Dana Epp's ramblings at the Sanctuary: MSDN Webcast Review: Writing Secure Code


« MSDN Webcast Review: Essentials of Application Security \| Main \| Gates speaks about Security at RSA Conference » February 20, 2004 MSDN Webcast Review: Writing Secure Code - Threat Defense Where Joel's presentation on Wednesdays was based around people and practices, today's presentation was about technology. And just like Wednesday, he did an excellent job. He covered a great amount of information which basically breaks down to: Defending against memory issues (buffer overflows etc) Defending against arithmetic errors (integer over/underflows etc) Defending against cross-site scripting Depending against SQL injection Defending against canonicalization issues Defending against cryptography weaknesses Defending against unicode issues Defending against denial of service I was REALLY impressed with the demos. As an example, when I was first learning about buffer overflows years ago I wish I could have watched this presentation to learn how to trample the stack. In 3 minutes he did a better job than most online tutorials do. I was also happy to see him impliment safe string functions in <strsafe.h> for his examples. I use the same type in my kernel code using <ntstrsafe.h>, and appreciate that he is teaching developers to use it as part of their normal daily programming. Course he later then didn't follow his own advice and I saw a few strcpy, but I will chalk that up to demo purposes code only. I had to chuckle when he whipped out Windows calculator to show how integer overflows happen by typing in 65533 and then adding 10, switching to binary view and looking at the 17bit output. Neat prop to easily show how a simple math calc could cause a 16 bit integer overflow. I will need to use that trick when teaching others about this common coding problem. Overall, this was the best presentation of the whole week. Enjoyable, educational and well worth the time. You should consider watching the on-demand presentation which will be online in a few days here. In the meantime, I kept a copy of the power point slides of the presentation, which you can get here. Posted by SilverStr at February 20, 2004 12:28 PM \| TrackBack		My 5 Favorite Books Writing Secure Code Secure Programming Cookbook Security Engineering Secure Coding Principles & Practice Inside the Security Mind My 5 Favorite Papers Smashing the Stack Penetration Studies Covert Channel Analysis of Trusted Systems DoD Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria NSA Security Recommendation Guides Archives December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 GeoURL

February 20, 2004

MSDN Webcast Review: Writing Secure Code - Threat Defense