Skip to main content

Design review prior to Code review

Is it really necessary to design review before performing Code Review? Why is it so important?
I asked Security Ninja and what he replied was quite convincing. As I am new to Code Reviews I can't comment on that but his reply make thing more clear for me:

"Nilesh asked a question about the last blog post which I want to answer here. He asked whether the design review was required prior to performing the source code review. I feel like I’m sitting on the fence when I say that it depends on your SDLC and organisation but it really does. In a well structured SDLC with security integrated into each phase you could be reviewing the design a long time before the code itself. The design items have a couple of different uses in my eyes. They give you guidance when reviewing the design for an application from a security point of view and help you either sign off or reject the design. The second benefit of these checklist items is to check whether the code you are reviewing matches up to the design you signed off."

To understand the Design properly a presentation by the designer will help.The design will have already been checked for quality,the designer will have had experience explaining it to a small group and at least a minimal set of drawings (models) will have been constructed. This will allow for a concise,understandable presentation. Given the quality of the presentation, more people will understand more important details of the design.

You can find Guidelines for Conducting Design and Code Reviews here in precise format:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms182019(VS.80).aspx

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

File Upload through Null Byte Injection

Sometimes, during file upload we come across situation wherein there would be check on the file extension at the client side as well as server side too. If the application does allow only .jpeg extension to be uploaded, the client side java script checks for the extension of the file before passing the request. We all know that how easily this can be defeated. Some applications, checks for the extension at the server side also. That's not easy to bypass. However there are some ways with which it still can be bypassed. Most of server side scripts are written in high level languages such as Php, Java etc who still use some C/C++ libraries to read the file name and contents. That leads to the problem. In C/C++ a line ends with /00 or which is called Null Byte. So whenever the interpreter sees a null byte at the end of the a string, it stops reading thinking it has reached at the end of the string. This can be used for the bypass. It works for many servers, specially php servers. T...
1 comment
Read more

Breaking Excel password protection

If you came across an excel sheet asking for password for allowing to make any changes into it, you may want to unprotect it. All we need to do is to edit the xml file which comes intrinsically packaged with Excel 2007 or 2010. But what about Excel 2003? For that, open the Excel 2003 file within Excel 2007, save it as xlsx file. So, keep in mind all the Excel files below 2007 version, you need to convert them as Excel 2007 with extension .xlsx. Now here are the steps for doing that: 1. Open the Excel 2003 file (e.g. Secret.xlsx) and save it as .xlsx (Excel 2007) format. If you already have Excel 2007 file, then no need for any conversion. 2. Now change the extension of the above file to .zip and extract the zipped file. Browse through the file in the extracted folder and go to: <LocalPath>\Secret\xl\worksheets.   3. Now open the sheet/ sheets you want to remove protection in any xml editor. Look for keywords such as 'sheetProtection' or 'workbo...
10 comments
Read more

jtool - an alternative to otool

jtool comes with a capability of running on Linux environment. Some ipa scanning tools are created to run on Linux environment where mac environment is not available. In such cases tools such as otool and class-dump-z will not work. So jtool can be an alternative to otool. For more information on jtool please refer to http://www.newosxbook.com/tools/jtool.html . It lists down various commands which have same output as otool or a equivalent. There are several commands mentioned in link. But for our customized requirements and basis checks I have listed down the below ones after running on many binaries. The outputs are similar or equivalent to otool and class-dump-z: Commands for checking PIE flag (ASLR) in jTool jtool -d -v -arch | grep stack ·           Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) protection: jtool -d -v -arch | grep _objc_release ·           To check if the devic...
1 comment
Read more