3 ms·
>I know it's taboo to say this, but in many real world use cases, memory safety bugs aren't that bad and have the severity of any other logic error. I don't th
by Kranar 4y ago
>I know it's taboo to say this, but in many real world use cases, memory safety bugs aren't that bad and have the severity of any other logic error.
I don't think it's true of many real world use cases and if anything is only true of perhaps trivial use cases, where an application is run on a computer that has no other sensitive information and is not connected to the Internet.
I think what's true is that many programs don't ever reach a point where they're popular enough that someone can reliably exploit it. The threat of memory related errors has not much to do with use case and more to do with whether someone cares enough to identify that error, can reliably reproduce it, and whether the application that exhibits that error is on enough computers that exploiting it is profitable. If those three conditions are satisfied then it matters not whether the program is a video game, a word processor, an image viewer or whatever.
- throwawaymaths 4y ago> I don't think it's true of many real world use cases and if anything is only true of perhaps trivial use cases, If you're running a single threaded cloud lambda, you could allocate into an arena and never free, so you don't get UAF or DF.
- verdagon 4y agoA lot of apps don't need internet access, or only communicate with a single (trusted) website, with no data exchanged with other users. I might even say most apps.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- woodruffw 4y agoRegardless of whether this is true (I don't think it is), it's probably not the right metric: even if Microsoft Word was completely offline and had no way to make Internet connections (it does), memory unsafety in it is exploitable by getting a user to open a file. (And the funny thing about "trusted" communications: they're trusted until an attacker figures out how to store and forward untrusted data, at which point a logic error in the server itself is now nicely composable with code that "didn't need" to be particularly memory safe.)
- tempodox 4y agoIsn't the whole point of an exploit to go beyond what the software was originally built to do?