Patches: Pull or Push ?



Most people prefer to disagree with the masses on whether they like sunny side up or scrambled eggs. And the form of getting patches is no different. If you ask an IT administrator (which is the person applying patches in most corporate organizations) they will tell you horror stories of how patches can go wrong and would be happy to give you examples of why every patch needs to be individually tested before deploying. 
But my dad, for example, doesn't care about patches, and while he won't go out of the way to install a patch, he may be ok with patches being pushed to him automatically.  

This debate  reminds me of another interesting debate in the Web-Operations world about "continuous deployment". In that case the debate was whether applications should be deployed in scheduled releases (for example every quarter) or whether it should be released as things gets developed and pushed.

If you think about this a little more it would be very clear that the developers who build the patches are the ones who first need to be ready to do "continuous deployment". The confidence of every patch is directly proportional to the robustness of test infrastructure... and the unit-tests and integration-tests which are associated with it. For products where there are test-gaps it makes sense for IT administrators to constantly monitor and test every single patch before its deployed. 

So that brings us back to "Pull or Push". Because of the increase in number of recent attacks, I am now very conscious about what products I use on a daily basis and try very hard to pick those which can auto-update without nagging me. And they are usually the ones which have robust test infrastructure to allow "continuous deployment"... which in turn means that they are usually the ones which have better test coverage of their products and are the ones which can quickly patch something bad very quickly with confidence (like a 0-day).

I do understand that mistakes in 'Push' based patches can be very expensive, but they are still more secure for end users when it comes to privacy and security.

The reason why I was thinking about this is that Adobe released a patch today.. hope you noticed. I just wish it would auto-update devices where have it installed... its easy to forget to update devices, and in general not doing silent auto-update makes me worried that they are not super confident about their test infrastructure.

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