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Then there is qmail. Totally written in C. No bugs, no security flaws. But the author is way brighter than I am. I spent my youth programming real-time interr

by wglb 6y ago

Then there is qmail. Totally written in C. No bugs, no security flaws. But the author is way brighter than I am. I spent my youth programming real-time interrupt rich medical diagnostic software in low-level assembly language, which is harder to get right than C. We had very few bugs. I would be reluctant to do this in C, probably less so in Rust (which I have yet to master) I appreciate what the Rust community is trying to accomplish, and suspect it will happen. However, there is an sense of overselling this idea of memory safety. Keep in mind that SolarWinds and Equifax are not memory safety issues. Also, someone wrote a Rust version of heartbleed, so it would be good to keep a perspective. And it isn't like I haven't been in the position to be rabid promoter of programming demagoguery. First was the unnecessarily limited gammar of Fortran II. I discovered XP/L and promoted that beyond reason. Then there was the GOTO demagogery which I was one of the loudest. And along with that Structured Programming, then Object Oriented Programming. So as you promote Rust, don't sell the idea that it will prevent every security nightmare out there--it will massively help with some very important ones. Additional work beyond programming language is necessary to improve security.

pjmlp 6y ago
When companies like Microsoft and Google publish security reports they state 70% of security exploits were caused by memory corruption bugs, they don't say 100%. Naturally memory safe systems programming languages still suffer from the remaining 30% root causes for security exploits. It isn't perfect, but much better, and we aren't still there because bean counters haven't been paying attention how much money it costs to fix those bugs, and the lack of liability.
- wglb 6y ago
  Agreed. But there are exploits and there are breaches. Exploits are bad and Rust will help, but in the rest of industry and government and military, exploits are not the whole story with respect to what causes breaches.

by wglb 6y ago

pjmlp 6y ago

When companies like Microsoft and Google publish security reports they state 70% of security exploits were caused by memory corruption bugs, they don't say 100%. Naturally memory safe systems programming languages still suffer from the remaining 30% root causes for security exploits. It isn't perfect, but much better, and we aren't still there because bean counters haven't been paying attention how much money it costs to fix those bugs, and the lack of liability.

wglb 6y ago
Agreed. But there are exploits and there are breaches. Exploits are bad and Rust will help, but in the rest of industry and government and military, exploits are not the whole story with respect to what causes breaches.