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And yet, look at all the billions (trillions?) of lines of code in the world which do not have a horrible security flaw. Heartbleed is notable because of its r
by ken 8y ago
And yet, look at all the billions (trillions?) of lines of code in the world which do not have a horrible security flaw. Heartbleed is notable because of its rarity. OpenSSL is over 500,000 lines of C, written by 500 contributors, and somehow it generally works pretty well.
Maybe the phrase "a decent programmer would never" unfairly assigns blame to an individual's skill, but I think it would be fair to say that the programmers who designed and implemented these bugs were not doing decent work on the day that they made these mistakes.
If our standards for C programmers don't include bounds checking of array access, what exactly do they include?
- zozbot123 8y agoThe whole problem is that you only need one mistake in all those billions/trillions of LOC's, and your systems get 0wned. I'm pretty sure that "our standards for C programmers" don't include "programmer is guaranteed not to make any mistake, EVAR", whereas that's an entirely appropriate standard for automated, language-based security.
- nineteen999 8y agoSee the related article posted from Microsoft today; Microsoft: 70 percent of all security bugs are memory safety issues https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19138602 If we could get rid of that 70% that would be great, but it still leaves programmers doing other stupid shit in the other 30% of cases.