Researcher: Oracle Needs To Patch 44 More Bugs

A German security researcher said this weekend that Oracle products, particularly its flagship database, are vulnerable to 44 bugs, the oldest reported to the Redwood Shores, Calif. developer two-and-a-half years ago, the newest submitted 12 days ago.

In a message posted to the Bugtraq security mailing list, Alexander Kornbrust of Red Database Security named 44 vulnerabilities, which included numerous SQL injection bugs, cross-scripting errors, and plain-text password exposures. Many of them will be fixed in upcoming Oracle security updates -- which the company dubs "Critical Patch Update" (CPU) -- or in future software upgrades, Kornbrust noted. No schedule has been set for the updates or upgrades, however.

Last year, Oracle's chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson claimed that Oracle's own researchers found 75 percent of the bugs in the company's products. Kornbrust used Davidson's figure to project that Oracle actually had 160 flaws it needed to fix.

"Let's do some math," wrote Kornbrust on Bugtraq. "According to Mary Ann Davidson 75 % of all security bugs are found by Oracle employees: If bugs are fixed independently by the reporter then:25 % = 40 unfixed bugs ( found by Red-Database-Security)75 % = 120 unfixed bugs ( found by Oracle employees)==> 160 security bugs are still unfixed."

Kornbrust's tally of reported-but-not-fixed vulnerabilities came less than two weeks after Oracle released a CPU with three-dozen patches, and days after another security researcher, David Litchfield of NGS Software, claimed that even after three attempts, Oracle wasn't able to properly fix a two-year-old bug."Oracle is not really fast fixing security issues," Kornbrust concluded in his Bugtraq message.