgrade for later ?
Example : the software uses python requests. A new version fixes CVE-2018-18074 about Authorization header, but you don't use this header, for sure. Is it resonable to upgrade a little bit later ?
Or is it going to take less time/effort to upgrade each time?
Or is the code so trivial you can immediately make the decision to skip that patch?
There's no perfect answer - you have to decide what's reasonable for your teams.
If your software runs on a unmaintained platform there won't be any security fixes and that's why amazon forces you to upgrade at some point.