• Table of Contents • Index • Reviews • Reader Reviews • Errata by Mark G. Graff, Kenneth R. Van

• Table of Contents • Index • Reviews • Reader Reviews • Errata Secure Coding: Principles & Practices By Mark G. Graff, Kenneth R. van Wyk Publisher: O'Reilly Pub Date: June 2003 ISBN: 0-596-00242-4 Pages: 224 Slots: 1 Despite their myriad manifestations and different targets, nearly all attacks on computer systems have one fundamental cause: the code used to run far too many systems today is not secure. Flaws in its design, implementation, testing, and operations allow attackers all-too-easy access. Secure Coding: Principles & Practices looks at the problem of bad code in a new way. Packed with advice based on the authors' decades of experience in the computer security field, this concise and highly readable book explains why so much code today is filled with vulnerabilities, and tells readers what they must do to avoid writing code that can be exploited by attackers. • Table of Contents • Index • Reviews • Reader Reviews • Errata Secure Coding: Principles & Practices By Mark G. Graff, Kenneth R. van Wyk Publisher: O'Reilly Pub Date: June 2003 ISBN: 0-596-00242-4 Pages: 224 Slots: 1 Dedication Copyright Preface Objectives of This Book Structure of This Book What This Book Does Not Cover Conventions Used in This Book About the Examples Comments and Questions Acknowledgments Chapter 1. No Straight Thing Section 1.1. The Vulnerability Cycle Section 1.2. What Is an Attack? Section 1.3. Why Good People Write Bad Code Section 1.4. A Call to Arms Section 1.5. Summary Chapter 2. Architecture Section 2.1. What Is Security Architecture? Section 2.2. Principles of Security Architecture Section 2.3. Case Study: The Java Sandbox Section 2.4. Summary Chapter 3. Design Section 3.1. Why Does Good Design Matter? Section 3.2. Secure Design Steps Section 3.3. Special Design Issues Section 3.4. Bad Practices Section 3.5. Case Studies Section 3.6. Summary Chapter 4. Implementation Section 4.1. Good Practices Section 4.2. Bad Practices Section 4.3. Case Studies Section 4.4. Summary Chapter 5. Operations Section 5.1. Security Is Everybody's Problem Section 5.2. Good Practices Section 5.3. Bad Practices Section 5.4. Case Studies Section 5.5. Summary Chapter 6. Automation and Testing Section 6.1. Why Test? Section 6.2. Good General Practices Section 6.3. Good Practices Through the Lifecycle Section 6.4. Risk Assessment Methodologies Section 6.5. Case Studies Section 6.6. Summary Appendix A. Resources Section A.1. Books Section A.2. Papers and Articles Section A.3. Web Sites and Online Resources Section A.4. A Final Note on Resources Colophon Index Dedication We dedicate this work to our late friend, Jim Ellis. The world knew him as James T. Ellis (or [email protected]), coinventor of Usenet and one of the early members of the team at CERT/CC. He taught each of us a lot about secure coding, too. Working off the karmic debt we owe to this generous genius is one of our main motivations for writing this book. —Mark G. Graff and Kenneth R. van Wyk Copyright © 2003 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Printed in the United States of America. Published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472. O'Reilly & Associates books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. Online editions are also available for most titles (http://safari.oreilly.com). For more information, contact our corporate/institutional sales department: (800) 998-9938 or [email protected]. Nutshell Handbook, the Nutshell Handbook logo, and the O'Reilly logo are registered trademarks of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. The association between the image of a bridge and the topic of secure coding is a trademark of O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. Preface Learn all you can from the mistakes of others. You won't have time to make them all yourself. —Alfred P. Sheinwold, Author of Five Weeks to Winning Bridge What's so hard about writing secure code? These days, we consumers get a few dozen security patch notices per week from the world's software product vendors and watchdog teams such as the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (CERT/CC) at Carnegie Mellon University. Terms such as buffer overflow and race condition foam out of the bulletins like poisonous vapors. Explore those terms a bit, and you'll find whole categories of mistakes that are possible to make—easy, in fact—while developing a piece of software. In this book, we take you on a virtual tour through the software development process, from inception to deployment. We focus on four broad stages—initial architecture, detailed design, implementation ("coding"), and operation—and discuss the security issues a developer faces at each stage. We also explore, of course, many of the specific software flaws we've studied and cataloged during our careers. We present expert technical advice, too, based on our decades of hands-on experience and tempered by some of our more notable failures. And while we invite you to learn from our mistakes, we also invite you to think with us—think hard—about why security vulnerabilities exist to begin with and why they seem impossible to stamp out. In this book, we try to shed new light on the variety of reasons we can see. And we explain in detail how developers, compensating for these factors with appropriate techniques and processes, can produce software "just secure enough" for the needs of their enterprises, users, and customers. Objectives of This Book Our principal goal for this book is to articulate clearly the fundamental security concepts and practices that apply to each phase of software development. We hope to teach others to think about security vulnerabilities in a new way. In matters of style, we have sought to lay an exposition of ideas on a foundation of clear technical examples (and tried to keep it crisp enough that you could work through it over the course of several evenings). We want this book to be read. In the long run we hope to move the proverbial ball down the field so the next generation of engineers can make the score. After all, a secure Internet is probably not even a single-generation achievement! It may well be (for the same reason that the great Dr. Edgar [1] Dijkstra refused to work with any graduate student who had ever programmed in FORTRAN) that engineers with our experience are not qualified to design a secure Internet and its appliances from the ground up. [1] In addition to being the recipient of the 1972 ACM Turing Award, Dr. Dijkstra is one of the "grandfathers" of modern programming. A secure Internet is important. When miscreants perpetrate (and the media plays up) frequent virulent attacks, the result is undermined trust in our information systems. This effect decreases our willingness to deploy Internet technology in business processes and societal settings where it could be of use. We all are deprived of the potential benefits: a sounder economy, more humane prisons, safer roads, even an expansion of personal liberty (for liberty flows from security, as citizens who have little to fear grant their neighbors more freedom). Who can say which admirable human accomplishments are being held back, in part, by the unreliability and skeptical public perception of this technology? How about you, the reader? What, specifically, will this book help you do? Understand the holistic nature of an application's security All too often, software security is treated as prophylaxis. It's a test that gets run prior to the deployment of an application or the installation of a firewall that guards an application's environment. We believe that this notion is dangerously outdated. In its place we present a clearly articulated model and rationale as to why security needs to be an integral component of every phase of an application's life. Security, to be truly successful, can never be an add-on feature of software. Apply sound security practices Regardless of the process that you or your organization use in developing software, this book will help you better understand the security decisions and the ramifications of those decisions during the development of software. Learn about available resources In elucidating the practices we endorse and describe in this book, we suggest tools you can use to automate many of the actual steps you'll undertake in developing secure software. We talk about old-fashioned checklists, too, and make other procedural recommendations you will be able to apply immediately to software development in the real world. Structure of This Book This book consists of six chapters. [2] The organization of this book closely follows a typical software development process or methodology known as the waterfall development methodology or Systems Development Lifecycle Model (SDLC). [2] While numerous software development methodologies exist, we have chosen to follow the waterfall model because it is commonly found in practice. The organization scheme we've followed in this book could be adapted to most other development with minimal effort. Chapter 1 discusses the "catch and patch" cycle of security bugs, introduces some attack types and potential defenses against them, and talks about the technical, psychological, and real-world factors (such as market forces) that stack the odds against secure application development.

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