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Meh. There are probably very few C++ codebases that have received more security attention than those of browsers like Firefox. Bug bounties, fuzzing, tons of ha
by staticassertion 7y ago
Meh. There are probably very few C++ codebases that have received more security attention than those of browsers like Firefox. Bug bounties, fuzzing, tons of hardening work.
It's really just not accurate to say "they weren't writing good C++" or "it's a legacy codebase". Those could both be true things, but it's totally glossing over the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in fixing that codebase.
- blub 7y agoTons of hardening work to plug an endless sieve. If browsers had remained sane, allowing one to download HTML, CSS and pictures instead of running so-called applications, they would have been secured a long time ago and we would have had a decent internet instead of this spyware and ads infested mess. With the rate of change that they're subjected to, they will never be secure. In 10 years Firefox will perhaps be 50% Rust and still full of vulnerabilities.
- staticassertion 7y ago> If browsers had remained sane This has no bearing on the issue. Yes, browsers are fast moving codebases. No one is arguing otherwise. > In 10 years Firefox will perhaps be 50% Rust and still full of vulnerabilities. Someone has already cited a case study from Mozilla showing a significant improvement in memory safety for components moved over to Rust, so all evidence at this point is to the contrary.
- JoshTriplett 7y agoIf browsers had refused to run applications, we'd have a lot more native applications that don't have any sandbox at all.
- blub 7y agoNative applications do have sandboxes, macOS definitely has this, Windows has this, iOS, Android... AppStores can also perform various checks which will never happen on web sites. The web is really the wild west, why do you think browsers are the main attack vector nowadays?