points by vjerancrnjak 3 days ago | 0 comments
Doesn’t this imply a software design issue where it is just written in a way to have these security bugs and patching them 1 by 1 is not what should be done but the whole design should change which can eliminate full classes of security bugs without any particular patches being necessary?
[–] muvlon 3 days ago
[–] AlienRobot 3 days ago
The only thing I know is that if I wanted to learn how to program, I have thousands of tutorials on the Internet and Youtube teaching everything from if/else to data structures and big O.
But if I wanted to learn software design and architecture, I'd probably not even know where to start.
[–] meowface 3 days ago
Sort of, but one has to be pragmatic.
[–] gb2d_hn 3 days ago
Isn't it said that with enough users and use cases, every bug becomes a feature that someone depends on. I'd bet that a lot of these vulnerabilities are the result of intentional trade offs in design.
[–] Gigachad 3 days ago
This is what the Rust advocates have been trying to say for a decade now. But C enthusiasts would always chime in that those bugs were just caused by careless devs and a real C programmer is fine.
[–] perlgeek 3 days ago
Rust eliminates some bug classes, but we don't even know yet how many of these vulns would've been prevented by using Rust.
It's also possible that we'd need even more architectural changes to avoid such bugs.
The idea of a microkernel suddenly becomes more appealing...
[–] saagarjha 3 days ago
We have a pretty good idea of this actually, people have been classifying bugs into memory safety issues, etc for a while even pre-AI.
[–] klooney 2 days ago
It's worth checking in on the vulns for uutils- lots of stuff! Interacting with the world outside of the compiler has lots of details. No use after frees afaik though.
[–] AdamN 3 days ago
A 'real' C programmer probably is fine .... but that's like 1% of the population of developers outputting C programs.
And now you have AI that's learned from the other 99% so nothing's changing anytime soon.
[–] rybosworld 3 days ago
> A 'real' C programmer probably is fine .... but that's like 1% of the population of developers outputting C programs.
The idea that there's a small subset of C programmers who can wrangle the language into obeying them perfectly is obviously, a fantasy.
[–] dbdr 3 days ago
I would hope writing C code for the Linux kernel qualifies you as a real C programmer. And yet, here we are. Being good, careful, and extensively reviewed by others helps, but is clearly not enough.
[–] raincole 3 days ago
The problem is most drivers believe they are above average drivers.
[–] kleiba2 3 days ago
And almost all of them could be correct.
[–] AdamN 2 days ago
Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average :-)
[–] imtringued 3 days ago
Yes but even if you swipe the Rust magic wand and somehow reduce the vulnerabilities by 99%, you are still left with 20 critical vulnerabilities per year.
There is something about kernels that make them easy targets and it's not just the language.
There are plenty of design decisions that could fundamentally change things. But they're not being taken. What you're seeing is the revealed preference of this system: Security is important, but not enough to make people incur the cost of adopting major changes in pursuing it.