The issue of maintenance, updates and software fixing actually deserves a few more considerations.

Since a long time, security experts have been saying that software updates are essential for the security of operating systems and applications. A long time ago instead, software updates were considered only when new features or features’ updates were needed. It took a long time but by now, at least for mainstream applications, periodic (eg. daily, weekly, monthly etc.) software updates, in particular for security issues, are standard.

Still there are many unresolved issues. First of all there are still systems which are not updated regularly, among them there are some “mission critical” ICT systems considered so critical that updates are not applied for fear of breaking the system or interrupting the service, and, at the opposite end, some consumer embedded systems considered to be of so little value that a security update feature has been dropped altogether. (In my previous post I briefly mentioned these two classes of systems.)

But there are two other aspects that must be considered. The first one is the time that it takes between the release of the security patch or update by the software vendor or maintainer, and its installation on the system. As in the case of both Bash Shellshock and OpenSSL Heartbleed, patches and updates have been released out of the normal schedule, and they should have been applied “immediately”. To apply “immediately” a patch released out of the normal schedule, one should at least have a way:

1. to know “immediately” that the patch has been released
2. to obtain and apply “immediately” the patch to the systems.

Obviously to do this one needs to have some established emergency security procedure in place. One cannot rely on someone reading/hearing the news somewhere and deciding by herself to act as a consequence.

The second aspect, again also relevant in the two incidents mentioned before, is what to do in the time between the announcement of the existence of the bug and the availability of the patch, what is called a 0-day vulnerability. Again there must be some well established emergency security procedure which indicates what to do. The minimum is to assess what is the security risk of running the systems un-patched, to investigate if there are other countermeasures (like signatures for IPS or other network filters, detailed monitoring etc.), and in the extreme case just to turn off the service until the patch is available.

It seems easy, but it is not yet easy to put in practice.