Unlike Microsoft Corp. executives who have predicted that Windows Vista will be hit by far fewer vulnerabilities than its predecessor, the developers who crafted Office 2007 -- while confident that the suite will be tougher to attack -- wont set a security target.
"What would show we were successful?" asked Joshua Edwards, the technical product manager for Office "That we demonstrate the attack surface area is extremely small. But we dont have a specific number of vulnerabilities in the next year that were shooting for."
Office 2007 security made front page news earlier this month when Microsoft contended that Word 2007 behavior reported as a vulnerability was actually by design.
Edwards defended Word 2007s security, and by extension, all of Offices, even with the application crash. The new Office file formats -- a format dubbed Open XML by Microsoft -- are superior to the binary file formats of previous Office collections, he said. "Because the XML schema is so well defined, we have a higher degree of resiliency to prevent the corruption of those documents than in earlier Office," said Edwards. "If someone has injected code into the document, as we parse them off the disk in real-time we can ignore that document."
Office 2007 was the first suite that Microsoft took through the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), a multi-part initiative that aims for secure code. Edwards touted SDL, but didnt go as far as to call it a panacea. "Is it safe to assume that because of SDL, Office is more secure? Yes," said Edwards. "But at the same time, its only part of what weve tried to do with Office security. And its a process, right?"
Among SDLs processes is code review: examining old code thats been reused from earlier software and just-crafted code for possible security problems. Windows Vista, which was also developed using SDLs strategies, has taken heat recently for containing a bug in the animated cursor code, which was grabbed from Windows 2000, a seven-year-old operating system.
Edwards assured Office 2007 users that all legacy code had been thoroughly checked. "Every bit of that code still had to go through the SDL proofing tools," he said. During the SDL review, the Office 2007 team also checked the Office 2003 code responsible for numerous vulnerabilities throughout 2006 that allowed bugs in Word, Excel and PowerPoint to be used for targeted attacks. "We looked at those to see if they were impacting 2007, but they did not affect the 2007 code base."
