Hacker News Reader

Great work by the MS team. It is great progress to shift OOB access into a controlled crash. These kinds of panic bugs are then easy to remediate, with clear stack traces, as we see in the turn around time from the report.

View on HN

This is my experience as well: Writing parsers for complex file formats in Rust often leaves a few edge cases which might cause controlled panics. But controlled panics are essentially denial of service attacks. And panics have good logging, making them easy to debug. Plus, you can fuzz for them at scale easily, using tools like "cargo fuzz".

This is a substantial improvement over the status quo.

Tools like WUFFS may be more appropriate for low level parsing logic when you're not willing to risk controlled panics, however.

That's true, but really this kind of problem screams out for the approach taken in WUFFS. Have the programmer who is Wrangling Untrusted File Formats prove that what they wrote is correct as part of that exercise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com