This paper is a personal contribution, not the official opinion of any specific group. The paper attempts to cover a broad range of subjects at an overview level. It provides references to treatments in greater detail, but the author will appreciate receiving suggestions for additional references to provide broader coverage. Whenever anyone undertakes a broad overview beyond ones own specialty, there will probably be a large number of embarrassing oversights and mistakes, but that may be an inevitable price of the necessary breadth of coverage.
Information-technology standards are the domain of ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1). Within that domain, programming languages fall within Standing Committee 22 (SC22). There is no direct responsibility for the areas of Security, Safety, and Quality in the charter of SC22, but programming languages (and their standardized libraries) play an important role (both positively and negatively) in all three areas. Therefore, SC22 has created Other Working Group: Vulnerabilities (OWGV), to produce a Technical Report entitled Guidance to Avoiding Vulnerabilities in Programming Languages through Language Selection and Use.
This informal paper is primarily addressed to the programming language standards committees (especially WG14 and WG21), and of course to the SC22 members, who initiated OWGV.
Where no citation is given, this author must take responsibility for the terminology. Further warning: these personal opinions do not mean that a consensus view has been adopted yet by OWGV.
Implementation-defined behavior behavior, for a well-formed program construct and correct data, that depends on the implementation and that each implementation shall document.
Unspecified behavior behavior, for a well-formed program construct and correct data, that depends on the implementation.
Undefined behavior behavior, such as might arise upon use of an erroneous program construct or erroneous data, for which the standard imposes no requirements.
Extension syntax or semantics which goes beyond the language standard.
Static analysis analysis of program properties which does not require execution of the program; as used here, it includes link-time analysis.
Dynamic analysis analysis of program properties which requires execution of the program.
Safety-critical software (herein abbreviated to the category of safety) software for applications where failure can cause very serious consequences such as human injury or death. In this category, a failure is called a hazard. Closely related categories include high-integrity software, predictable execution, and reliability.
Software quality
(herein abbreviated to the category of
quality) the degree to which software implements
the needs described by its specification.
In this category, a failure is called a bug.
Closely related categories
include conformance.
Software security (herein abbreviated to the category of security) the aspect of software which is defined by a security policy (including factors such as confidentiality, authentication, non-repudiation, etc. [SC27/WG2]). One important distinction between safety and security is that security must address the possibility of an attacker, who is assumed to be malevolent [Seacord]. In this category, a failure is called a weakness (see the Common Weakness Enumeration or CWE [Martin]). If a weakness in a particular application is such that an attacker could exploit it, then that weakness is called a vulnerability in that application. Closely related categories include trustworthiness.
The term software assurance (SwA) includes predictable execution, conformance, and trustworthiness, that is, all three categories above safety, quality, and security. [Jarzombek]
Remote content executable material that is external to the current application, e.g. a program invoked by the system() function.
Security-critical behavior (herein abbreviated to critical behavior, or CB) a behavior which when executed can directly cause a weakness, e.g. any execution of the system() function.
Critical undefined behavior (herein
abbreviated
A vulnerability in a programming language is (in terms of the categories above) a feature of that language which can cause, or is strongly correlated with, a weakness, a hazard, or a bug. (OWGV may be nearing a consensus on something like this definition; note that it is distinct from vulnerability in an application, as described above.)
In the past, many control systems were constrained to meet the requirements of safety, but not security requirements. Then, some of these systems were connected to the internet, e.g. so they can be monitored remotely, but now those connections provide the entry for a malevolent attacker. (See [Jarzombek].) Therefore, the categories of systems that require security analysis may be vastly expanded in the near term (see [Clarke] for novelistically-dramatized illustrations).
Applications in most programming languages
can be vulnerable to execution of remote content remote
site inclusion, cross-site scripting, etc. but the APIs
that access the remote content are a known set.
In other words, execution of remote content is a critical
behavior (CB), but not a critical undefined behavior (
Each occurrence of implementation-defined behavior, unspecified behavior, or undefined behavior in a languages standard will typically increase the cost of any tool for that language, because the validation tool will require implementation-specific configuration. However, the costs of validation tools do not by themselves cause vulnerabilities and therefore those costs are outside the scope of the OWGV. Furthermore, it has been reported that non-standard implementation-specific extensions contribute an even greater factor in validation tool costs [Engler], and non-standard extensions are clearly outside the scope of OWGV.
Guidelines to achieve safety, security and quality will typically define some subset of the full language and are usually enforced by some variety of static analysis tools. Such guidelines are typically designed to prevent some (hopefully large) class of problems; in this sense, they produce an incremental, or heuristic, level of improvement. In many cases, the cost-benefit for such guidelines and associated tools is significantly favorable, especially if the alternative is status-quo, more-of-the-same. For influential recent examples, see [Kass] and [Koo], and also [CERT-SCS].
In another example of the subsetting-plus-tool
approach, the JSF++ standard [JSF++]
prevents occurrence of the buffer-overflow
We could contrast the subsetting-plus-tool
approach with the full set approach, which will typically
require even larger tools to avoid subsetting the language.
For one example in the full set category, the
vtable exploit
There is a specific set of CUBs included
in the CWE, as follows: Various categories
of buffer overflow (121, 122, 124) and out-of-bounds indexing
(129); (signed) integer wraparound (128), truncation (197), and
overflow (190); indirecting a null pointer (476); double free
(415); using pointer after free (416); and non-reentrant functions
re-invoked by signal handler (179). (For
the full list of weaknesses, see [CWE];
each definition has its own page, so http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/121.html
provides definition
121, etc.)
To summarize: we propose to divide security-critical software components into three sub-categories:
Categories 1 and 2 are probably beyond the scope of programming-language experts, as they involve security policy and software/systems engineering methodology. Presumably, such components must be quality-tested to a quality level which is the highest level supported by the project, but in no case less than an organization-wide definition of minimal quality testing e.g. a component which invokes system() must ensure that the program name passed to the function has been validated according to the projects security policy.
However, category 3 requires specialized
expertise in the programming languages specification and
implementation, to understand how a
We close with a brief disclosure of Plum Halls commercial interests: we are working on methods to attack the problems of security, safety and quality at the language-foundation level by preventing UBs (especially CUBs) with definitive methods, rather than the incremental or heuristic methods described above. A combination of methods are required, at compile-time, link-time, and (to a surprisingly small extent) at run-time [Plum#1].
Conformance test suites for C, C++, Java, and C# are developed and distributed by Plum Hall. These suites (especially the C suite) are sometimes used in the process of qualifying compilers for use in safety-critical applications [Plum#2].
Projects with the highest requirements for
safety and quality can make use of commercially-available compiler-testing
services which maintain huge databases of regression tests for
error-free code generation. A service
such as the Compiler Qualification Service (CQS) from Japan Novel
has for many years been routinely used by the large producers
of embedded systems in
[SC27/WG2] Terms of reference for JTC1 SC27/WG2 (Cryptography and security mechanisms), from http://www.nia.din.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=5182
[Black] Paul E. Black et.
al. Proceedings
of the Static Analysis
[
[Clarke] Richard A. Clarke, Breakpoint. Penguin Group, 2007. http://www.amazon.com/Breakpoint-Richard-Clarke/dp/0399153780
[CWE] Common Weakness Enumeration. http://cwe.mitre.org/
[Engler] Keynote
Presentation
[Jarzombek] OWGV-N0018
Joe Jarzombek, US Department of Homeland Security, "Considerations
in Advancing the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,"
presented at Meeting #1 of OWGV,
[JSF++] JOINT STRIKE
FIGHTER
[Kass] Michael Kass et.
al. Source
Code Security Analysis Tool Functional Specification Version 1.0,
NIST Draft Special Publication 500-268,
[Koo] Michael Koo et. al. Source Code Security Analysis Tool Test Plan; Draft 1 for public comment of Version 1.0. http://samate.nist.gov/docs/source_code_security_analysis_test_plan_03_09_07.pdf.
[Martin] Robert
A. Martin, The MITRE Corporation, "The Common Weakness Enumeration
Initiative," presented at Meeting #1 of OWGV,
[OWGV] ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/OWG:Vulnerabilities http://www.aitcnet.org/isai/
[
[
[
[Quinlan] Dan Quinlan, et.al. Support for Whole-Program Analysis and the Verification of the One-Definition Rule in C++, in [Black] pp. 27-35.
[Seacord] Robert C. Seacord, Secure Coding in C and C++. Addison-Wesley, 2006. http://www.amazon.com/Secure-Coding-C%2B%2B-Software-Engineering/dp/0321335724/