4 ms·

If it was "embarassingly basic", wouldn't it have been found way sooner? not YEARS down the line, even DECADES? Since you mention ruby: https://exchange.xforce

by rnovak 11y ago

If it was "embarassingly basic", wouldn't it have been found way sooner? not YEARS down the line, even DECADES? Since you mention ruby: https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/89191 https://exchange.xforce.ibmcloud.com/vulnerabilities/89191 What was that about not having buffer overflows in "modern" languages?

mikeash 11y ago
That Ruby bug is a bug in the C implementation of the language. Surely this bug supports the point that modern languages don't have these problems, since you have to look at the bits written in C to find them. As for "embarrassingly basic," it takes years or decades to find these bugs because we're using tools that hide them. Basic runtime bounds checking would have turned up this bug pretty much immediately. If you use a language where a buffer overflow often causes no runtime error, then of course it's going to be hard to notice when you've made one.