Developers who wish to defend their code should be aware of Advanced Persistent Exploitability (APE). It’s a situation where broken code remains broken due to incomplete security improvements.

La Planète des Singes

Code has errors. Writing has errors. Consider the pervasiveness of spellcheckers and how often the red squiggle complains about a misspelling in as common an activity as composing email.

Mistakes happen. They’re a natural consequence of writing, whether code, blog, email, or book. The danger here is that mistakes in code lead to vulns that can be exploited.

Sometimes coding errors arise from a stubborn refusal to acknowledge fundamental principles, as seen in the Advanced Persistent Ignorance that lets SQL injection persist more than a decade after programming languages first provided countermeasures. Anyone with sqlmap can trivially exploit that ancient vuln by now without bothering to know how they’re doing so.

Other coding errors stem from misdiagnosing a vuln’s fundamental cause – the fix addresses an exploit example as opposed to addressing the underlying issue. This failure becomes more stark when the attacker just tweaks an exploit payload in order to compromise the vuln again.

We’ll use the following PHP snippet as an example. It has an obvious flaw in the arg parameter:

<?php
$arg = $_GET['arg'];
$r = exec('/bin/ls ' . $arg);
?>

Confronted with an exploit that contains a semi-colon to execute an arbitrary command, a dev might choose to apply input validation. Doing so isn’t necessarily wrong, but it’s potentially incomplete.

Unfortunately, it may also be a first step on the dangerous path of the ”Clever Factor”. In the following example, the dev intended to allow only values that contained alpha characters.

<?php
$arg = $_GET['arg'];
# did one better than escapeshellarg
if(preg_match('/[a-zA-Z]+/', $arg)) {
    $r = exec('/bin/ls ' . $arg);
}
?>

As a first offense, the regex should have been anchored to match the complete input string, such as /^[a-zA-Z]+$/ or /\A[a-z][A-Z]+\Z/.

That mistake alone should worry us about the dev’s understanding of the problem. But let’s continue the exercise with three questions:

  • Is the intention clear?
  • Is it resilient?
  • Is it maintainable?

This developer declared they “did one better” than the documented solution by restricting input to mixed-case letters. One possible interpretation is that they only expected directories with mixed-case alpha names. A subsequent dev may point out the need to review directories that include numbers or a dot (.) and, as a consequence, relax the regex. That change might still be in the spirit of the validation approach (after all, it’s restricting input to expectations), but if the regex changes to where it allows a space or shell metacharacters, then it’ll be exploited. Again.

This leads to resilience against code churn. The initial code might be clear to someone who understands the regex to be an input filter (albeit an incorrect one in its first incarnation). But the regex’s security requirements are ambiguous enough that someone else may mistakenly change it to allow metacharacters or introduce a typo that weakens it.

Additionally, what kind of unit tests accompanied the original version? Merely some strings of known directories and a few negative tests with ./ and .. in the path? None of those tests would have demonstrated the vulnerability or conveyed the intended security aspect of the regex.

Code must be maintained over time. In the PHP example, the point of validation is right next to the point of usage (the source and sink in SAST terms). Think of this as the spatial version of the time of check to time of use flaw.

In more complex code, especially long-lived code and projects with multiple committers, the validation check could easily drift further and further from the location where its argument is used. This dilutes the original dev’s intention since someone else may not realize the validation context and re-taint or otherwise misuse the parameter – such as using string concatenation with other input values.

In this scenario, a secure solution isn’t even difficult. PHP’s documentation gives clear, prominent warnings about how to secure calls to the entire family of exec-style commands.

$r = exec('/bin/ls ' . escapeshellarg($arg));

The recommended solution has favorable attributes:

  • Clear intent – It escapes shell arguments passed to a command.
  • Resilient – The PHP function will handle all shell metacharacters, not to mention the character encoding like UTF-8.
  • Easy to maintain – Whatever manipulation the $arg parameter suffers throughout the code, it will be properly secured at its point of usage.

It also requires less typing than the back-and-forth of multiple bug comments required to explain the pitfalls of regexes and the necessity of robust defenses. Securing code against one exploit is not the same as securing it against an entire vuln class.

There are many examples of this “cleverness” phenomenon, from string-matching alert to dodge XSS payloads to renaming files to avoid exploitation.

What does the future hold for programmers?

Pierre Boule’s vacationing astronauts perhaps summarized it best in the closing chapter of La Planète des Singes:

Des hommes raisonnables ? … Non, ce n’est pas possible

May your interplanetary voyages lead to less strange worlds.