4 ms·

"The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards... And even then I have

by s_q_b 10y ago

"The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards... And even then I have my doubts." [0] For your application to be secure, hundreds of thousands of individuals must have never made a mistake in millions of LOC within libraries generally written in low-level C. That isn't very plausible. If at some point, my input hits your code, your memory, and your processor, that fact alone is sufficient to know that the system is vulnerable. [0] "Computer Recreations: Of Worms, Viruses and Core War" by A. K. Dewdney, Scientific American, March 1989

wtbob 10y ago
> … generally written in low-level C … Maybe we should focus on that? Why are we writing OSes in C when more-secure alternatives have existed for decades? Why don't we consider writing our phone OSes (which don't actually require backward-compatibility to 1960s OSes) in something higher-level and more-secure?
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Because industry adopted an OS whose code was available for free, aka UNIX, and C came along. Just today I read a paper fron the author of Concurrent Pascal to C.A.R. Hoare, written in the early 90's about industry's looming doom due to C's usage starting to take off outside UNIX. He was right...
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Which Hansen paper was that?
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      His remark written in 1993 is: "The 1980s will probably be remembered as the decade in which programmers took a gigantic step backwards by switching from secure Pascal-like languages to insecure C-like languages. I have no rational explanation for this trend. But it seems to me that if computer programmers cannot even agree that security is an essential requirement of any programming language, then we have not yet established a discipline of computing based on commonly accepted principles." It was written on "Per Brinch Hansen (letter to C.A.R. Hoare 1993a", however I got the quote from "Java's Insecure Parallelism" and so far failed to find a copy of his letter. I have spend the day going through his papers after you posted them, and now Solo with Concurrent Pascal, done in a PDP-11/45 is yet another proof I can refer to for safer alternatives done in about the same age C was coming to life. EDIT: Typos
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        I keep posting them since he simply got so much done ahead of others. Invented monitors, nucleus concept for OS design, safe[r] concurrency, co-invented Wirth-style development of OS's (sort of drew on each other), and so on. Thing I like about his papers is he comes off like a real engineer that tried to get at the root of the problem, solve it in a systematic but practical way, avoid overcomplication, and clearly publish the solution. Yet, hardly anyone knows his name or research. I fix shit like that. :) Wait till you get to Edison System on PDP-11 that gave us C and UNIX. He beat BCPL author and Wirth at their game of over-simplifying systems. Language was simpler than C, safer, easier to compile, and more efficient for calls between tasks. Then he did distributed system language after that. I for whatever reason haven't got around to reading those in depth but I'm sure they'll be interesting.

by s_q_b 10y ago

wtbob 10y ago

> … generally written in low-level C … Maybe we should focus on that? Why are we writing OSes in C when more-secure alternatives have existed for decades? Why don't we consider writing our phone OSes (which don't actually require backward-compatibility to 1960s OSes) in something higher-level and more-secure?

pjmlp 10y ago
Because industry adopted an OS whose code was available for free, aka UNIX, and C came along. Just today I read a paper fron the author of Concurrent Pascal to C.A.R. Hoare, written in the early 90's about industry's looming doom due to C's usage starting to take off outside UNIX. He was right...
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Which Hansen paper was that?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    His remark written in 1993 is: "The 1980s will probably be remembered as the decade in which programmers took a gigantic step backwards by switching from secure Pascal-like languages to insecure C-like languages. I have no rational explanation for this trend. But it seems to me that if computer programmers cannot even agree that security is an essential requirement of any programming language, then we have not yet established a discipline of computing based on commonly accepted principles." It was written on "Per Brinch Hansen (letter to C.A.R. Hoare 1993a", however I got the quote from "Java's Insecure Parallelism" and so far failed to find a copy of his letter. I have spend the day going through his papers after you posted them, and now Solo with Concurrent Pascal, done in a PDP-11/45 is yet another proof I can refer to for safer alternatives done in about the same age C was coming to life. EDIT: Typos
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      I keep posting them since he simply got so much done ahead of others. Invented monitors, nucleus concept for OS design, safe[r] concurrency, co-invented Wirth-style development of OS's (sort of drew on each other), and so on. Thing I like about his papers is he comes off like a real engineer that tried to get at the root of the problem, solve it in a systematic but practical way, avoid overcomplication, and clearly publish the solution. Yet, hardly anyone knows his name or research. I fix shit like that. :) Wait till you get to Edison System on PDP-11 that gave us C and UNIX. He beat BCPL author and Wirth at their game of over-simplifying systems. Language was simpler than C, safer, easier to compile, and more efficient for calls between tasks. Then he did distributed system language after that. I for whatever reason haven't got around to reading those in depth but I'm sure they'll be interesting.