David Litchfield Quotations

On November 7 NGS alerted NISCC to the problem. It was hoped that due to the severity of the problem that Oracle would release a fix or a workaround for this in the January 2006 Critical Patch Update. They failed to do so.

Oracle still has not released an official patch, so it is still leaving its customers at risk. It is a trivial thing to fix. If the company is still working on it, I do not understand why.

SQL injection is probably today's biggest security issue. This problem has been known about for years, but seven out of ten Web applications are still vulnerable. I find it extremely frustrating.

Someone can come in off the Internet over the Web without a user ID or password and interact with the back-end database server, so it goes through all the firewalls. This is critical.

We disclosed this to Oracle on Oct. 25 last year. Around the same time, they were alerted to another high-risk flaw that is not as serious as this one. They fixed that one in the January CPU but neglected to fix this. It's not a case of not having enough time, because the fix is trivial and the risks are severe.

This specific flaw was reported to Oracle on the 19th of February 2006.

The whole point of a regular patch cycle is that people can plan ahead and install once. But if you are having to install it nine times, where's the benefit of that?

It's quite astonishing how backwards they are in their approach to security.

They are well behind the curve at the moment.

This is a very critical issue and it's disappointing that Oracle hasn't fixed it, especially since the workaround is rather simple.