Underhanded Code and Automation

So, software is eating the world—and you thought this was going to make things simpler, right? If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough. I should trademark that or something! 🙂 While a lot of folks are thinking about code quality and supply chain are common concerns, there are a lot of little “side trails” organizations do not tend to think about. One such was recently covered in a paper on underhanded code, which is code designed to pass a standard review which be used to harm the system later on. For instance, you might see at some spot—

if (buffer_size=REALLYLONGDECLAREDVARIABLENAMEHERE) {
/* do some stuff here */
} /* end of if */

Can you spot what the problem might be? In C, the = is different than the ==. Which should it really be here? Even astute reviewers can easily miss this kind of detail—not least because it could be an intentional construction. Using a strongly typed language can help prevent this kind of thing, like Rust (listen to this episode of the Hedge for more information on Rust), but nothing beats having really good code formatting rules, even if they are apparently arbitrary, for catching these things.

The paper above lists these—

• Use syntax highlighting and typefaces that clearly distinguish characters. You should be able to easily tell the difference between a lowercase l and a 1.
• Require all comments to be on separate lines. This is actually pretty hard in C, however.
• Prettify code into a standard format not under the attacker’s control.
• Use compiler warnings in static analysis.
• Forbid unneeded dangerous constructions
• Use runtime memory corruption detection
• Use fuzzing
• Watch your test coverage

Not all of these are directly applicable for the network engineer dealing with automation, but they do provide some good pointers, or places to start. A few more…

Yoda assignments are named after Yoda’s constant placement of the subject after the verb (or in a split infinitive)—”succeed you will…” It’s not technically wrong in terms of grammar, but it is just hard enough to understand that it makes you listen carefully and think a bit harder. In software development, the variable taking the assignment should be on the left, and the thing being assigned should be on the right. Reversing these is a Yoda assignment; it’s technically correct, but it’s harder to read.

Arbitrary standardization is useful when there are many options that ultimately result in the same outcome. Don’t let options proliferate just because you can.

Use macros!

There are probably plenty more, but this is an area where we really are not paying attention right now.