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A seat belt is a safety feature, while bullet-proof glass is a security feature. The major shift in thinking was that the kernel needed to start adding bullet-p
by pdpi 6y ago
A seat belt is a safety feature, while bullet-proof glass is a security feature. The major shift in thinking was that the kernel needed to start adding bullet-proof glass rather than better seat belts.
- zxzax 6y agoI don't think I understand that analogy in terms of kernel code, can you give an example of what seat belts and bullet proof glass are in this context? Does that mean that previously in places where they only had CRCs, they added firewalling and cryptographic signing?
- pdpi 6y agoA way to detect buffer overflows is by using canary values at the end of the buffer. A hardware failure is unlikely to randomly generate the same value as the canary and you can use this to detect an overflow. Malicious hardware would want to deliberately set the canary to the same value as it was before so as to escape detection, and you need to use something more sophisticated like a random canary value instead of a constant.