Security of Third Party Applications
Secunia collect some very interesting information about the patch state of Windows systems. Their results from 20,000 machines published yesterday were that over 98% of PCs were insecure, having at least one out-of-date application installed. Actually this isn't surprising and is exactly what I'd expect; it's all down to third party applications. Let's say you're browsing the web. It's more than likely that at some point you'll want to view some PDF files, watch some Flash content, or play a...Enterprise Linux 5.1 to 5.2 risk report
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 was released last week, around 6 months since the release of 5.1 in November 2007. So let's use this opportunity to take a quick look back over the vulnerabilities and security updates we've made in that time, specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server. The graph below shows the total number of security updates issued for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server starting at 5.1 up to and including the 5.2 release, broken down by severity. I've split it into two...XSS vs Remote Execution of Arbitrary Code
Last Friday, just as I was finishing work for the day, an email appeared in my mailbox from the UK CPNI announcing a public remote code execution flaw in Apache on HP-UX. As Chair of the Apache Software Foundation Security Team I knew there were no outstanding remote code execution flaws in Apache HTTP server (in fact we've not had a remote code execution flaw for many years) so I was expecting to invoke the Red Hat Critical Action Plan which would have meant a rather long weekend for me, my...Read more than the Headline
Secunia released a security summary report for 2007 and surprisingly gave a count for Red Hat for the year at over 600 vulnerabilities. I had no idea how they got to this number, it certainly doesn't match our own publicly available metrics at https://www.redhat.com/security/data/metrics. Using our public tool, for every Red Hat product and service, for 2007 we issued 306 advisories to fix 404 vulnerabilities. Of those 404 vulnerabilities 41 were critical (on the scale used by Microsoft and...Enterprise Linux 5.0 to 5.1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 was released today, around 8 months since the release of 5.0 in March 2007. So let's use this opportunity to take a quick look back over the vulnerabilities and security updates we've made in that time, specifically for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server. The graph below shows the total number of security updates issued for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server up to and including the 5.1 release, broken down by severity. I've split it into two columns, one for the...Third-party severity ratings
The National Vulnerability Database provides a public severity rating for all CVE named vulnerabilities, "Low" "Medium" and "High", which they generate automatically based on the CVSS score their analysts calculate for each issue. I've been interested for some time to see how well those map to the severity ratings that Red Hat give to issues. We use the same ratings and methodology as Microsoft and others use, assigning "Critical" for things that have the ability to be remotely exploited...Three months of Enterprise Linux 5
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released back in March 2007 so let's take a quick look back over the first three months of security updates to the Server distribution: We released updates to ten packages on the day we shipped the product. These is because we freeze packages some months before releasing the product (more information about this policy). Only one of those updates was rated critical, an update to Firefox. For the three months following release we shipped 31 more advisories to...Predictable security severities
Red Hat has shipped products with randomization, stack protection, and other security mechanisms turned on by default since 2003. Vista recently shipped with similar protections and I read today an article about how the Microsoft Security Response Team were not treating Vista any differently when rating the severity of security issues. The Red Hat Security Response team use a similar guide for classification and I thought it would be worth clarifying how we handle this very situation. We...New Red Hat Signing Keys
We're changing the package signing key we use for all new Red Hat products. Since 1999, all RPM packages in Red Hat products have been gpg signed by the master key "Red Hat, Inc <security@redhat.com>" (keyid DB42A60E). I'll call this the legacy signing key for the rest of this article. This signature is one of two security mechanisms we use to ensure that customers can trust the installation of packages and their updates. The other is that the update client, up2date, checks the SSL...Hip to be... OVAL
Earlier this month Red Hat started publishing Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) definitions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux security issues and today we obtained official compatibility. But what are these definitions, how do you use them, and why are they important? One of the goals of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to maintain backward compatibility of the packages we ship where possible. This goal means making sure that when we release security updates to fix vulnerabilities that...Another "Days of Risk" study
Today a "Role Comparison Report" from Security Innovation was published which has a headline that we fix security issues less than half as fast as Microsoft. Red Hat was not given an opportunity to examine the "Role Comparison Report" or it's data in advance of publication and we believe there to be inaccuracies in the published "days of risk" metrics. These metrics are significantly different from our own findings based on data sets made publicly available by our Security Response Team....Survivability
In the Red Hat earnings call last night, Matthew Szulik mentioned some statistics on the survivability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. In August 2004, SANS Internet Storm Center published statistics on the survival time of Windows by looking at the average time between probes/worms that could affect an unpatched system. The findings showed that it would take only 20 minutes on average for a machine to be compromised remotely, less than the time it would take to download all the updates to...
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