> A decent programmer would never...
You might want to Google for ImageTragick. Or heartbleed. Or shell shock. Or Java deserialization. Or flash. But please, tell me more about what a decent programmer would never do.
You might want to Google for ImageTragick. Or heartbleed. Or shell shock. Or Java deserialization. Or flash. But please, tell me more about what a decent programmer would never do.
And PHP was seen as harmless fun.
And malware was thought of as boot sector viruses and even though the first worm (1988, the Morris) worked exactly like what people are harping about (buffer overrun), no one cared, because C++ was slow to compile, and managed runtimes are evil.
And still no one cares. It takes some competence to stop using C, but it's easier to simply shout at those who point out the obvious.
And when someone brings out the good old Therac-25 everyone starts to fall silent. (Even if healthcare accreditation is very expensive, it's expensive exactly because the whole IT field is still full of unverifiable code.)
Yes it might have been easy to get away with writing the OP's faulty specification into code back then. After 25 years of people screaming about the dangers of buffer/integer overflows, it's very hard for me to think that a serious C/C++ programmer could look at that specification and not see the issue before blindly committing it to code today. I suppose it could happen.
OpenSSL (which everyone else here is crying about as an example) is also over 20 years old.
> And still no one cares. It takes some competence to stop using C, but it's easier to simply shout at those who point out the obvious.
Well imagine trying to rewrite the Linux kernel today in a memory safe language, without losing any support for any of the current target architectures. Or NetBSD even more so for that matter. Nobody has convinced me it could be done, and as of yet, it hasn't been.
Throwing away C and C++ for good is fine - if you don't want to do much in the way right now of embedded programming, or working with sophisticated games engines (eg. UE4), just for fun.
If you're not confident of the quality of the code, then maybe don't deliver it to for all and sundry saying its fit for purpose. And if you are confident, then check it again. That's all I'm saying.
Agreed. And even though it could be done, but it'd of course came at an enormous cost to the current pace of driver and other updates.
Google is trying something with Fuchsia though.
And there are experiments similar to how Linux itself got started. (Redox OS comes to mind.)
Aware of both of these, but yeah, wake me up when either are close to being capable of being even a niche competitor, for example, as complete and accessible as Haiku currently is.
Most of the BSD's didn't have decent working SMP for a period longer than that either.
I think it's kind of sad that it takes a company the size of Google to create something like Fuchsia, which we can't be sure will ever see the light of day for most users, even given the vast pools of code available in Linux and BSD they could reference.
Hardware has grown exponentially in complexity since Linux was initially developed of course, which makes the job of writing a new OS much tougher. But you could probably find 20-30 different hobby OS's over on osdev.org that are more complete and accessible for the end user than Fuschsia or Redox right now, even if they are just more boring POSIX clones.
Though, interestingly hardware also got a lot smarter (because usually they have some kind of microprocessor and RTOS on them), so in theory interfacing with it should be more easier. (Serial buses, simple enumerate, simple addressing, we have a lot of good abstractions, no need to fiddle with registers, just use a PCI-E, DMA, I2C library.)
But of course at the same time just supporting these smart standards is hard (because initialization of things is not trivial, even just getting DDR RAM to work requires tinkering with MSRs, and ACPI is its own special hell).
Er ... what? Where are you getting this information? Haiku has been in development since 2002, and has SMP support since ... 2003/2004?
NUMA support is a little shaky, but I know users who have run Haiku on 32-core Ryzens with no issues. So we definitely have SMP support.
Now re-reading it, the article clearly states that development started in 2001, and that it has rudimentary SMP support.
Maybe the phrase "a decent programmer would never" unfairly assigns blame to an individual's skill, but I think it would be fair to say that the programmers who designed and implemented these bugs were not doing decent work on the day that they made these mistakes.
If our standards for C programmers don't include bounds checking of array access, what exactly do they include?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19138602
This might be shocking to a flawless supercomputer AI such as yourself but humans make mistakes.
> imagine the format says [number of bytes to come] [the bytes]. Allocate an array with the specified size and then copy the rest of the message into it. Right?
If your client came to you and said that was the specification, you'd be negligent to fail to point out the obvious flaw with the logic, wouldn't you?
"Unfortunately, the OpenSSL basket was being watched somewhat less than very carefully. Yeah, it has bugs, but surely somebody else will fix them. And worst case scenario, since everybody uses the same library, everybody will be affected by the bugs. Nobody wants to be alone".
https://www.openbsd.org/papers/eurobsdcon2014-libressl.html
So I'm pretty sure the one example you have picked here reinforces my point.
Is that real world enough for you?
But you go ahead and believe it's because of dumb luck if you like.
> we strive everyday to provide new mitigations and defense in depth to prevent its exploitation.
I'm fairly confident that even if you didn't do that it wouldn't make much of a difference, because the likelihood of anyone attempting to exploit your particular niche program are quite low.
> But you go ahead and believe it's because of dumb luck if you like.
I didn't say it was dumb luck. The fact of the matter is that most software isn't hardened in the way you describe, for simple economical reasons.
If you honestly think that emergency services infrastructure is less of a valuable target to a rogue operator than Internet Widgets Inc. or whatever then I think we are done here for now.
This is all a huge over-reaction to my initial point which was; the format that the OP proposed was busted, and any good C/C++ programmer should notice that immediately rather than implement it blindly. If they can't do that then, yes, definitely stick to a managed language. Which I agree is good advice anyway.
Thank you and have a nice day.
It is in your original statement (abbreviated):
If there were easily exploited buffer overflow in <our program>, ambulances and fire engines <for our customers> would never be called to their destinations nor arrive on time.
One doesn't follow from the other. Your statement implies there are bad actors in existence that would actually exploit such flaws in order to disrupt the service. That may or may not be true, therefore it does not follow.
> The previous poster purported that I mustn't have much "real world" experience in coding, and I responded that I and my team wouldn't be entrusted to successfully maintain a program and network that coordinates emergency services first responders over a large land mass and number of people if that was the case.
That's not what I actually replied to, but it's also a non-sequitur. It would be entirely plausible that you could be a reckless band of cowboy coders that happens to be able to produce a working product that is nevertheless full of theoretically exploitable flaws that just happen to not get exploited, because nobody cares. Also, whoever "entrusted" you may themselves be entirely reckless or incompetent.
I'm not saying that any of this is the case, I'm simply saying you can't logically deduce one from the other. Therefore it doesn't really work as an argument.
Rubbish. If the service in question was directly accessible from a public network and its source code known and published, it would be attacked in less than 5 minutes. That is the assumption that causes millions of dollars to be spent on securing the application and the environment every year. We are not prepared to take that risk, and we secure appropriately and expensively.
> Also, whoever "entrusted" you may themselves be entirely reckless or incompetent.
That is how employment works in the wider world of Internet Widgets etc. but not in critical government regulated infrastructure like emergency services.
Yes we are unable to prove 100% that the application has no externally exploitable bugs, despite our best efforts, so we don't claim that it is and go and make it accessible to untrusted sources of input.
You just keep going with the non-sequitur, but now you're also moving the goalpost. Your original statement didn't contain anything about "directly accessible from a public network" (which I assume isn't the case) or "source code known and published" (which you said wasn't the case).
And it is still a non-sequitur. Why would anybody expend non-trivial resources to find exploitable flaw in an open-source codebase to actually bring down emergency service? There's no reasonable way to profit from that. If you're some foreign hacker, you might want to find the exploit, but you wouldn't attack right away. Again, I'm not saying nobody would possibly do it, but one does not automatically follow from the other.
Heartbleed really is the best example on how a critical piece of software infrastructure (including a lot of government regulated infrastructure) had a publicly visible flaw that went undetected (and presumably unexploited) for several years.
> That is how employment works in the wider world of Internet Widgets etc. but not in critical government regulated infrastructure like emergency services.
I don't know man, I'm here arguing with this guy who doesn't seem to grasp a basic concept in logical reasoning, yet he's working on critical government infrastructure.
It's already been discussed in this thread how old OpenSSL is - it dates back to 1998 when the risk of buffer overflows was not as well understood or publicised as it is now. It has also been addressed that code audits of OpenSSL were done as a result, which has lead to both forks and patches.
In the context of the new, one liner graphics format proposed by the OP in 2019 that had an obvious bug written straight into its specification, this thread has now reached absurd levels.
> Again, I'm not saying nobody would possibly do it, but one does not automatically follow from the other.
Ok. I'll tell my customer we don't need all the firewalls, IDS, code inspection, risk assessment and hardening because zeroname on HN told me it was OK.
> I don't know man, I'm here arguing with this guy who doesn't seem to grasp a basic concept in logical reasoning, yet he's working on critical government infrastructure.
I'm not at all offended by your ridiculous insults, I feel rewarded every day that my team and I are working on something worthwhile, and also the white-knuckled fear on that goes with it on occasion when we worry whether we've missed something or not.
Let's just both be thankful you don't live in an area where my team provides emergency services then.
Again, have a nice day, "man".
That's completely irrelevant to the point I am making. I'm using it as a counterexample to your reasoning that if code for (your) critical infrastructure was published, any obvious flaws in it would almost immediately be discovered and exploited. That's completely orthogonal to how old or poorly written the codebase is.
> Ok. I'll tell my customer we don't need all the firewalls, IDS, code inspection, risk assessment and hardening because zeroname on HN told me it was OK.
Well, I didn't. You're clearly not only unwilling to engage in logical reasoning, you also seem to lack basic reading comprehension.
> I'm not at all offended by your ridiculous insults...
I don't mean it as an insult, but I'm really losing my patience here. Your ego is so tied to being right that you can't admit to having made a little logical blunder there. Logical fallacies are actually really common, there's no shame in them. In fact, I'm prone to arguing the same If-this-then-that fallacies myself.
Either way, if you really care to be right, it doesn't matter what your job is or who gave it to you and how smart and diligent your team is. You just have to get your propositional logic correct.
Simple example:
False: If I leave the door unlocked, people will come and steal my stuff. (Non Sequitur)
True: If I leave the door unlocked, a thief will have it much easier to come in and steal my stuff.
The Morris worm was released in 1988.
People are prone to make logical errors and to overlook stuff, even when they are aware of the risks. Thinking is hard, and every little bit of help is useful, either from peers or from tools.
Do not take what zeroname wrote as an insult. He simply pointed out the mistake you made (indeed, it does not follow what you wrote - it may be possible, and probable, but it does not follow automatically).
You can look at all this as a peer review, just not for code, but for thought/logic argumentation.
- that is not simply pointing out mistakes. That's ridiculous insults that have no place on HN. I didn't think zeroname came off better in that exchange at all, in terms of who was trying to communicate, not just appear superior. There was a crossed wire, and condescending lectures in basic logic mixed with insults did not help.