Bryan here. The security community has been buzzing since SANS and MITRE’s joint announcement earlier this month of their list of the Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors. Now, I don’t want to get into a debate in this blog about whether this new list will become the new de facto standard for analyzing security vulnerabilities (or indeed, whether it already has become the new standard). Instead, I’d like to present an overview of how the Microsoft SDL maps to the CWE/SANS list, just like we did with the SDL/OWASP Top Ten mapping last May.
Michael and I have written up a detailed item-by-item analysis of the SDL coverage of the Top 25 and posted it on the microsoft.com Download Center. We believe that the results tend to endorse the validity of the SDL, given that the Top 25 were developed independently and the SDL does quite well at enabling us to root them out of the software we deliver. We encourage you to download the analysis white paper and make use of it in your own organization: we’ve published guidance around every manual process described in the paper, and we’ve also made many of the same SDL-required security tools that we use internally free for you to download and use as well.
Below is a summary of how the SDL maps to the Top 25 vulnerabilities; as you can see the SDL covers every one of the Top 25 vulnerabilities, and all but two of them (race conditions and download of code without integrity check) are covered by multiple SDL requirements. I’m also particularly pleased to note that we have tools to prevent or detect more than 75% of the Top 25.
CWE
Title
Education?
Manual Process?
Tools?
Threat Model?
20
Improper Input Validation
Y
116
Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output
89
Failure to Preserve SQL Query Structure (aka SQL Injection)
79
Failure to Preserve Web Page Structure (aka Cross-Site Scripting)
78
Failure to Preserve OS Command Structure (aka OS Command Injection)
319
Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
352
Cross-site Request Forgery (aka CSRF)
362
Race Condition
209
Error Message Information Leak
119
Failure to Constrain Memory Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer
642
External Control of Critical State Data
73
External Control of File Name or Path
426
Untrusted Search Path
94
Failure to Control Generation of Code (aka 'Code Injection')
494
Download of Code Without Integrity Check
404
Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
665
Improper Initialization
682
Incorrect Calculation
285
Improper Access Control (Authorization)
327
Use of a Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm
259
Hard-Coded Password
732
Insecure Permission Assignment for Critical Resource
330
Use of Insufficiently Random Values
250
Execution with Unnecessary Privileges
602
Client-Side Enforcement of Server-Side Security
Gary McGraw, CTO at Cigital, recently interviewed Steve Lipner as Gary kicked off his "Reality Check Security Podcast" series. I think podcasts like this are important because they help learn from others' experiences.
For those that don't know Gary, he's been involved in software security for years, and has written plenty of excellent books on the subject. He also plays a mean fiddle.
Finally, Cigital is a member of the Microsoft SDL Pro Network.