A string of new security alerts from Microsoft - four this week and
57 so far this year - has highlighted the company's challenge in
making its software secure.
In January, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill
Gates outlined a new "Trustworthy Computing Initiative", promising
to make security a top priority in Microsoft's software
development.
The company has long been criticised within the industry for
software development practices that seemed to put functionality and
convenience over security. Gates promised to reverse this with the
Trustworthy Computing Initiative.
This week Microsoft posted four security alerts concerning products
ranging from the company's core Windows operating system to a
software development kit (SDK) used to integrate Windows
applications into the UNIX operating system.
Among those alerts was a "critical" warning by Microsoft about the
Windows Help feature, which provides assistance to users with
questions about the operating system or specific applications.
It was discovered that a flaw in an ActiveX component used by
Windows HTML Help could allow a remote attacker to assume the role
of a user on a Windows machine.
Another posting issued a patch for the company's SQL Server
product, including fixes for four newly discovered vulnerabilities.
Commenting on the company's problems Rich Mogull, research director
at analyst group Gartner G2, said: "Microsoft has two major issues
to deal with. One is a cultural change. Innovation always took
precedence over other factors at Microsoft."
"The other issue is that [Microsoft] has a massive code base to
deal with. They have hundreds of products on the market and
millions of lines of code that they produced [prior to the
Trustworthy Computing Initiative]."
According to Mogull, Gartner is cautioning its customers about
continuing security problems in Microsoft's products, despite the
vendor's high profile emphasis on security.
Alan Paller, director of the SysAdmin, Audit, Networking and
Security [SANS] Institute agreed, and offered another possible
explanation for the high number of security flaws in Microsoft's
products: the comparatively young age of the products.
"We've seen that the number of [security] vulnerabilities in
software applications is related to two factors: the number of
lines of code and the newness of the product," said Paller.
"Apache isn't better than [Microsoft's] Internet Information
Server, it's just older and smaller, and that means fewer new
bugs," said Paller.
Gartner believes Microsoft needs to repeat the transformation of
the company that took place in the mid-1990s when it shifted from
being a desktop to an Internet-focused business. "Microsoft showed
strong leadership before getting on board with the Internet, but
this is an even bigger change. The Internet was about missing an
opportunity to innovate, whereas with security it's about changing
the face of the products that are out there," said Mogull.
"You can't develop as quickly, you can't release products with all
the features turned on, and you have to be more responsive to
security."
The Gartner analyst said users had a role to play in improving
software quality. "We need to have businesses exert market forces
and hold vendors liable for products."