5 ms·

I really wish the OpenBSD team would consider rewriting some of these internet facing services in Go. It would be much safer than C.

• tptacek 7y ago
  This isn't memory corruption, and you could easily end up with the same bug in Go (or Rust) code; the problem is that it's shelling out to subcommands to perform mail delivery and not screening addresses for metacharacters due to a logic bug.
  • _wldu 7y ago
    I did not say it was related to memory corruption. I said Go would be much safer than C (and it would be). When you remove an entire class of bugs, you can focus on other things... such as sound logic. I love OpenBSD and use it a lot. But this notion of C everywhere for everything is wrong.
    • newnewpdro 7y ago
      That's great and all, but you'd create a host of new bugs unrelated to safety with a pile of new code in a largely unfamiliar language (for the openbsd devs, anyways). Rewriting the world in some safe language isn't a panacea, this meme is getting very old.
      • pcwalton 7y ago
        The fact that memory-safe languages don't prevent every bug ever is not an argument against their use, any more than the fact that some people die in car accidents even when wearing a seatbelt is an argument that you shouldn't wear seatbelts.
        • newnewpdro 7y ago
          I'm not arguing against their use.
    • nanolith 7y ago
      You also lose a lot of tooling that has been built up over the decades to help with C development, such as model checkers. Simply replacing one language for another doesn't help. It's silver bullet thinking. This isn't an issue of language or platform, but an issue of process. The OpenBSD team has one of the best overall software development processes out there, but it is still very much a manual process. The class of exploits that are currently being discovered are often discovered via tool-assisted analysis. Such tools can also be used during the software development process to find errors that can be exploited. There are a dozen or so of such tools available for C currently ranging from OSS to commercial. Typically, these tools rely on model checking or bounded model checking, and they are quite effective at reducing attack surfaces or entire classes of errors beyond what most languages can provide on their own. To take full advantage of model-guided development, however, requires a different software development process that is more difficult to adapt to older code bases overnight. Still, this adaptation is significantly less effort than, say, porting a C code base to Go or Rust. Model-guided development and other types of formal methods aren't silver bullets, and they aren't perfect. But, they are much more effective tools for building better systems than a language or compiler on its own. I suspect that the OpenBSD developers will adapt to using a model-guided approach. They make use of some static analysis tools already. I find this much more likely than the OpenBSD team switching to Go or Rust, as it is a much more pragmatic solution and a more powerful solution.
      • na85 7y ago
        >The class of exploits that are currently being discovered are often discovered via tool-assisted analysis Which tools would I start googling if I wanted to learn more about this?
        • aaronmdjones 7y ago
          Clang's static analyzer and libfuzzer are fantastic, and the former has saved my bacon more than once. It also has lots of sanitizers (more than gcc) for run-time instrumentation, not that that would have helped in this case, but still.
      • pcwalton 7y ago
    • 1over137 7y ago
      Presumably, you could also build your C code with Address Sanitizer and use that in production, then most memory corruption would segfault. You'd have a performance hit of course, but could be worth it.
  • brohee 7y ago
    In a better language than C, you could encode valid addresses in a proper type whose constructor would fail. But yes, you can treat everything as a string in any language.
    • asveikau 7y ago
      But you still have to decide what is invalid in order to do that. You could just as easily not think of an invalid input case.
    • hedora 7y ago
      You can also use type safety to enforce input validation in C. Just return an error code from the initializer, and annotate it must check. (Or, if you want to couple memory allocation with the checks, write a factory that returns null on input validation errors). Various parts of the stdlib do this, though often without the compiler annotation. They often hide the struct members inside a compilation unit to prevent callers from bypassing the check (as much as is possible in a language with unsafe primitives).
      • brohee 7y ago
        It's not idiomatic C, and is pretty rare in practice. And the ergonomics are vastly better in other languages, starting with C++.
    • vbezhenar 7y ago
      C have types too. Put your string into a struct, do not expose struct fields directly but make an API to access/modify those fields and it won't be any different.
• yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  If it's in base, that would mean dragging Go itself into the OpenBSD tree. Which you can argue is good, but that's a major change.
  • boring_twenties 7y ago
    At least it's BSD-licensed.
  • IcePic 7y ago
    nice, then someone would just port rust and go and whatever to all the obsd arches, and not just to the main 2-3 platforms. Breaths not being held.