3 ms·

You have crafted a nigh-impossible tower of requirements that you admit are way beyond what is commonly practiced in the software under question in order to dis

You have crafted a nigh-impossible tower of requirements that you admit are way beyond what is commonly practiced in the software under question in order to disclaim the statement "SQLite is very unlikely to be the most vulnerable piece of software in your stack". Right now on the front page of HN is an article about how Microsoft was also a victim of what may come to be labeled the most impactful hack ever, a list which includes most (all?) US government agencies. The root vuln? A crap admin password used by an IT monitoring software company which has software deployed to an alarming percentage of the industry. I dunno man, I feel like my original statement is pretty reasonable. Let's please not move the goalposts to the moon. :)

patrec 6y ago
I don't think your statement is unreasonable at all coming from the common perspective that it is part of the natural order of things that opening a text document would expose your computer to a non-negligible risk of hostile takeover. Personally I find this a very unreasonable thing to accept. Secure (single user) text processing (etc.) is not a hard problem at all and there is zero reason it should create any security risks. Crap passwords (and security practices) are not pertinent at all here, unless you also argue that Boeing shouldn't really bother to make airplanes with non-lethal autopilot interactions because being killed by a mis-designed airplane is the least of risks to the typical US citizen's life give how obese he or she is. The pertinent question is: if you are to design a wordprocessor, should you avoid baking sqlite into the design because of security concerns? I think you should. Sqlite is written and tested very well, but it is written in not formally verified C, and using a memory unsafe language for reading potentially hostile databases poses a completely unnecessary and avoidable security risk.

patrec 6y ago

I don't think your statement is unreasonable at all coming from the common perspective that it is part of the natural order of things that opening a text document would expose your computer to a non-negligible risk of hostile takeover. Personally I find this a very unreasonable thing to accept. Secure (single user) text processing (etc.) is not a hard problem at all and there is zero reason it should create any security risks. Crap passwords (and security practices) are not pertinent at all here, unless you also argue that Boeing shouldn't really bother to make airplanes with non-lethal autopilot interactions because being killed by a mis-designed airplane is the least of risks to the typical US citizen's life give how obese he or she is. The pertinent question is: if you are to design a wordprocessor, should you avoid baking sqlite into the design because of security concerns? I think you should. Sqlite is written and tested very well, but it is written in not formally verified C, and using a memory unsafe language for reading potentially hostile databases poses a completely unnecessary and avoidable security risk.