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by Taek 1212 days ago
I like this idea, and given today's technology it feels like something that could be accomplished and rolled out in the next 30 years.

If the compiler (like rust) can prove that OOB memory is never accessed, the hardware/kernel/etc don't need to check at all anymore.

And your proof technology isn't even that scary: just compile the code yourself. If you trust the compiler and the compiler doesn't complain, you can assume the resulting binary is correct. And if a bug/0day is found, just patch and recompile.

1 comments

The reality is that we do want to run code developed and compiled and delivered by entities we don't fully trust and who don't want to provide us the code or the ability to compile it ourselves. And we also want to run code that can dynamically generate other code while it's doing so - e.g. JIT compilers, embedded scripting languages, javascript in browsers, etc.

Removing these checks from the hardware is possible only if you can do without it 100% of the time; if you can trust that 99% of the binaries executed, that's not enough, you still need this 'enforced sandboxing' functionality.