Report: Oracle's Click-to-Play Feature Greatly Improves Java Security
During last October's JavaOne conference, I attended the post-keynotes Java panel, where leaders of the various Java organizations within Oracle, along with JCP chairman Patrick Curran, lined up at one end of the press room to answer reporters' questions. It's a traditional part of the event, this panel, and I've been to more than a few of them, so you'd think I would have noticed immediately the dearth of questions about the security of Java, which had kicked off the Q&A for the last few years. But it was Henrik Stahl, vice presidentof product management in Oracle's Platform Group, who observed at the end of the discussion that there had been no security questions at all.
I mentioned this later to Mike Milinkovich, the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, who was on hand that day to lead a session. He was not surprised. "That's what happens when you have a squeaky clean year," he said.
I'm not sure I'd call 2014 "squeaky clean," but Java-based breaches -- not to mention headline -- were down last year. In fact, there were no major zero-day Java vulnerabilities discovered and exploited in the wild. Why? A new report released this week by HP Security Research offers at least part of the answer. The authors of "HP Cyber Risk Report 2015," (PDF) credited Oracle's click-to-play feature, introduced in 2014, for the improved security.
"Oracle introduced click-to-play as a security measure making the execution of unsigned Java more difficult," the report's authors wrote. "As a result we did not encounter any serious Java zero days in the malware space. Many Java vulnerabilities were logical or permission-based issues with a nearly 100 percent success rate. In 2014, even without Java vulnerabilities, we still saw high success rate exploits in other areas."
Click-to-play is the browser feature that blocks Java content by default. The Web page displays a blank space until the user clicks the box to enable that content. This seems to have mitigated the vulnerability of Java in the browser, which was largely the result of the way Oracle has bundled the Java browser extension with the Java runtime environment (JRE).
Among the exploits listed in the report's Top 10, none targeted Java, which had been one of the most commonly exploited targets in previous few years. "This may indicate that the security push, which caused delay in the release of Java 8, is getting some results," the researchers wrote, "although it may be too early to tell. It may also be a consequence of browser vendors blocking outdated Java plugins by default, making the platform a less attractive target for attackers."
The success of the click-to-play feature at thwarting Java attacks was "the one exception" in an "inherently vulnerable" environment in which systems are built on decades-old code, and patches are inadequately deployed, the researchers concluded. And that success may be responsible for shifting attacker focus to vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Adobe Flash.
"Attackers continue to leverage well-known techniques to successfully compromise systems and networks," the researchers wrote. "Many client and server app vulnerabilities exploited in 2014 took advantage of codes written many years back -- some are even decades old."
The most common exploit the researchers saw last year was CVE-2010-2568 (CVE: "Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures"), which accounted for just over a third of all discovered exploits. According to the CVE site, this vulnerability affects the Windows Shell in XP SP3, Server 2003 SP2, Vista SP1 and SP2, Server 2008 SP2 and R2, and Windows 7. It allows local users or remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted .LNK or a .PIF shortcut file, which is not properly handled during icon display in Windows Explorer. Six Java exploits were listed, accounting for a total of 28 percent.
There's much more in this report -- things like a deep-dive into highly successful vulnerabilities, an awesome glossary, and a lot of revealing statistics. The report is free for download. I also recommend the HP Security Research Blog.
Posted by John K. Waters on February 24, 2015