Having classic ASP pages hosted on a production system in 2021 seems like a pretty strong indication of a lack of codebase maintenance and auditing.
AFAIK classic ASP pages can be as secure as those in any other framework. The vulnerabilities (most commonly SQL injection) are known and are addressable.
I know it chafes at some (Microsoft marketers esp.?) that ASP pages are still around. But classic ASP is yet another example of that old adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
I watched one organization assign an entire division of programmers to develop a moderately-sized ASP.NET application: they went through orientation and training in ASP.NET and then planned, designed, coded and rolled out ...nothing! After two years there was literally nothing!
A perceptive manager in another division approached his sole ASP developer and asked if she could write some ASP code to "demo" that same project. She looked at the specifications and then quietly wrote an entire system!
Weeks later, when the department heads saw her "demo", they thought the ASP.NET developers had completed it. Imagine their surprise to find that what they were looking at was done, not by the ASP.NET group funded millions of dollars but by someone in another division: a single focused classic ASP developer quietly working downstairs.
Nonetheless IIRC ASP pages reach end-of-life support by Microsoft in 2025 so it might make sense to migrate. But b/c classic ASP was written in a manner consistent with early web standards (CGI/APACHE) migration of classic ASP to one of the various classic ASP-like frameworks in PHP, Perl, Ruby et al would likely be easier, faster and cheaper. Migration would be mostly translation and much, if not all, could be automated.
In contrast, moving classic ASP to ASP.NET would be more fraught with problems. The underlying models of the WWW are inconsistent.
Also, how many classic ASP developers are there now , to add new protections for new issues...
And if you look at the linked thread, it doesn't seem like they've done a great job of maintenance...
Yes, it is just like PHP or Perl or Ruby with the CGI specification.
raesene9 says >" how many classic ASP developers are there now ..."<
Good question! But IMO a web developer could learn classic ASP in a single day!8-))
raesene9 says >"the individual developer has to code all defence,<
Yes, just like PHP or Perl or Python.
or.... they could move the application to a supported platform with a wider developer base and in-built protections against common web application security attacks.
There is a reason why most web app developers do not hand code their entire stacks. For example why ruby web developers use rails. Web app. sec. is a a relatively complex field to get right, full of edge cases. Having each and every web app development team take the time to understand all those cases and edges probably isn't the best use of scarce developer resources.
Yes yes. And this was of course very maintainable, up to todays standards, easy to onboard new hires in, not falling apart in edge cases that weren't part of the demo, code that was audited by multiple developers, it didn't make any shortcuts in terms of security, etc. etc. etc.
That some business guys are amazed by the "lone wolf dev skills" might be explainable, but on HN we should know better. Yes, there are devs that get a ton done irrelevant of framework, but "getting things done" (in terms of business requirements) is only part of the story.
I'm less cynical than you are about the parent comment, largely because I'm watching the same scenario unfold within my own company.
We're on year two of the million-dollar team turning out nothing. I'm in a different department, but my position means I liaise with lots of different people throughout the organization, so I also know that a single dev in a third department is half-way through solving the problem because a ultra-high-level manager doesn't want to wait anymore and will use it as an excuse to can the other team and that department's director.
And this was of course very maintainable, up to todays standards, easy to onboard new hires in, not falling apart in edge cases that weren't part of the demo, code that was audited by multiple developers, it didn't make any shortcuts in terms of security, etc. etc. etc.
Unless you've seen the person's codebase, it's uncharitable for you to assume that it's deficient, perhaps based on your own experiences.
If this scenario can happen in two companies, it might be more common that any of us realize.
What was shown wasn't a demo - it was a full implementation. It was rolled into production weeks after the first showing and AFAIK is still in use 20 years later.
What is there other than "getting things done" (that is, other than bitching about it)?
That being said, we should really take these anecdotes with the appropriate grain of salt. After all, we're here in a thread about countless companies being threatened by security flaws. A dev that "gets things done" (from a business point of view) might actually do that, but do they also think about all those other requirements that business themselves can neither validate nor appreciate if measured by short-term KPIs?
I'm not saying that's happening, but I've seen too many "Why are you spending weeks on this, I can do this in half a day!"-kind-of-devs, that then hack something together that technically works as the requirements demanded, but completely falls flat under any aspects of maintainability and extensibility, let alone security.
Eventually, after many months and at least a couple million dollars, I and three other people got dragged in: another developer (no one lets me do UI code), a good project manager to coordinate with users and management, and a developer/tech lead/manager who had two unique abilities: good at cutting Gordian knots, and having enough political capital to say "no" to people (most people around couldn't say "no" to save their life; I can and do, but nobody listens to me). The latter promptly booted the previous team off the project.
Within four months, we had the new app up and running and in production. I'm told that it has one of the best issue track records in our area, including never having had a sev 1 outage. On the other hand, I have heard some of its current maintainers complain about it not being "up to todays standards" because we deliberately kept it simple rather than adopting a bunch of complexity for resume-padding reasons.
No, you shouldn't be surprised about this, it's natural that smaller dev teams are actually faster. This is Mythical Man-Month.
But the best way to do this is (and the way consistent with this thread's narrative) is to to develop the final system before you tell the CEO. Oh, and best to have a supervisor for you who does the telling.
Old and well maintained software can be reliable and secure, it just rate to encounter it. Maintenance is underappreciated. People don't get rises and promotions for successful maintenance of an old system. But they get it for new projects even if this project is rewriting of an old system in a new language/framework (even if a rewrite introduces new bugs, vulnerabilities and drops some old features).
So if an organization has money to spare, the software will be re-written every several years to flow the fashion and if doesn't have money security will suffer too.
In theory you can totally add those protections per application but the effort of doing that, maintaining the knowledge required per application or team and keeping on top of new research, is likely higher than just moving to a new framework which has in-built protection.
Also you have to consider developer availability. At 19 years since it was deprecated, there is a smaller pool of people who are skilled at maintaining that codebase, and the group of people who can do that, and keep on top of web application security attacks is even smaller.
Though Classic ASP was released much earlier in 1996 and I don't know if SQL libraries offered parameter binding and template engine - escaping of string in template variables.
I started in security in 2000, as an analyst for an org using classic ASP. maintaining security was a pain.
I then started as a pentester in ~2005 and what I can tell you is, in my experience, classic ASP applications rarely had good protections against injection attacks (e.g. XSS, SQLi) for precisely the reason that the framework did not protect against it, leaving developers to make sure they had routines to canonicalise/sanitize/parameterize input correclty, and also that they implemented them universally across all possible user inputs.
Whilst this isn't impossible, in my experience, it was rarely done perfectly.
In comparison, something like ASP.Net which had in-built protections available, at least had the chance of having good uniform protection.
The problem is that in most codebases I've seen, once you get to 19 years passed deprecated, it's not that it's a well maintained hardened environment. It's a poorly maintained environment that people don't want to clean up for fear they break something.