[nicoburns]

C vulnerabilities do have a nasty habit of giving the attacker full code execution though, which doesn’t tend to be nearly so much of a problem in other languages (and would likely be even less so if they weren’t dependant on foundations written in C)

[foobiekr]

I don’t disagree with you. But just before writing that message I was code reviewing some python that was vulnerable a to the most basic SQL injection. Who needs or wants execution authority when you can dump the users table of salted sha passwords?

[saagarjha]

In C you can just use code execution to grab the passwords before they get salted…

[foobiekr]

One is the whole database.

I am very aware of code execution attacks and persistence around them. C has a class of failures that are not present in most other languages that are in current use, my point is that it really only solves part of the problem.

From a security perspective, the 90% issue is the poor quality of developers in whatever language you choose.

[nicoburns]

I think the difference is in the difficulty in preventing the bugs. I'd be very surprised if our codebase at work contained SQL injection bugs. We use a library that protects against them by default, and all code gets reviewed by a senior developer. SQL injection is easy to prevent with a simple code review process.

Subtle issues with undefined behaviour, buffer overflows, etc in C are much trickier and frequently catch out even highly experienced programmers. Even with high quality developers your C program is unlikely to be secure.

[legulere]

SQL or shell command injection also gives attackers full code execution.