It’s the second part of our talk with Daniil Svetlov at his radio show “Safe Environment” recorded 29.03.2017. In this part we talk about vulnerabilities in Linux and proprietary software, problems of patch an vulnerability management, and mention some related compliance requirements.
Video with manually transcribed Russian/English subtitles:
Previous part “Programmers are also people who also make mistakes”.
Taking about the fact that if you use fully updated software and do not use some self-written scripts, programs, then in theory everything will be safe.
But recently there was some statistics that critical vulnerabilities stay in Linux kernel about 7 years from the moment they appeared as a result of a programmer’s error till the moment they were found by our white hat researcher.
But it is not clear during these seven years if cybercriminals have found them, used them and how many systems were broken using this vulnerabilities. Not to mention that some special government services may use it too.
For example: The latest Linux kernel flaw (CVE-2017-2636), which existed in the Linux kernel for the past seven years, allows a local unprivileged user to gain root privileges on affected systems or cause a denial of service (system crash). The Hacker News
Well yes. There is such a statistic. There is also some criticism from proprietary software developers. Like you say “many eyes that looks in code will find any error.” This is a quote from Linus Torvalds, if I’m not mistaken.
Not exactly. Linus’s Law is a claim about software development, named in honor of Linus Torvalds and formulated by Eric S. Raymond in his essay and book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999).[1][2] The law states that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”; or more formally: “Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.” Wikipedia
But in practice, yes, there are really old vulnerabilities that come up after many many years. Because apparently they did not looking for this vulnerabilities well enough.But we still don’t have anything else, except Linux kernel. Therefore, they can say anything, but they will use it anyway. It is in the first place.