4 ms·

Shellshock didn't have anything to do with C. gotofail looked like an SCM merging bug, which could have happened in any language. Security issues in the Rails w

Shellshock didn't have anything to do with C. gotofail looked like an SCM merging bug, which could have happened in any language. Security issues in the Rails world are often caused by libraries that do more than they should, just like less does (YAML comes to mind). Yes, it would be nice to get rid of one class of errors. But proper sandboxing would get rid of them all.

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 12y ago
No. Even a perfectly sandboxed Apache could be subverted to send modified (malicious) data to other http clients. Sandboxes are great, but just because something's sandboxed doesn't mean all security issues are now reduced to a DoS.
pjmlp 12y ago
While true, out of bounds errors, pointer misuse and undefined behaviors are the top exploits of any C code base, removing them would already be a big improvement in security.
diminoten 12y ago
Yeah those are the famous ones, but what's much more likely is that you're not going to necessarily be working on a project with as wide a footprint as any of those, and you're probably not going to create a bug that's quite as harmful as any of those either, but you're still going to cause memory-management problems for your project if you start out writing C. No one's saying it's impossible to write memory-safe C code, it's just exponentially harder, and when you're not 100% sure of your use case and exact performance needs, you're going to spend a lot more time than you want to making C do only what you want and nothing else.
colin_mccabe 12y ago
You're absolutely right. Actually, this bug doesn't have anything to do with C either. You could probably get less to delegate to some vulnerable shell script utilities. You just have to find one case of "rm -- $INPUT" where someone left out the --, and put in an -rf as input.

4 ms·

Shellshock didn't have anything to do with C. gotofail looked like an SCM merging bug, which could have happened in any language. Security issues in the Rails w

by gurkendoktor 12y ago

Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 12y ago
No. Even a perfectly sandboxed Apache could be subverted to send modified (malicious) data to other http clients. Sandboxes are great, but just because something's sandboxed doesn't mean all security issues are now reduced to a DoS.
pjmlp 12y ago
While true, out of bounds errors, pointer misuse and undefined behaviors are the top exploits of any C code base, removing them would already be a big improvement in security.
diminoten 12y ago
Yeah those are the famous ones, but what's much more likely is that you're not going to necessarily be working on a project with as wide a footprint as any of those, and you're probably not going to create a bug that's quite as harmful as any of those either, but you're still going to cause memory-management problems for your project if you start out writing C. No one's saying it's impossible to write memory-safe C code, it's just exponentially harder, and when you're not 100% sure of your use case and exact performance needs, you're going to spend a lot more time than you want to making C do only what you want and nothing else.
colin_mccabe 12y ago
You're absolutely right. Actually, this bug doesn't have anything to do with C either. You could probably get less to delegate to some vulnerable shell script utilities. You just have to find one case of "rm -- $INPUT" where someone left out the --, and put in an -rf as input.