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Date: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 20:20:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: "David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@...eeler.com>
To: "oss-security" <oss-security@...ts.openwall.com>
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Shellshock and beyond
On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 15:48:10 -0700, Tim <tim-security@...tinelchicken.org> wrote:
> To me, it's not about anticipating the next bug, it is about providing
> guidance to developers who care only so much about security so that we
> can avoid some bugs that we didn't anticipate.
Agree!
> PS- I'm of two minds on this. More recently I've decided that educating
> developers isn't nearly as effective as providing developers APIs and
> development environments that make it unlikely they will shoot
> themselves in the foot. It's not that developers can't be trained,
> it is that they will probably only be developers for a handful of
> years and move on to other roles later, with a whole new batch of
> green coders coming in to fill their positions. Anyway...
I don't think there's an either/or here. Yes, if you *can* change the
tools/libraries/development environments to prevent attacks, or reduce
their effectiveness, you *should*.
That said, a fool with a tool is still a fool. There's no way to create
a development environment that can't be misused. Thus, you'll always need
to educate and train developers for situations the system cannot prevent.
In the long term I think this will be easier, because novice developers will be able
to learn from the many experts around them. Today, the number of
developers who understand security issues is a vanishingly small percentage
of the total, so the novice has no one to learn from.
--- David A. Wheeler
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