The researcher disclosed the bug one week before Microsoft is scheduled to patch it. I'm sure MS isn't thrilled, but they did drag their feet:
"I decided to release this bug one week before the patch is released, because it is not the first time Microsoft sits on my bugs. I'm doing free work here with them (I'm not paid in anyways for that) with the goal of helping their users. When they sit on a bug like this one, they're not helping their users but doing marketing damage control, and opportunistic patch release."
The researcher sounds really petty. They're patching it, but not on this person's schedule so he's causing microsoft and USERS problems they didn't have before.
If they weren't patching, I'd understand, but this isn't the right way to get attention in my book.
There are very competent people on this planet who make a very good buck out of zero-days (not to mention remotely control users' machines, and steal data). IMO the researcher didn't want that particular vulnerability to dwell on somebody's todo list for several years.
It definitely puts pressure on MS but I don't think that's bad. Corporations have demonstrated time and again that the only way to get them to move is a PR hype.
If they want researchers to stop doing preliminary public disclosures, they should prioritize security higher than PR damage control.
> IMO the researcher didn't want that particular vulnerability to dwell on somebody's todo list for several years.
Except the researcher themselves knew it was one more week, and not "several years." You cannot claim they were ignorant if their own statements shows that they were not.
Well, if MS claims the patch is coming in one week, one approach might be to wait one week and then release the exploit. Works out regardless of the accuracy of the claim.
Patch Tuesday is the second Tuesday of each month. Unless something odd happens, you can count on the fix being out a week from tomorrow. There's also a justification for this — they sat on it because they were releasing other SMB-related patches on the February Patch Tuesday. I don't really think anybody can reasonably argue that MS would not release the fix next week. But that's not the point.
This bug was reported in December, and there's no reason to believe that they didn't have a patch in time for inclusion in the January Patch Tuesday. They chose to withhold that patch due to non-technical, apparently PR-related, reasons, and the researcher in question is complaining that this has happened before with other bugs reported by him. That's a pretty cavalier approach to security, and early disclosure is the only way the researcher can punish MS for it.
Sure, if MS promised to issue a patch in January, then go ahead and release info when they don't. But it's weird to wait for a February patch, and then release a week early.
Like I'm more or less ok with "full disclosure upon discovery" as a consistent release policy. Or "wait for a patch up to 90 days". Or several other models. "Wait until one week before patch" is an oddball policy which seems like it has all the cons and none of the pros of other models.
Releasing a week early makes for a smallish window during which the exploit is unpatched and in the wild, while still being impactful enough that it forces Microsoft to react to it somehow. I'm not sure it's the Right Way of Doing Things, but it's defensible.
They chose to withhold that patch due to non-technical, apparently PR-related, reasons
Do you know that, it is it just speculation? I could speculate that there were technical reasons around having two smb patchsets to test in various combinations vs bundling into one.
The cynical answer would be: try harder Microsoft, and do not let your customers remain vulnerable simply because you can't test two patch-sets at the same time.
If 'trying harder' is not possible due to financial reasons, then the only recourse is disclosure.
This bug will be fixed now, but certainly could have been excluded again because of technical reasons---they're publishing a separate set of patches on SMB again soon, maybe those patches have higher priority to people on the Microsoft org-chart than the patches for this bug.
When companies aren't given hard deadlines for disclosure, they'll just delay forever because there is always a technical reason that you can't do enough testing to satisfy yourself, while doing X, Y, Z which are added to your schedule for political/financial reasons.
Why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt when their press release contains actual lies? When someone lies to me everything they say becomes suspect. It's the standard we expect individuals to live up to, why do you want to give more slack to a company?
Further, so what? There's always some problem. They should either suck it up and work harder or come clean and give users actual choice in how to respond.
Why do they deserve the benefit of the doubt when their press release contains actual lies?
I didn't say they do. I responding to the parent post on the bit I quoted ("They chose..."). If it's irrelevant under other precondition, take it up with the parent post.
«He told Ars that the software maker initially planned to patch the flaw in December but later decided to delay the release until February so it could be included with other planned SMB fixes.» «it is not the first time Microsoft sits on my bugs»
So they already reneged once on this bug which fits into a previous pattern. If that is right putting pressure on them sounds entirely justified and not at all petty.
Meh. The bug requires you to connect Windows to a malicious SMB server.
Now that everybody knows that, if anybody is really concerned, they can stop SMB connections from LAN to WAN by blocking TCP 139, 445 and UDP 137, 138.
Wait, when did everyone become aware of that? I'm willing to bet the vast majority of windows users have no idea. _Some_ people only know _because_ he released the bug.
I'm now aware, and I was able to block connections in my organizations firewall that protects a few thousand users. Not every single user needs to be aware for it to be effective.
Yes, but the point is you wouldn't be aware unless he released the info. He gave individual users an option to protect themselves in the absence of a patch from MS.
You're absolutely right! The researcher acted in a questionably ethical manner here by waiting to disclose the vulnerability. The only ethical approach is full and immediate public disclosure.
Full and immediate public disclosure seems irresponsible and counterproductive IMO.
The last thing I'd want as a developer or a manager is to wake up in the morning with a PR shit storm and angry users on my hands because some inane script kiddie found it appropriate to disclose a zero day without reaching out to me or my team first. Sure, some other guy might know about or find the vulnerability and exploit it by the time a patch comes out; it's guaranteed that they will if you release a 0day.
We can discuss all we want on what a reasonable delay to release a patch might be, but absolutely not on the notion that immediate public disclosure is the right thing to do. It wastes everyone' time, disrupts workflows, puts fellow developers, their managers, and their users under intense pressure and stress, all so some kid can enjoy an ego trip. To me it just seems gross and childish.
The last thing I'd want as a developer or manager is to wake up in the morning with a PR shitstorm and enraged users because I shipped some vuln.
What full disclosure does it put everyone on the same footing. Developers, users, and attackers all at once. It reduces the window for potential abuse as much as possible. As policy, it sharpens the incentives to be very careful in your development processes and improve security measures.
It's worth considering that this is actually a long-running historical debate. One of the commonly espoused positions is yours - contact devs privately, give them a reasonable amount of time to patch, then disclose after a patch. After all, it minimizes disruption to production planning and workflows and still protects users. Seems reasonable right? Everyone wins!
Catch is, it's historically been abused by companies more interested in their production schedules than the security of their users. Maybe that's not you! In which case, well done, you're completely awesome! However, this has historically turned out to be rather a lot of software companies.
Full disclosure, the policy I advocated for, seeks to short-circuit this. It offers maximum information to a maximum of people in a minimum of time. It pressures companies to fix their products rapidly and to ship better products in the first place. It also offers users the ability to be aware that they may be under attack and protect themselves in lieu of a patch which may or may not ever come into being.
At the end of the day, the question is this: who are you protecting with your disclosure policy? I would suggest that the policy you have advanced seeks to balance the interests of users and of developers/managers. It's perhaps worth considering that your users may prefer a policy that aligns your incentives more with theirs. Perhaps your customers might prefer policies that encourage a proactive stance.
> It reduces the window for potential abuse as much as possible.
Immediate public disclosure to everyone, including blackhats, reduces the window for potential abuse as much as possible? Cynical answer: You are technically correct … It reduces the window of potential abuse to 0. While at the same time it opens the window for actual (guaranteed) abuse.
Generally speaking, immediate public disclosure is harmful to the very people you want to protect with the disclosure because they are left defenseless to hordes of intruders that, before the disclosure, probably didn’t even know about the issue. By “put[ting] everyone on the same footing”, the developers scramble to release something, anything, that kind of works to mitigate the situation which causes the software quality to suffer.
Even high quality software with careful developers will occasionally suffer from security vulnerabilities. You put every company and individual under general suspicion of misusing responsible disclosure, and by immediate public disclosure you want to get back at them for having a security issue in their software. You don’t care about protecting anyone.
The key difference between before and after disclosure is that people are vulnerable and ignorant before, with no chance whatsoever to defend themselves. After disclosure, people are vulnerable and warned, with the potential to defend themselves. In both scenarios, there is the very real threat of attackers.
I care about protecting people. I hold the idiosyncratic belief that keeping secrets from the vulnerable does not make them safer. I understand that many people do not agree with this.
> After disclosure, people are vulnerable and warned, with the potential to defend themselves.
Only in your wildest wet dreams are people able to defend themselves. You maybe, but certainly not random Joe down the street. And that's assuming Joe reads tech news to begin with.
The only people who this significantly affects in practice are a) the black hats who now have a window of opportunity to do mischief, and - much more importantly - b) the devs who end up needing to patch software under intense pressure.
But anyway, as you pointed out, it's been an ongoing debate for decades.
It also affects professionals who read CVEs and posts to full-disclosures to learn that what mitigations are available. Those tend to be the people responsible for protecting whole networks, who are capable of deploying Snort signatures or roping off vulnerable boxes. Or just people who appreciate knowing that their servers might be vulnerable. I've been in a couple of those positions.
The standing assumption in security is that for any given vuln, the black hats already know. This is a defensive assumption, stemming both from the general unknowability of the subject and the frequent occurrences of it actually being demonstrably true. It's the devs who need to patch software under intense pressure, and the product organization that sets their priorities, and the growth hackers who just want things shipped now whose priorities could perhaps stand to gain from a little adjustment.
I've worked places where engineers would have welcomed that sort of outside pressure.
To put it another way, I do not believe that keeping people ignorant keeps them safe. I fully understand why some people might prefer to believe otherwise.
If we're gonna be brutally realistic about human nature: most people won't budge if they are comfortable and maintain an illusion that things are under control, unless there's external pressure. I have no links to scientific studies but IMO that's common sense and is widely observable.
I too find the actions of the researcher slightly questionable but he himself said this isn't the first time and he's sick of important fixes being delayed.
You know what? It worked. You might disagree with the approach, but what about the results? MS is absolutely gonna release a fix now, there's no denying that.
There's no excuse for them to delay patching it without explaining to him in detail why there's a delay, and even if he had been a dick about it, they should've had a very good explanation for the public.
They had neither and that is unacceptable.
Reason being: Even if he doesn't publicize it, someone else might know and be using it without MS knowledge. Anytime you become aware of an exploit one must act as if it already is being abused.
What is the thresshold where you do decide to release the bug description?
Microsoft has sat on bugs for years saying they were working on them. Do you disclose after a week? A Month? a Year?
If it were a company or team with a solid history of patching swiftly I could see trusting them. But this is Microsoft, they have the resources to fix bugs. They chose an OS design that sacrificed security for other things. Worst, they chose to betray trust in the past. Someday Microsoft might earn that trust back, but they are a long way off from earning mine.
If I informed them of the bug and it wasn't fixed in the next patch, then I would need solid evidence they are working on it or I release the exploit. If it were a group I trusted I would follow up several times until I lost faith in them.
I don't know, I guess that really depends on the frequency and context of 'not the first time Microsoft sits on one of my bugs'. I'm not a security researcher but I suppose if I was and Microsoft was sitting on my bugs pretty frequently and they were really serious I might just give them a shot across the bows one fine day.
And when Microsoft do cut QA short people complain that Microsoft doesn't care about quality/is using retail as a beta test. It is really a no-win situation to be honest.
The correct way to do this is immediately release a bulletin to admins to block the affected service, then push a patch to disable it, then push a patch to fix and reenable it when they feel ready.
It's only unwinable because Microsoft refuses to take a PR/cash hit of telling people to stop using something while it's broken.
We live in the age of security researcher marketing. No one wants to be the anonymous guy who submitted sometnhing. They want to be the star and have all these articles written about them and all this attention. The easiest, of course unethical, way to get this is to release something before its patched regardless of what the OEM is doing in regards to patch scheduling. To release one week before patch Tuesday is a pretty big middle-finger to a lot of people for no other reason than what looks like personal gain or spite.
I imagine this decision is going to bring him a lot of negative attention. I wouldn't hire someone who 0-day'd a security bug a week before its patch out of spite.
Thankfully, connecting to a random smb is a fairly edge case. I believe most firewalls block smb to/from the internet and most consumer ISPs block the protocol outright. This probably won't have much of a real world impact.
> He told Ars that the software maker initially planned to patch the flaw in December but later decided to delay the release until February so it could be included with other planned SMB fixes.
No, it was only a 0day before he made it public. He is merely providing security-conscious persons information and a way to defend themselves from an exploit which MS has not fixed. He is turning a 0day into a known vuln.
You know who sounds really petty though? The whiners taking Microsoft's side despite them missing the bug in the first place and sleeping on the report, and now attacking the person who reported it.
> They're patching it, but not on this person's schedule so he's causing microsoft and USERS problems they didn't have before.
Not in the slightest. You do not understand how the internet works. The vulnerable systems were vulnerable yesterday, and are vulnerable today because MS didn't think it was worth hurrying to patch them. Users' harm was caused by Microsoft who gave them a broken product, and by any hypothetical hackers, not by a security researcher telling the public what the hackers probably already knew.
Microsoft had a chance to release an emergency bulletin as soon as they were informed of the vuln, with mitigation steps. (ie, block SMB, etc) They didn't, and in fact spent time recommending useless things (Win10, Edge) that only serve to slander competitors by implication, and pimp more of their products.
Microsoft needs the understand that the new timeframe for releasing mitigations, if not patches, is closer to 24h than 24 days. But even if they hit that metric, they don't deserve any fanfare until they do it without lying or misdirecting.
Downvoters: RTFA - The Microsoft reports are intentionally misleading wrt. steps customers need to follow to be safe, and they claim to be better that their competitors (Apple, etc) in this regard despite obvious and consistent proof to the contrary. Microsoft is responding to security concerns with marketing speak, and they're knowingly setting their customers up for catastrophic data loss or hacks by recommending useless fixes.
"I decided to release this bug one week before the patch is released, because it is not the first time Microsoft sits on my bugs. I'm doing free work here with them (I'm not paid in anyways for that) with the goal of helping their users. When they sit on a bug like this one, they're not helping their users but doing marketing damage control, and opportunistic patch release."