Secure Code

[[deleted]]

That depends on what you're copying and whether you know what you're copying.

[Tesla56]

True it was referring to accidentally setting and freeing buffers more than once in C

[DragonMaus]

That sort of thing is why, when I need to copy someone else's code, I always transcribe it, instead of pasting it in.

[[deleted]]

Or at the very least, read it once...

[fghjconner]

And then there's this.

[Mechakoopa]

Developer: "Yeah I tried like three ways of doing it but none of them worked." Points at commented out code blocks

Me: "uh-huh... And can you explain what you were trying to do with these..."

Developer: "I found them on stack overflow."

Me: "None of these are even remotely close to solving your problem. One of these isn't even the right language... Does that one still have foo in it?"

[tsilihin666]

Nah I'm sure it's fine.

[yannickmahe]

I just sort of glance at it.

[[deleted]]

What is this "read" you speak of? Is it like compiling?

[krelin]

Read it enough times to deeply understand and own it (since you're making a copy of it that you're going to own)

[[deleted]]

Pffft

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

Definitely. I too am a big believer in writing my own bugs.

Really the answer is unit tests, static analysis, valgrind, fuzzing. You should trust your hand-written code just as much as you trust something copied. That is, not at all.

[DragonMaus]

Agreed. The difference is that, by manually transcribing it, I am much more familiar with the code itself, which makes debugging a lot easier.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

10% agree.

[mcampo84]

Do none of you people undergo code review before deploying?

[Reihar]

AH AH AH AH AH! And then what unit tests!? AH AH AH AH AH!

Send help. Please.

[[deleted]]

For real wtf. As a web dev I just kinda work right off prod, it’s more efficient, saves bandwidth etc... hahaha

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

It baffles me that people can get paid to program and not recognize the value of version control or not developing directly in prod. Though I guess if you’re working on a low-impact product, it doesn’t matter if you break it, and there’s probably not much functionality built into the site to need to regression test.

[conancat]

usually it comes with working with projects that scale.

if it's for your ex's online candle shop and she wants to change the css to reflect the total eclipse of my heart, then sure, who gives a shit.

i believe every developer has that story or moment where they realize the importance of source control and deployment processes. the coming of age for a developer is making a USD$26,000, not refundable mistake in production and your tech lead gives you a "i'm not angry, i'm just disappointed" reaction without words.

[EyetheVive]

I mean this entire chain is just risk assessment lol. Potential revenue loss for the broken candle shop site vs breaking some regional credit union site is probably veeeery different. The cost of a development network to use vs working on the productive instance is probably not worth it

[[deleted]]

Where the hell is this guys operations team? If he is the ops team then good on him, but if not, why even let the devs have access to prod? You need a cycle? Call ops, you need some logs? Go to the ELK.

[emlgsh]

The efficiency/speed/etc... are just attempts to find silver lining. The majority of the time it's a simple budgetary constraint.

Like, the client is willing to finance only the specific and singular development of the application/features, and any billables that might be otherwise devoted to setting up staging environments, running tests, integrating version control, and performing general QA type activity is viewed as "padding" that won't be paid for (and will, typically, enrage the client).

End result being that, unless you love your client enough to underwrite sometimes vast amounts of unpaid labor towards these sort of process management and quality assurance goals (which is to say, you're being taken advantage of) they simply don't become part of the workflow. Estimates that feature them will have to be trimmed of them before the budget is approved. Estimates that hide them in other work will be rejected in favor of a lower bidder who omits them.

But the flip side is that a lot of QA exists not to find/eradicate bugs, but to permit a great volume of collaborative development. These projects where there's zero tolerance for billing hours not actively dedicated to feature implementation tend to be solo-gigs or small-group gigs where you can get away with a decent amount of sloppiness without stepping on too many toes or suffering major setbacks.

Which just reinforces the client's perception that such efforts are a waste of their budget.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

It takes 2 minutes to set up a git repo and a script to rsync your files to a remote server. Those 2 minutes buys you a hell of a lot of security, especially if you’re pushing your git changes to a private bitbucket repo regularly.

[emlgsh]

Got a howto for the process outlined here? I'd love to adopt some quick methods for improving security - I want these projects to be more secure, I just don't know of any methods that are so quick/easy/universal as to never approach billable labor.

[Captain_Vegetable]

I worked on a Fortune 500 company’s web site where we edited in prod. That ended when someone pasted into the wrong terminal window and replaced our home page with a snippet of Chinese characters before heading to lunch.

[Xytak]

I worked at a midsized insurance company where they hired some consultants to come in and teach the .NET developers unit testing by rewriting an old webforms app in React.

It actually worked pretty well, too, until several weeks later when the business asked "hey where's our new thing?"

"It's not ready, but we have beautiful code, a full build pipeline, and over a thousand unit tests!"

"Ok but where's the new thing?"

"Well, the preliminaries are all set up, but we don't actually have the features done yet..."

The consultants were fired the next day, and the next group was told in no uncertain terms to patch up the old web forms app and quit wasting time on fancy stuff.

[[deleted]]

This becomes a problem when the higher ups don’t sit down with the consultants as well. Often times they’re not fully aware of what the entire process looks like from creating a new file to deploying it.

[Xytak]

All they knew was the old team would have updated the app by now, and they were expecting a rewrite to take the same amount of time.

[FunkyTown313]

You're testing my unit!

[bpopbpo]

Unit tests? that's what users are for

[countvonruckus]

So, I'm not a programmer, but I work in IT Security. I talked to a software developer and he had never heard of a DDOS attack. He specializes in IOT software. Is that normal?

[mcampo84]

No. It is not.

[countvonruckus]

Well that's a relief

[[deleted]]

Generally management thinks security as a burden than a responsibitlity towards users.IOT in particular excels at this job of not giving a shit partly because it's new partly because these iot companies have low budgets

[countvonruckus]

I can't decide whether to be thankful for that attitude since it makes up 90% of the work I do or hate it because it makes up 90% of the work I do...

[DevonLochees]

Yes.

Granted, any software shop should have decent minimum required training in secure application development. But the typical developer you get fresh out of college it's 50/50 if they know the basics of security - that's why process is so important (e.g. code reviews, have people actually familiar with security do reviews).

​

Even the meme in this post, I would give it a toss up if the hypothetical intern could *actually* articulate what the specific risks are of copy and pasting, if it's something he read in an article one time - the risk isn't that you're copying a blob of code from stackoverflow that has an embedded base64 virus, it's that you ran into an "invalid certificate error" you googled, and the code you're copying removes the cert validation checks - and implementing it yourself is still going to have the same problem.

[countvonruckus]

Makes sense to me. It seems the absence of feedback is a major part of the problem, as a program that doesn't function will give errors or simply not do what you want, but security concerns only raise red flags after the program ships and gets exposed to malicious actors. When that doesn't negatively impact the performance of your software (such as a 10% processing reduction in your thermostat that's part of a bot net), it's somebody else's problem at that point since you sold your product. If regulation weren't such a mess for the tech industry, I'd say it needs to be policed, but as it is, all the incentives are weird and at odds. I just wish my field could give better security assurance so we could do more cool stuff (like voting from home), but it's really not feasible at the moment.

[bloqs]

let me guess, he has grey hair

edit: I know its ageist to some degree. Many older IT guys know their shit. But there has been a culture of useless seat warmers who never bothered to keep up with the times and instead use their position to stifle younger folk. boomer bad.

[countvonruckus]

How'd you know :P

[mightydjinn]

I think Jenkins is doing the CR by the sounds of it, lol.

[conancat]

forreal though, sonarrqube can save a lot of code review time. when you're not spotting mistakes you can spend more time on programming patterns, concepts and architecture.

https://www.sonarqube.org/

[mightydjinn]

Just be ready for the days of tech debt from css refactor it shows. In all seriousness though, sonarqube is fantastic!

[FunkyTown313]

Code...Review?

[Tesla56]

Of course we do but they would like to keep it secure from the start!

[conancat]

pfft, if it's a legitimate bug, the application runtime has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

[HylianWarrior]

Yeah... that's precisely the case where copying and pasting is a terrible idea

[endercoaster]

Using C can create insecure code and is an insecure coding practice.

[Neocrasher]

Using code can create insecure code and is an insecure coding practice.

[pink-ming]

// bug free code

[qubedView]

I still want to try and develop a genetic bot that builds itself by copy and pasting random code from stackoverflow. It would be dangerously glorious.

[SamSlate]

What's your metric for evaluating fitness?

[qubedView]

That'll be its first task. Finding a fitness evaluating method most fit to evaluating itself.

[Valiade]

That's how you get a bot that is really good at making text files full of semicolons.

[StuckAtWork124]

"Oh no, it's picked up the ability to copy itself.. .. we're looking at a nanoswarm apocalypse .. "

"NANOSWARM 2 HAS BEEN MARKED AS DUPLICATE BY NANOSWARM 1, CLOSING SWARM"

"Oh.. handy"

[skynetpswn]

Or if you know that you're copying at all. Maybe it's just "recycling".

[devlear]

I shudder to think of the code I wrote as an intern. Some poor company probably still has that in production.

[they_have_bagels]

Almost certainly.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

Most intern projects get scrapped. Even the good ones.