This document summarizes a presentation about the future of web application security. It discusses how security practitioners and developers have skewed views of security. It notes how compliance, processes, people, and tools need to change to improve security. Developers will not prioritize security without requirements to do so. Tools and frameworks need to make security the default instead of something that must be explicitly added.

1. The Thing That Should Not Be
A glimpse into the dark future of
web application security
Bruno Morisson <bm@integrity.pt> IBWAS’10

2. About me
• Consultant & Partner - INTEGRITY, Consulting &
Advisory
• ~12 years in Information Security
• CISSP-ISSMP/CISA/ISO27001 Lead Auditor
• Background as a Linux/Unix sysadmin
• Background as a C developer
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3. Warning!
This is all rather unscientific!
Really.
Consider yourself warned.
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4. If wishes were ponies…
…security would be inherent to the applications.
…there would be no (security) bugs.
…we would all get along just fine.
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5. This is how they see us
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6. This is how we see them
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7. We’re all skewed!
Security practitioners have a skewed vision of reality.
We’re usually what regular people would call paranoid.
Developers have a skewed vision of reality.
They usually don’t care about (or understand) security
issues.
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8. We’re all skewed!
We believe everyone should care about security at least as
much as we do.
WE’RE WRONG!
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9. We’re all skewed!
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10. Security Mindset
“Good engineering involves thinking about how things
can be made to work; the security mindset involves
thinking about how things can be made to fail.”
Bruce Schneier
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11. “We have a firewall on our internets”
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12. “We use usernames and passwords to access our web
application”
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13. SSL
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14. Proof
Source: Cenzic Web Application Security Trends Report – Q1-Q2,
2010, Cenzic Inc.
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15. More Proof
Source: Cenzic Web Application Security Trends Report – Q1-Q2,
2010, Cenzic Inc.
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16. Even more proof
Source: Verizon Data Breach Report 2010
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17. OWASP Top Ten
• Injection
• XSS
• Broken Authentication and Session Management
• Insecure Direct Object Reference
• CSRF
• Security Misconfiguration
• Insecure Cryptographic Storage
• Failure to Restrict URL Access
• Insufficient Transport Layer Protection
• Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards
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18. How are we solving this ?
The typical approach is forcing developers to
solve all of these problems.
But the question is: Who are the developers ? Do
they understand the problem ?
Most of them know nothing about security.
Some of them know little about web development.
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20. Render Unto Caesar…
Security practitioners are not web developers
Why should web developers be security practitioners ?
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21. Flashback
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22. Let’s party like it’s 1999
Most security vulnerabilities had to do with services:
• HTTP (IIS, apache)
• FTP (wu-ftpd, IIS)
• POP3 (Qpopper)
• SMTP (Sendmail)
• DNS (Bind)
• Telnet
• SSH
• …
Buffer Overflows, Format Strings, Integer Overflows were the flavor
of the decade…
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23. What happened ?
Security vulnerabilities had global impact.
Few companies/groups produced that software: Microsoft, Apache,
SUN, Sendmail, Linux community/vendors.
Some built security into the process (Secure SDL), mainly Microsoft.
Tools started having security features (from bounds checking, to
static and dynamic code analysis)
Operating Systems security was improved (no ASLR or DEP back
then)
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24. Back to the future
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25. And now ?
Impact of vulnerabilities is limited to that company (or set of
companies that use that particular software)
Anyone develops a Web Application.
Myriad of development languages.
Point & Click frameworks that automagically create code…
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26. Looking into the future…
Let’s break this down into 4 areas:
• Compliance
• Processes
• People
• Tools
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27. Compliance
Unless there’s a business requirement, don’t
expect anyone to implement security.
Ex: PCI-DSS, Data Privacy Laws, …
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28. Processes
If security is done ad-hoc, it will most surely
fail.
• Embed security in the SDL
• Create internal processes for dealing
specifically with security (e.g. risk
assessment, engineering, testing, etc)
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30. People
Developers won’t build security into the apps,
unless it’s a requirement…
They need to:
understand the security impact.
know how to solve the problem.
know how to use the tools…
Developers won’t become security gurus.
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31. Tools
People fail.
Tools/frameworks should become more idiot-
proof.
Have security built in by default. Force
insecurity to be explicit.
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33. Thank You!"
Q&A?
Bruno Morisson
CISSP-ISSMP, CISA, ISO27001LA
[email]: bm@integrity.pt
[work]: http://www.integrity.pt/
[fun]: http://genhex.org/~mori/
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