[This was originally published on the OSVDB blog.]
The Vulnerability Disclosure Game: Are We More Secure?
http://www2.csoonline.com/exclusives/column.html?CID=28072
By Marcus J. Ranum
Do you remember the original premise of the disclosure game? By publicly announcing vulnerabilities in products we will force the vendors to be more responsive in fixing them, and security will be better. Remember that one? Tell me, dear reader, after 10 years of flash-alerts, rushed patch cycles and zero-day attacks, do you think security has gotten better?
I know that Microsoft, Oracle and others have spent huge amounts of money improving the security of their software. Never mind the fact that 99.99 percent of the computer users in the world would rather they had spent that money making their software cheaper or faster, I suppose it’s a great thing to see that software security is being taken seriously. Security has gotten more expensive. But do you think security has gotten better?
It’s a tad ironic that the only way we could ever hope to answer this question is if the vendors practiced full-disclosure! The only way this question could be answered is to see a list of all the vulnerabilities that vendors like Microsoft or Oracle have found and fixed through in-house auditing. If they have found and fixed 1,000 vulnerabilities compared to the 250 publicly disclosed (arbitrary numbers), then yes, security has gotten better. Right? If software is shipping with less vulnerabilities per lines of code, then security has improved, and the “we’ll force your hand” crowd had something to do with it.
If twenty years of brutal full disclosure really did teach them the importance of security by forcing them to spend considerable money on said security, then didn’t those wily “we’ll force your hand” folks in the 90’s do what they claimed, although a little differently than planned?