Re: Installation and setup of secure applications

[Andreas Saurwein <saurwein () uniwares com>]

At 20/1/2004 13:28 Tuesday, you wrote:

Plus, I am fully aware that many people don't even agree that this is part of
software development per se.


I'm on your side.


How much involvement do you believe that software developers should have in
installing and configuring their applications in their host environments?


Most developers I have come to know so far, hardly master the language they 
are programming in, less the operating system their programs will run on.


And, focusing on Windows NT (2000, XP, 2003), security is not an easy task. 
How many programmers can you name who know what is an ACL, ACE, or process 
token? How many of these few know how to atually use it in their applications?


Even if companies would start to pay more attention to "security related 
knowledge" when they look for employees, they still have to deal with the 
fact that writting a secure program is a much bigger effort.


Another hurdle is the fact that nowadays everybody wants to be "portable" 
and support at least two completely different operating systems. This means 
you have to write double code, wrapper libraries, have more people who know 
more things.



Should applications be designed and implemented such that they make extensive
use of their host OS security features?  Note that I'm not saying that they
should _rely_ on it, but should the developers make more use of the
capabilities available to them (sometimes at the cost of easy portability) as
one of many layers of defense?  If so, how much is {enough|too much}?


Yes they should be designed to make extensive use of the OS and its 
features. The few that do it already are successful applications.
There is just the big danger to "rely" on the security of the OS without 
knowing it and thus unknowingly adding securityholes to the application.


As for the setup progress... I think anyone who every used any of the 
popular setup programs is aware that they have absolutly no support for any 
kind of security. They hardly support proper installation/deinstallation.
So you end up writting all this security related setup code yourself. Which 
brings us back to the points raised before.


cheers
Andreas