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Opera Screeches at Mozilla Over Security Disclosure
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Monday February 18, @05:30PM
from the did-too-did-too dept.
from the did-too-did-too dept.
The Register is reporting that Mozilla's handling of a recent security exploit that affected both browsers has drawn an unhappy response from the Opera team. "Claudio Santambrogio, an Opera desktop developer, said the Mozilla team notified it of a security issue only a day before publishing an advisory. This gave the Norwegian software developers insufficient time to make an evaluation. [...] Santambrogio goes on to attack Mozilla's handling of the issue, arguing that it places Opera users at unnecessary risk."
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Your Rights Online: Opera Files EU Complaint Against Microsoft 455 comments
A number of readers have sent word about Opera Software ASA's antitrust complaint against Microsoft filed with the EU. Here is Opera's press release on the filing. The company wants the EU to "obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop" and to "require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities." The latter request makes this a case to watch. Will the Commissioner take the Acid2 test using IE7?
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All Things Considered... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All Things Considered... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All Things Considered... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All Things Considered... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:All Things Considered... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem was reported in November and fixed in early February.
Clearly, this is longer than one day.
Following the links in other posts to the mozilla issue tracking, it apparently took a while to fix.
The Opera guys would have liked a little more heads-up than one day, that's all, and that doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
Why all the high-and-mighty whining about 'if they really cared they would have fixed it'?
But you've missed the point... (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is suggesting that Mozilla should have delayed the fix (in order to hold back disclosure).
No, it would have been open and responsible and good if someone at Mozilla had thought to send an email to the Opera dev team a week or two ago saying:
We're fixing this exploit and think you should too.
Lots of Love,
Your secret big red monster Valentine.
No need to coordinate releases, but given that it took them a while to patch it, they should assume it'll take Opera a wee while to, and in the meantime they're leaving members of the public open to exploit.
Members of the public that used to use Firefox, but had to stop because Mozilla never fixed the memory leak and these users were using old machines (NT4, 32 meg RAM) and Open Source was supposed to mean never being obsolete, but it was only the non-open, free Opera browser that offered me a fully-patched, fully working browser.
HAL.
Re:All Things Considered... (Score:5, Insightful)
Full public disclosure of security bugs is generally considered the best way to get rapid fixes, and was the entire reason that places like BugTraq were founded. Following standard protocol is not an "attack". Vendors like to assume that you're just maliciously publishing things that would be no problem for their users until you did so. That's untrue.
Many bugs are well-known by black hats before they are found by the good guys. The safest thing for users is to assume that all severe bugs are well-known by the bad guys; when you disclose publically, you give the users a chance to protect themselves even if the software is not yet fixed. I'm not sure of the details of this exploit, but they may be able to protect themselves by limiting their surfing to well-known trusted sites, using an alternate browser, or turning off javascript or whatever. In other cases, some sort of external wrapper or proxy, tighter firewall rules, limiting access to DMZs, or other external steps can help prevent big security problems even without a full vendor fix available yet. It may even be worth it to some users just to forgo using an application for a few days until it's fixed.
Keeping silent until the vendor fixes things might just hurt the user's security situation, and certainly doesn't give the user the option of evaluating the risk and determining whether it's worth ignoring it or not--it forces them to make their usage decision without good information.
First... (Score:5, Funny)
I must be missing something here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I must be missing something here... (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm, there's something wrong with my sarcasmeter, it seems to be off the scale...
Re:I must be missing something here... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are you saying they should have released the fix and not mention what it was fixing - making it less likely people would apply the fix (plus it's open source not saying what it's fixing doesn't really keep it secret)?
Note that mozilla never mentioned Opera in the advisory anyway.
So what you're really saying is that Mozilla should pass all it's security fixes past Opera and IE and Safari and Konqueror and etc and not release them until all of those competitors have said "OK we've fixed it too".
Re:I must be missing something here... (Score:5, Insightful)
What I seem to get from the article is that a problem was found with Firefox, a fix was developed, and sometime prior to wrapping things up and deploying the fix, someone at Mozilla cared enough about the Internet environment we all share to do a quick regression test of Opera and when a problem was discovered, they PRIVATELY notified the Opera team.
What more could you ask for in the way of good citizenship?
the alternative being...? (Score:5, Insightful)
So keeping in the fix but not mentioning it in the release notes is out. What, then... not patch the flaw? Yeah. Right.
Opera might be a nifty browser, but apparently its authors are whiny bitches.
-=rsw
Streisand effect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:insightful?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oprah screeches at Godzilla over Security! (Score:5, Funny)
Crap article (Score:5, Insightful)
What they actually say is that they only had a day between notification and public disclosure. He's actually happy that Mozilla told them at all (hence the
I know Mozilla can do no wrong around here, but come on. Even the Mozilla devs would be happier getting more then one day before public disclosure of a security hole.
Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we all know already that disclosing the exploit is what brings the motivation to fix the hole.
The fact that they hid the bug reports at all should be enough to make the Opera kids grateful. After all, the Mozilla foundation operates in a pretty open and transparent fashion. The most honest (and destructive) way to go would be to never hide the bug reports.
But just to cover that old ground once again; when code changes, diffs happen automatically, and people know just precisely what changed. You can be sure that some of those people are malicious hackers looking for new ways to screw us all; there's good money in it. So by hiding the details of the exploit, you make sure that only the more skillful and malicious hackers have the exploit. Does that sound like a good idea to you?
Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, maybe not. You never know what the black hats already know; as a _user_ of ssh, if you disclose then I can take steps to limit damage--e.g. if I'm allowing full ssh access from outside my network (so that employees can work on the go), I may decide that the small benefit of doing so doesn't merit the risk. I'd rather turn off external ssh access for a few days until there's a fix.
When you hide the bug, you're hiding the ability for the users to take steps to protect themselves. You're forcing me to run with exposed systems for several days, and hoping that nobody "bad" knows about the bug. And you're making that judgement for your users rather than giving them the ability to make that call themselves; that's almost impossible given that the judgement might hinge heavily on whether I'm a large financial institute or a personal blog site that backs up daily. Just guessing that most users are happy with your security through obscurity is bound to be wrong in some cases, and those cases are likely to be some of the more financially significant ones.
(That's on top of the pressure to issue a real fix that full disclosure brings. Before things like BugTraq, it was common for people to sit on severe security bugs for literally _years_.)
Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, wait a second. If I am developing software package "A", and you develop competing package "B", and I find a hole in A and fix it, then just for laughs test to see if your product has the same hole and then I am kind enough to let you know that it does, then I announce that there is a hole in A, how am I responsible for the security of B at all? I've done you a favor by performing the test and giving you a heads up in the first place! I don't owe you anything.
I'm not sure what you think that has to do with anything. The Mozilla foundation didn't even announce to the public that there was a hole in Opera. The announcement is that there is a hole in Firefox. Why not try reading the advisory [mozilla.org]? There is NOTHING in there about Opera's susceptibility. You can't even view the bug report [mozilla.org] without a Mozilla bugzilla account with the proper access - I just logged into my account, and that doesn't include me, so it's not like even the report is generally available. Also, as per the advisory:
So it seems as though the Opera team has had some warning about problems similar to these in the past - along with the rest of the world.
Could I find and fix a bug in one of my pieces of software in a day? Probably, because all of them are very simple. If I had a development team and a security response team (they do have one of those, don't they?) then I bet "I" could find and fix known security problems in larger software products in a day, too.
Actually, a number of security holes in the Linux kernel have been found, announced, and fixed on the same day, now that I think of it.
Re:Sheesh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Could a coder please weigh in? (Score:5, Insightful)
For example, Opera is on a very differen timezone from the US, so initial publication may happen overnight from the POV of the Opera staff.
So then a day starts. When people start their day, they have a pile of things to respond to. The incoming messsages have to be triaged. Someone has to make a decision that this is important enough to escalate or take action on.
Then you have to find people with the capability to test whether its a real problem. This may take a couple hours. People go on vacation, get sick, etc.
Then you have to take the time to do the research, test whether this is a real problem, what versions it affects, etc. This takes a couple hours.
Then yuou have to stop a coder from working on something else, bring them up to speed on the problem (if its not the same person doing the testing), and get them started on the fix.
Then even with a fix you have to do regression tests. Not sure about Opera, but many mature apps have full test suites that can take a couple hours.
Then you have to write release notes, update the web page, do a new deploy package, and update your update servers to notify Opera that there is a new update.
As you can see, very little of the time here is coding.
Many large orgs have taken steps to create a 'short path of decision making' to streamline this process, always have one coder on call who can do this work, etc. But even then if anything is out of whack or the wrong person is sick or on vacation or on another urgent item, a whole day could pass without response.
Re:overreaction (Score:5, Interesting)
At the end of the day, Mozilla would have acted better by keeping the exploits closed for a few more days, as they would hope anyone else would do for them. By not doing so, they upset people, and others expressing that upset is perfectly understandable. There's no mass outcry at Opera, no press release or open letter saying the Mozilla team are dicks, there's a few words saying what happened and a couple of emoticons on a developer blog entry.