Symantec: Patches for catastrophic security flaws in security products may take weeks

Customers will have to wait until mid-July for fundamental architectural flaws to be fixed

Security flaws across Symantec's range of security products will not be patched for weeks, the company has warned.

While certain patches have been rushed out to cover some of the "as bad as it gets" security flaws identified by Google's Project Zero, the patches to secure the fundamental architectural flaws are still some weeks away.

While the cloud-based versions of Symantec's Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition will (finally) be updated this week, customers say that users of the workstation versions will have to wait weeks. Symantec has promised updates "by mid-July" and recommended that customers apply them as a matter of urgency. But in the meantime, users of Symantec security products will be vulnerable.

Google's Project Zero publicised the catastrophic flaws it found in Symantec's Norton Antivirus products last week, after uncovering them in May and reporting them to Symantec.

"These vulnerabilities are as bad as it gets. They don't require any user interaction, they affect the default configuration, and the software runs at the highest privilege levels possible. In certain cases on Windows, vulnerable code is even loaded into the kernel, resulting in remote kernel memory corruption," warned Tavis Ormandy, in a blog posting revealing the vulnerabilities.

Ormandy criticised Symantec for the flaws, which he suggested were the result of cutting corners. For example, antivirus software typically has dedicated unpackers to get around the problem of software "packers" that compress executables.

"This causes a problem for antivirus products because it changes how executables look," he said. "Antivirus vendors solve this problem with two solutions. First, they write dedicated unpackers to reverse the operation of the most common packers, and then use emulation to handle less common and custom packers."

The problem with both these solutions, said Ormandy, is that they are hugely complicated and prone to vulnerabilities, making it "extremely challenging" to make such code safe.

"We recommend sandboxing and a security development life cycle, but vendors will often cut corners here. Because of this, unpackers and emulators continue to be a huge source of vulnerabilities," he said.

Other security companies have been whacked for cutting corners here, including Comodo, ESET, FireEye and Kaspersky, but Symantec runs its unpackers in the kernel of the operating system.