Paper Info
Title
Blood in the Water - Are there Honeymoon Effects Outside Software?
Abstract
1 Honeymoons In a previous paper at this workshop (and in a forthcoming full paper), we observed that software systems enjoy a security “honeymoon period” in the early stages of their life-cycles. Attackers take considerably longer to make their first discoveries of exploitable flaws in software systems than they do to discover flaws as systems mature. This is true even though the first flaws, presumably, actually represent the easiest bugs to find and even though the more mature systems tend to be more intrinsically robust. The software honeymoon effect is surprisingly pronounced and pervasive, occurring in virtually every kind of widely used software system, whether open or closed source and whether an operating system, word processor, graphical rendering system, or web browser. While the length of the honeymoon varies, far more often than not, the time between the discovery of the first zero day attack and the second will be considerably shorter than between the initial release and the first. In a forthcoming paper, we will examine various factors that appear to influence the honeymoon, but the central observation is this: honeymoons occur because, at the early stages of a software system’s life, the attacker’s (lack of) familiarity with the system matters far more than the system’s intrinsic security properties. As the first flaws are discovered, the community of attackers develops more expertise and becomes more efficient at discovering flaws, even after the “low hanging fruit” bugs are patched and eliminated (when, we would otherwise expect, flaws should become harder to find). This leads us to wonder whether there are security honeymoons in other aspects of system security besides software itself. In particular, are there honeymoon effects in basic security protocols? Cryptographic algorithms? Security architectures? A cursory initial analysis suggests that the answer may be an emphatic “yes”. In the rest of this position paper, we examine representative examples in security protocols (Needham-Schroeder), crypto algorithms (hash functions), and security architecture (virtual machines), where an analysis of inter-arrival times of published papers discussing attacks suggests that honeymoons are enjoyed across a wide range of computer security defenses.
Year
Venue
Field
2010
Security Protocols Workshop
Internet privacy,Virtual machine,Cryptographic protocol,Cryptography,Computer security,Honeymoon,Software system,Software,Hash function,Engineering,Enterprise information security architecture
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
2
0.43
References 
Authors
7
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sandy Clark1708.29
matt blaze23189381.70
Jonathan M. Smith31689238.40