A paper earlier this year at Usenix entitled "The Bugs We Have to Kill" takes a similar position: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_aug15

A paper earlier this year at Usenix entitled "The Bugs We Have to Kill" takes a similar position: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_aug15_02_bratus.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/articles/login_aug... In fact, djb quite famously identified parsing as one of the major sources of vulnerabilities, hence his devotion to formats like TAI64, netstrings, cdb and use of the file system namespace where sufficient. (See #5: http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html http://cr.yp.to/qmail/guarantee.html)