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by twanvl 2556 days ago
In something like a TCP/IP stack correctness is strongly related to safety. For example, it could be perfectly memory safe, but deliver packets to the wrong address, allow other programs to read all traffic, or allow easy denial-of-service attacks.
1 comments

I realise we didn't define "safe" before we started, but I didn't just mean memory safety. Agreed that all of your examples would be incorrect, I'd just also term all of them as also unsafe.

An example of something that's incorrect but not unsafe would be, say, an error which would occasionally corrupt random TCP packets causing checksums to fail and the packets to be retransmitted. It's not working how it should, but it's not compromising your system's security or your data's safety (at least I don't think it is).