look who's talking about whitelists now

thanks to an email from james manning i got to see a company called signacert congratulating themselves for being part of the future of security technology...

you see, signacert produces what could be classified as a whitelist type of technology and symantec's canadian VP and GM, michael murphy, was quoted in the media as saying that whitelisting is the future of security technology...

now before i go further i'll make an obligatory disclaimer (because people have gotten the wrong idea in the past) that i am not anti-whitelist, i use whitelisting techniques, i think they can be a worthy addition to a security strategy, but unlike the hypesters i don't sweep their limitations under the carpet...

when a representative from a company as well known and respected as symantec says the type of technology your company happens to produce is the future of security, i suppose it's only natural to want to congratulate yourselves for being on the vanguard - but don't be so quick to pat yourselves on the back that you choose to highlight the words of someone saying foolish things as you'll only wind up looking foolish yourselves...

you see, michael murphy made a grievous error in his representation of scale leading to media statements like this:

The number of malicious software attacks, including viruses, Trojans, worms and spam, is rising exponentially, dwarfing the number of new benevolent programs being developed, making it increasingly difficult for security firms to keep up.

and this:

With more than 600,000 attacks catalogued – 212,000 of them added since January of this year – “we’re approaching a tipping point,” where there just won’t be room in antivirus databases for all of them, Murphy said. But legitimate applications are about the same in number as they were when only about 15,000 attacks had been documented.

that the signacert blogger wyatt compounded by characterizing the blacklist problem as infinite and the whitelist problem as finite... you cannot favourably compare the scale of the set of all known good programs to that of the set of all known bad programs unless your only intention is to say 'my database is bigger'... the set of good programs is orders of magnitude larger and growing faster than the set of bad programs, a fact that researchers from at least one whitelist vendor apparently concede...

if you're going to use the argument of scale against traditional blacklists then you cannot present a centralized whitelist as a viable alternative... the only conventional whitelist whose scale is more manageable than traditional blacklists is the one where the user him/herself decides what goes on the list (with all the potential for wrong decisions and the security implications thereof)... with whitelists you can have a manageable scale OR accuracy enough to protect users from their own bad decisions, but you can't have both...

this is something i would kinda hope the folks at signacert would already know, and i definitely expected the folks at symantec would know this - but the again, considering their CEO made the ridiculous claim that the problem of worms and viruses was solved, perhaps i should have known better to expect that from them... that or i should just know better than to listen to people in non-technical positions talking about technical things...