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I think it is often under appreciated by people who haven't worked in security how hard high quality C is in practice.
by hedgehog 1y ago
I think it is often under appreciated by people who haven't worked in security how hard high quality C is in practice.
- uecker 1y agoWe might also have different priorities. I do not care too much that google and apple want to lock down their smartphone spyware and sales platforms. The supply chain risks and maintenance burden imposed onto me by the Rust ecosystem are much more of an concern.
- hedgehog 1y agoI don't know what this has to do with locking down phones, but I do appreciate not getting compromised just for cloning a repo or opening my laptop at a coffee shop.
- germandiago 1y agoWho says you do not? :)
- hedgehog 1y agoOh, I think it's a real problem, that's why I'm in favor of improved tools.
- sunshowers 1y ago(There is a persistent idea that the lack of memory safety in C is good because it allows people to jailbreak their phones.)
- rcxdude 1y agoIt is a sad thing but I do root against secure boot initiatives because they almost entirely work to limit user's freedom instead of improving their security.
- uecker 1y agoThis is not what I said, but memory safety is certainly not anything which is a high priority for my own security. I still think memory safety is important and I also think Rust is an interesting language, but... the hype is exaggerated and driven by certain industry interests.
- IshKebab 1y agoRust isn't popular just because of memory safety though. I think the memory safety message is maybe a little too loud. It's also a modern language with fantastic tooling, very high quality library ecosystem and a strong type system that reduces the chance of all kinds of bugs. It's obviously not perfect: compile time is ... ok, there aren't any mature GUI toolkits (though that's true of many languages), async Rust has way too many footguns. But it's still waaaaay better than C or C++. In a different league.
- uecker 1y agoRust is a nice language, but it pushed too aggressively with the argument of "memory safety" at all cost ignoring other considerations. And Cargo is certainly a disaster even though it may be considered "fantastic tooling" by some. In any case, I do not think it is funny that I now depend on packages without timely security update in my distribution. This makes me less secure.
- scns 1y agoIs there better tooling in C/C++? No snark intended?
- uecker 1y agoI guess this depends on what you consider good tooling. I am relatively happy with C tooling. But if you want to quickly assemble something from existing libraries, then language-level package managers like npm, cargo, pip are certainly super convenient. But then, I think this convenience comes at a high cost. We now have worms again, I thought those times were long over... IMHO package management belongs into a distribution with quality control and dependencies should be minimized and carefully selected.
- hedgehog 1y agoThanks, that take is... Something. I'm all for user-controllable hardware but I think that's a regulatory problem not a technical one.
- account42 1y agoHow often do you clone a repo and don't immediately run build commands that execute scripts provided by the repo.