RE: Credentials held unencrypted in memory during runtime

CERT provides secure coding best practices:
https://www.securecoding.cert.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=637

Chapter 8 covers "Memory Management", with the following relevant topics:

MEM03-CPP. Clear sensitive information stored in returned reusable resources
MEM06-CPP. Ensure that sensitive data is not written out to disk

Complete with good/bad coding examples.

Rationalizing why something is/is not a security issue by scenario examples or logic of "it would just be easier for an attacker to do X" misses the point and does not foster secure software. Lots of really smart people have chewed on these problems for years and secure coding best practices have been established as a result.
If TortoiseSVN doesn't want to follow secure coding best practices so be it, but trying to justify these decisions by arguing it's not a security issue runs counter to CERT and many other industry recognized security experts.

Is the argument that secure coding best practices are wrong?
Why not be safe rather than sorry?

(BTW, "pervasive memory scraping" is the term being used these days -- apparently the SANS Institute identified this as the top threat for this year. A good Google search will turn up lots of references, and one counter-measure in a defense-in-depth strategy is to ensure in-memory sensitive data is handled appropriately...)

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Received on 2011-04-12 15:26:11 CEST