My fellow Princeton computer scientists Sudhakar Govindavajhala and Andrew Appel released an eye-opening report this week on access control problems in several popular applications.
In the old days, operating systems had simple access control mechanisms. In Unix, each file belonged to an owner and a (single) group of users. The owner had the option to give the other group members read and/or write permission, and the option to give everybody read and/or write permission. That was pretty much it.
Over time, things have gotten more complicated. Windows controls access to about fifteen types of objects, with about thirty different flavors of privileges that can each be granted or denied, for any object, to any user or group of users. Privileges can be managed with great precision. In theory, this lets people grant others the absolute minimum privileges they need to do their jobs, which is good security practice.
The downside of this complexity is that if the system is hard to understand, people will make mistakes. End users will surely make mistakes. But you might think that big software companies can manage this complexity and will get the security settings on their products right.
Which brings us to Sudhakar and Andrew’s research. They built an automated tool to analyze the access control settings on files, registry entries, and other objects on a Windows machine. The tool looks at the settings on the machine and applies a set of inference rules that encode the various ways a user could try to leverage his privileges improperly. For example, one rule says that if Alice has the privilege to modify a program, and Bob runs that program, then Alice can use any of Bob’s privileges. (She can do this by adding code to the program that does what she wants; when Bob runs the program, that code will run with Bob’s privileges.) The tool looks for privilege escalation attacks, or ways for a relatively unprivileged user to gain more privilege.
Sudhakar and Andrew ran the tool on professionally-managed Windows systems, and the results were sobering. Several popular applications, from companies like Adobe, AOL, Macromedia, and Microsoft, had misconfigured their access control in ways that allowed relatively unprivileged users – in some cases even the lowliest Guest account – to gain full control of the system.
Sudhakar and Andrew notified the affected vendors well before publishing the paper, and some of the problems they found have been patched. But some problems remain, and testing on new systems tends to find still more problems.
There are two lessons here. First, complicated security mechanisms lead to mistakes, even among relatively sophisticated software developers and companies, so the desire to control privileges precisely must be tempered by the virtue of simplicity. Second, if you’re going to have a complicated system, you probably need tools to help you figure out whether you’re using it safely.
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