Security News > 2006 > January > Q&A: Oracle exec says users get enough flaw info

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/holes/story/0,10801,107928,00.html By Jaikumar Vijayan JANUARY 20, 2006 COMPUTERWORLD As senior director of security assurance at Oracle Corp., Duncan Harris is in charge of the company's vulnerability remediation processes. He also manages a team of "ethical hackers" at Oracle's Reading, England, software lab whose job is to find flaws in the vendor's products. Following Oracle's latest quarterly patch release this week (see "Oracle releases patches for 82 flaws" [1]), Harris spoke with Computerworld about the company's patching policies and its relationship with the IT security community. Oracle just announced patches for 82 vulnerabilities. Why so many? Oracle doesn't shy away from fixing flaws publicly through our Critical Patch Updates. We don't hide our internally discovered vulnerabilities. When we discover something internally, we still mention it in our Critical Patch Updates. Other vendors, as the security community knows, may be doing silent fixes. It is something we don't believe in. That is part of the explanation for the large number of vulnerabilities. Certainly, there is also much more attention being paid to Oracle for whatever reason. Critics say Oracle doesn't share enough vulnerability information for users to make proper risk assessments. Why don't you disclose more details? The comparison is quite clearly with Microsoft's monthly updates. You have to remember that Windows updates are clearly aimed at client machines. Oracle has client-side products, some of which are quite important, but our fundamental focus is on the server side. Comparing this to the monthly patching that Microsoft does is like comparing apples and oranges. It really is quite different to have a systems administrator patch a server-side system and a small client. Why do you think the security community is so unhappy with Oracle? In terms of working with the security community, we work very well with those that are happy to abide by the security vulnerability handling processes, which we have published on our Web site for anyone to see. There are others who for their own good reasons choose to pressure us and put our customers at risk by a partial or early or zero-day disclosure of vulnerabilities in Oracle products. I assume that is part of their marketing method to potentially increase their consulting business. Our "Unbreakable" [advertising] campaign was also a bit of a red flag, which may be another reason why there is so much attention being paid to Oracle by security researchers. How long does it take for Oracle to fix flaws? It absolutely depends on their severity. The Critical Patch Update that we [just] issued -- one of the vulnerabilities there was reported to Oracle in November. There is another that was reported to Oracle 800-plus days ago by external researchers. That is not something we are proud of, [but] it points to the fact that we fix vulnerabilities in order of severity. We are making substantial efforts to refine the infrastructure such that reports of vulnerabilities being more than two years old should be a thing of the past. Perhaps in a year's time it will be. But I do anticipate that for the remainder of 2006, you will see security researchers declaring that vulnerabilities they reported two years ago have just been fixed. How many of your vulnerabilities are discovered internally? If you look at all of the vulnerabilities that my security group handles, we discover about 75% of them. About 10% is reported to us by our customers. The remainder comes to us through external security researchers. How has your vulnerability remediation processes evolved over the past few years? We have seen a substantial move starting over four or five years ago whereby real-world hackers and security researchers started turning their attention more and more to applications that sit on top of the operating system. There has been a substantial targeting of database and applications. About March 2001, Oracle was tracking exactly nine security vulnerabilities across our whole product stack. Eighteen months later, in September 2002, we were tracking 62. We've had to substantially change parts of our infrastructure to cope with the challenges. [1] http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,107825,00.html _________________________________ InfoSec News v2.0 - Coming Soon! http://www.infosecnews.org

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