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On the 30C3 there was a talk about a C Compiler (actually an llvm optimization plugin) that can eliminate nearly every memory management related vulnerability b
by Perseids 13y ago
On the 30C3 there was a talk about a C Compiler (actually an llvm optimization plugin) that can eliminate nearly every memory management related vulnerability by adding memory checks. The penalty is only a 100% increase in runtime.
> If you're a C programmer and somebody says like: I've that optimization that makes your program 3% faster you go: wow! Then you come and say: well, now I make it half as fast you go: w00t?! But then you remember that people actually use ruby to serve web pages.
I'd say this would be actually worth it for a far more secure FFmpeg.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ybcByjNlq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ybcByjNlq8
- StavrosK 13y agoThe difference is that FFMpeg is very, very CPU-bound, taking four hours instead of two to encode a movie is a big hassle. On the other hand, not many people use a world-facing FFmpeg instance to submit jobs to. I don't see why security should trump speed here.
- Perseids 13y agoYou mean, not many people use VLC? https://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc.html#thirdparty https://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc.html#thirdparty
- Crito 13y agoFor realtime playback locally sure. I don't think there are many/any public-facing systems backed by VLC. Presumably VLC prioritizes speed over security.
- Perseids 13y agoOh, that was the point being made. My view is that VLC essentially is a public facing system, in the same sense that my browser is a public facing system. Sure, it is not as easy to do a targeted attack against my VLC as against my mail client (or against the nginx on my server). But it is fed a lot of untrusted data. The same goes for Chrome, which also uses FFmpeg according to the article.
- bane 13y agoor plex, which i believe is ffmpeg based for real-time transcoding
- vezzy-fnord 13y agoThere's also AT&T Labs' memory-safe dialect of C called Cyclone: http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/ http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/ It's been around since 2006, but I haven't really heard of anyone using it. I wonder why.
- berdario 13y agoCyclone has been dead since years (the last release is dated 5 May 2006) It never compiled on 64bit architectures, and to get it to compile with 4.0 or 4.1 (newer versions of gcc won't work) you need to fetch it from SVN (last commit is dated May 2009)... and obviously: no distribution still ship such an old version of the build tools... you'd need something like debian lenny, which does not even receive security updates anymore
- al2o3cr 13y ago"that can eliminate nearly every memory management related vulnerability" This is like saying "my bulletproof vest will stop nearly every round fired at it". Too bad it only takes ONE...
- fzltrp 13y agoSo I suppose you'd rather not wear any bulletproof vest?