Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jrockway 6566 days ago
I'm not a Ruby fan, but wouldn't finding those buffer overflows make it more secure? Now that they've been found, they're fixed. (Sure, it could be indicative of overall careless design, but I don't think that's the case here. A few silly mistakes, now no longer a problem.)

Finally, Ruby has more than one implementation. Finding a hole in one implementation says nothing about the language overall.
2 comments
tptacek 6566 days ago
Yes. Everyone else: find a large C codebase that has shipped without an integer overflow. Go ahead. I'm waiting.
link
tptacek 6565 days ago
Want some help? Don't bother with qmail. Daniel J. Bernstein managed to ship a version of qmail with an integer overflow.

(That's the only vulnerability ever found in qmail, and it wasn't exploitable --- Postfix has had much worse).

link
jrockway 6565 days ago
Too bad the original qmail is nearly useless these days. (I had a class with DJB in college, and used qmail for quite a while. Eventually I got overrun with spam and switched to something that would reject messages immediately after virus/spam scanning them.)

The point is that writing simple software in C is possible. But writing complex software is very very hard.

link
tptacek 6565 days ago
Every mail server I've ever run has been qmail, including my current company's current mail server, which backs a relatively popular blog and a pretty healthy number of press hits with @matasano.com mail addresses, along with several decently active open mailing lists, and I simply don't have any of these problems you're talking about.

If you took a class with Bernstein, you might be familiar with the ISP whose entire mail operation, including customer POP and virtual hosting, I ran on qmail --- that'd be EnterAct. So yeah, I'm not buying your "qmail is too simple to matter" argument. If you want to chase it down, I'll be happy to show you where the last few Sendmail vulnerabilities were found. Clue: not in the crazy Sendmail features that qmail lacks.

But that's besides the point. You didn't answer my question.

Name a piece of code of comparable complexity to qmail that's never had an integer overflow. Here's another hint: Perl isn't one of them.

link
throttle 6566 days ago
The mistakes are so amateurish that it should raise questions about the rest of the codebase (i.e. the defects which are yet to be found)...
link
j2d2 6566 days ago
What projects have you done?
link
jrockway 6566 days ago
should raise questions about the rest of the codebase (i.e. the defects which are yet to be found)

It has.

link
tptacek 6566 days ago
By who? Cite someone who matters.
link