Yes that's all it takes. No code reviews, security review, integration testing, quality assurance testing, compatibility testing, or validation. None of the work on the installer or updater. No release notes or other communication to the community.
Just a couple lines of code. Easily done before morning coffee.
If this was a small startup, I can absolutely see those being hurdles. This is Microsoft on a product they've had for 20+ years that is a major part of their platform - those things should be mostly automated and well oiled machines.
A mature enterprise level company has no excuses for "QA is hard!" or "We can't validate patches!" for a product they sell. I don't expect them to get this out in ten minutes, but they should be able to manage a patch in 24 - 72 hours for a fairly critical and relatively easily solved security bug.
I would guess I averaged about 10 lines a month on my project that had been around for decades. Making even slight tweaks required dozens of meetings, design discussions, functional and performance testing, etc. etc. It took an eternity.
The bike shed won't get painted to a new color just because a the new middle manager asked for it.
“If this was a small startup I couldn’t see those being hurdles but at a behemoth like MS with an almost 2 decade old product I can.”
In a large enterprise the process isn't too hard, it's just complicated.
I was neither justifying or admonishing MS for this issue, I was just responding to a gross trivialization of the process that I found offensive.
Let's see. How many microsoft employees would it take to change a lightbulb? ;-)
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ericlippert/2003/10/28/how-...
Highlight:
> That initial five minutes of dev time translates into many person-weeks of work and enormous costs
This is just to add an interesting article on top of the sibling comment from the MS employee; nothing's easy in the engineering of a large product.
Valid counter-criticism of the "just a couple of lines of code" line generally, but four months is a long time since disclosure and that is a lot of morning coffees.
According to the article, Microsoft is dedicating resources to a new client which won't exhibit the flaw.
So I guess that means either they examined the flaw and determined it wasn't a high enough risk to warrant patching, or they don't care. Dealer's choice I guess.
Maybe the number of people using Skype these days is insignificant? I tried to use it about a year ago and noped the hell away after 5 minutes.
There have been a lot of write-ups on this topic on Raymond Chen's blog, here is a good example:
The link you provide as an example suggests that this sort of thing might be done to facilitate testing, but again, that doesn't seem to be a compelling reason for not fixing it now - 'ship what you test' is a good principle, but it does not preempt 'fix known security holes.'
There was a month when 50%+ of the traffic on full-disclosure@ was just one person repeatedly announcing newly discovered problems with various Windows software that all involved search-path problems ("DLL hijacking" or related issues).
There's at least one author who is super keen on using the phrase "binary planting" to refer to a similar class of attacks.
I doubt this was intentional at first, but the fact that they don't want to fix it is very fishy.
To anyone going "but what if they replace the binary!" well then they've already gotten past the air-tight hatchway.
Good question. Almost every time I want to use some new security tool - like say AppLocker - Skype craps out on me, because it seems to be so badly programmed, and it's all over the place in Windows. It's why I stopped using the native app completely, and only use the web version whenever I still need to use Skype.
%SYSTEMROOT%/Temp doesn't seem to be user-readable at all, so I'm having trouble understanding how you write anything there without already having escalated permissions.
If anyone is wondering, it's a little bit tricky to check because without the read permission, Windows Explorer can't see what the permissions are.
Edit: @jwilk in the comments here pointed to a better article about the security vulnerability [1]. Based on the technical details, there seems to be no reason why Microsoft could not issue a very quick fix loading the DLL from the secure location.
Important quote in my eyes:
“The engineers provided me with an update on this case. They've reviewed the code and were able to reproduce the issue, but have determined that the fix will be implemented in a newer version of the product rather than a security update. The team is planning on shipping a newer version of the client, and this current version will slowly be deprecated. The installer would need a large code revision to prevent DLL injection, but all resources have been put toward development of the new client.”
In other words, it seems Microsoft/Skype doesn’t care about security at all. A couple of lines to fix the bug, in theory, but Microsoft is too busy to do it. Doesn’t make sense, unless a new version would have been released shortly, but it has been 4 months between that email and disclosure.
[1]: http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2018/Feb/33