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I’m really stuck on a relatively minor point: why does Joe-E have to ban the finally keyword?

• macintux 1y ago
  Per Wikipedia: non-deterministic execution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe-E
• mike_hearn 1y ago
  I had an explanation of that but deleted it because the article is already too long. The Joe-E paper explains their reasoning. Briefly, Java uses exceptions to indicate certain kinds of errors that might leave the application in an undefined state like stack overflows, running out of memory and so on. Finally blocks allow you to execute code after those events occur. Therefore, sandboxed code could run code inside a VM that's entered a somewhat indeterminate state. This shows up a subtle detail of sandboxing schemes that are often overlooked. The guarantees Java provides around safety are tightly scoped and often little more than saying the JVM itself won't crash. It's not that hard to arrange for a stack overflow to occur whilst some standard library code is running, which means execution can abort in nearly any place. If the code you're calling into isn't fully exception-safe, it means the libraries global variables (if any) can be left in a logically corrupted state, which might be exploitable. If Java finally blocks had a filter clause, that could help, but finally is sometimes implicit as with try-with-resources.