3 ms·
For a language developed mostly in the 70s, in which so much system software is written, any defenses are worthwhile. It might be unwise to use this in systemd
by chasil 5y ago
For a language developed mostly in the 70s, in which so much system software is written, any defenses are worthwhile.
It might be unwise to use this in systemd (as triggering these traps would crash the system), but it would be helpful in many other places, especially in processes that have called listen() to be network servers.
- nayuki 5y agoCrashing the system would be preferable to corrupting memory and crashing the system at an undetermined time in the future.
- chasil 5y agoThis is not necessarily true. These memory bugs in the X server were very long lived. "Some people are not happy to find that previously reliable programs suddenly start crashing. However, as one person put it, they would rather have an application crash than introduce a subtle but undetected corruption in some mission critical database that does not get detected until three months down the road. One such application is X(7), the graphics interface for nearly any UNIX based platforms, including Linux, Solaris, and the other BSD distributions. It was discovered that the X server would crash in several different ways." https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20051224192032 https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20051224192032