We see a lot of FUD on a daily basis here in the security industry, and it’s rarely worth blogging about. But for whatever reason this one managed to get under my skin.

Nominum is a commercial DNS vendor that normally targets large enterprises and ISPs. Their DNS server software includes more features than the usual BIND installation, and was originally designed to run in high-assurance environments. From what I know, it’s a decent product. But that doesn’t excuse the stupid statements from one of their executives in this interview that’s been all over the interwebs the past couple days:

Q: In the announcement for Nominum’s new Skye cloud DNS services, you say Skye ‘closes a key weakness in the internet’. What is that weakness?

A: Freeware legacy DNS is the internet’s dirty little secret – and it’s not even little, it’s probably a big secret. Because if you think of all the places outside of where Nominum is today – whether it’s the majority of enterprise accounts or some of the smaller ISPs – they all have essentially been running freeware up until now. Given all the nasty things that have happened this year, freeware is a recipe for problems, and it’s just going to get worse.

Q: Are you talking about open-source software?

A: Correct. So, whether it’s Eircom in Ireland or a Brazilian ISP that was attacked earlier this year, all of them were using some variant of freeware. Freeware is not akin to malware, but is opening up those customers to problems.

By virtue of something being open source, it has to be open to everybody to look into. I can’t keep secrets in there. But if I have a commercial-grade software product, then all of that is closed off, and so things are not visible to the hacker.

Nominum software was written 100 percent from the ground up, and by having software with source code that is not open for everybody to look at, it is inherently more secure.

I would respond to them by saying, just look at the facts over the past six months, at the number of vulnerabilities announced and the number of patches that had to made to Bind and freeware products. And Nominum has not had a single known vulnerability in its software.

The word “bullsh**” comes to mind. Rather than going on a rant, I’ll merely include a couple of interesting reference points:

  • Screenshot of a cross-site scripting vulnerability on the Nominum customer portal.
  • Link to a security advisory in 2008. Gee, I guess it’s older than 6 months, but feel free to look at the record of DJBDNS, which wasn’t vulnerable to the DNS vuln.
  • As for closed source commercial code having fewer vulnerabilities than open source, I refer you to everything from the recent SMB2 vulnerability, to pretty much every proprietary platform vs. FOSS in history. There are no statistics to support his position. Okay, maybe if you set the scale for 2 weeks. That might work, “over the past 2 weeks we have had far fewer vulnerabilities than any open source DNS implementation”.

Their product and service are probably good (once they fix that XSS, and any others that are lurking), but what a load of garbage in that interview…

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