[mpeg]

"Google Chromium CSS contains a use-after-free vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page. This vulnerability could affect multiple web browsers that utilize Chromium, including, but not limited to, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Opera."

That's pretty bad! I wonder what kind of bounty went to the researcher.

[duozerk]

> That's pretty bad! I wonder what kind of bounty went to the researcher.

I'd be surprised if it's above 20K$.

Bug bounties rewards are usually criminally low; doubly so when you consider the efforts usually involved in not only finding serious vulns, but demonstrating a reliable way to exploit them.

[clucas]

Here is a comment that really helped me understand bug bounty payouts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43025038

[bri3d]

Everyone should read this comment, it does a really eloquent job explaining the situation.

The fundamental thing to understand is this: The things you hear about that people make $500k for on the gray market and the things that you see people make $20k for in a bounty program are completely different deliverables, even if the root cause bug turns out to be the same.

Quoted gray market prices are generally for working exploit chains, which require increasingly complex and valuable mitigation bypasses which work in tandem with the initial access exploit; for example, for this exploit to be particularly useful, it needs a sandbox escape.

Developing a vulnerability into a full chain requires a huge amount of risk - not weird crimey bitcoin in a back alley risk like people in this thread seem to want to imagine, but simple time-value risk. While one party is spending hundreds of hours and burning several additional exploits in the course of making a reliable and difficult-to-detect chain out of this vulnerability, fifty people are changing their fuzzer settings and sending hundreds of bugs in for bounty payout. If they hit the same bug and win their $20k, the party gambling on the $200k full chain is back to square one.

Vulnerability research for bug bounty and full-chain exploit development are effectively different fields, with dramatically different research styles and economics. The fact that they intersect sometimes doesn't mean that it makes sense to compare pricing.

[0xbadcafebee]

Why is it the USA doesn't have their own bug bounty program for non-DOD systems? Like, sure, they have a bounty for vulns in govt systems. But why not accept vulns for any system, and offer to pay more than anyone else? It would give them a competitive advantage (offensive & defensive) over every other nation. End one experimental weapons program (or whatever garbage DOD spends its obscene budget on) and suddenly we're not cyber-sucky anymore.

[eks391]

I think you are confusing bug bounty programs with espionage and cyber warfare. The USA definitely accepts vulnerabilities for any system (or at least target systems), paying good money for them if it is an attack chain, giving them that competitive edge you mention. They have at least one military organization over this exact thing (USCYBERCOM) and realistically other orgs to include the intelligence community. There are no bug bounties on "any" system because bug bounties are part of programs to fix bugs, not exploit them. They therefore have bug bounties for their own systems, as those are the ones they would be interested in improving. What you described, which they definitely do, is cyber espionage, and those bugs are submitted through different channels than a bug bounty.

[0xbadcafebee]

But that's the thing, I think they specifically need a non-IC program. If I'm a white-hat, grey-hat, or a somewhat cagey black-hat, I'm not gonna reach out to a shadowy organization with a penchant for extrajudicial surveillance, torture & killing to make $50k on a bug. Sure, you can try your hand at selling them an exploit that won't get revealed. But if only you and The Company know about the bug, and it could mean the upside in a potential war (or just a feather in an agency head's cap), why would The Company keep you alive and able to talk about it? OTOH, if the program you're reporting to doesn't have a track record of illegal activity, personally I'd feel a lot safer reporting there. And ideally their mission would be to patch the bug and not hold onto it. But we get to patch first, so it's still our advantage.

[lesostep]

Because collecting and gatekeeping vulns so you can attack other countries is bad manners. If you look up some of the Snowden testimonies, it's implied USA at least had access to some 0-days at the past, but nobody admitted to it, because it just bad national politics.

Even if USA is doing dog-shit in politics now, openly admitting to collecting cyber-weapons (instead of doing it silently) is just an open invitation to condemnation

[qingcharles]

From being in the trenches a couple of decades ago, they do. They just don't disclose after they pay the bounty. They keep them to themselves. I knew one guy (~2010?) making good money just selling exploits (to a 3-letter agency) that disabled the tally lamps on webcams so the cams could be enabled without alerting the subject.

[intheitmines]

See the equation group saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_Group

[stevefan1999]

Just go with XMR

[walletdrainer]

This underestimates the adaptability of threat actors. Massive cryptocurrency thefts from individuals have created a market for a rather wide range of server-side bugs.

Got a Gmail ATO? Just run it against some of the leaked cryptocurrency exchange databases, automatically scan for wallet backups and earn hundreds of millions within minutes.

People are paying tens of thousands for “bugs” that allow them to confirm if an email address is registered on a platform.

Even trust isn’t much of a problem anymore, well-known escrow services are everywhere.

[naeioi]

The bounty could be very high. Last year one bug’s reporter was rewarded $250k. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44861106

[duozerk]

Maybe google is an exception (but then again, maybe that payout was part marketing to draw more researchers).

[throwaway150]

So is there anything that would actually satisfy crowd here?

Offer $25K and it is "How dare a trillion dollar company pay so little?"

Offer $250K and it is "Hmm. Exception! Must be marketing!"

What precisely is an acceptable number?

[cwillu]

One is a lament that the industry average is so low, and the other is… a lament that the industry average is so low. What's the problem?

[hsbauauvhabzb]

An increase in the average bug payout. Bounty programs pay low on average.

[idiotsecant]

A number better than what the exploit could be sold for on the black market

[i_am_jl]

I don't believe those numbers will ever come close to converging, let alone bounty prices surpassing black market prices.

It seems like these vulnerabilities will always be more valuable to people who can guarantee that their use will generate a return than to people who will use them to prevent a theoretical loss.

Beyond that, selling zero-days is a seller's market where sellers can set prices and court many buyers, but bug bounties are a buyer's market where there is only one buyer and pricing is opaque and dictated by the buyer.

So why would anyone ever take a bounty instead of selling on the black market? Risk! You might get arrested or scammed selling an exploit on the black market, black market buyers know that, so they price it in to offers.

[DiggyJohnson]

You can work your day job and make $20-500k/yr or pursue drug dealing and make $5-5000k/yr. I don’t think that’s actually a compelling argument for the latter even if the opportunity cost is better.

[salviati]

I think a big part of "criminally low" is that you'll make much more money selling it on the black market than getting the bounty.

[duozerk]

I read this often, and I guess it could be true, but those kinds of transaction would presumably go through DNM / forums like BF and the like. Which means crypto, and full anonymity. So either the buyer trusts the seller to deliver, or the seller trusts the buyer to pay. And once you reveal the particulars of a flaw, nothing prevents the buyer from running away (this actually also occurs regularly on legal, genuine bug bounty programs - they'll patch the problem discreetly after reading the report but never follow up, never mind paying; with little recourse for the researcher).

Even revealing enough details, but not everything, about the flaw to convince a potential buyer would be detrimental to the seller, as the level of details required to convince would likely massively simplify the work of the buyer should they decide to try and find the flaw themselves instead of buying. And I imagine much of those potential buyers would be state actors or organized criminal groups, both of which do have researchers in house.

The way this trust issue is (mostly) solved in drugs DNM is through the platform itself acting as a escrow agent; but I suspect such a thing would not work as well with selling vulnerabilities, because the volume is much lower, for one thing (preventing a high enough volume for reputation building); the financial amounts generally higher, for another.

The real money to be made as a criminal alternative, I think, would be to exploit the flaw yourself on real life targets. For example to drop ransomware payloads; these days ransomware groups even offer franchises - they'll take, say, 15% of the ransom cut and provide assistance with laundering/exploiting the target/etc; and claim your infection in the name of their group.

[chc4]

I don't think you know anything about how these industries work and should probably read some of the published books about them, like "This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends", instead of speculating in a way that will mislead people. Most purchasers of browser exploits are nation-state groups ("gray market") who are heavily incentivized not to screw the seller and would just wire some money directly, not black market sales.

[streetfighter64]

I mean, you're still restricted to selling it to your own government, otherwise getting wired a cool $250k directly would raise a few red flags I think. And how many security researchers have a contact in some government-sponsored hacking company anyway? Do you really think that convincing them to buy a supposed zero-day exploit as a one-off would be easy?

Say you're in the US. I'm sure there are some CIA teams or whatever making use of Chromium exploits "off the record", but for any official business the government would just put pressure on Google directly to get what they want. So any project making use of your zero-day would be so secret that it'd be virtually impossible for you to even get in contact with anybody interested to buy it. Sure they might not try to "screw you", but it's sort of like going to the CIA and saying, "Hey would you be interested in buying this cache of illegal guns? Perhaps you could use it to arm Cuban rebels". What do you think they would respond to that?

[spacebanana7]

Defence firms like Raytheon are often happy to pay for stuff like this. What happens afterwards with the exploit is anybody's guess. Source - a vague memory of a Darknet diaries episode.

[saagarjha]

There are intermediate firms that will get the exploits passed to the right people. They are not very difficult to find.

[skipkey]

Eh, not really? If it's a legit company who provides services to various governments, they're going to pay you, they're going to report the income to the government, you'll get a 1099 for contract/consulting, and you'll pay your taxes on the legit income. No red flags. Assuming they're legit and not currently sanctioned by the US government that is.

[moring]

> Even revealing enough details, but not everything, about the flaw to convince a potential buyer would be detrimental to the seller, as the level of details required to convince would likely massively simplify the work of the buyer should they decide to try and find the flaw themselves instead of buying.

Is conning a seller really worth it for a potential buyer? Details will help an expert find the flaw, but it still takes lots of work, and there is the risk of not finding it (and the seller will be careful next time).

> And I imagine much of those potential buyers would be state actors or organized criminal groups, both of which do have researchers in house.

They also have the money to just buy an exploit.

> The real money to be made as a criminal alternative, I think, would be to exploit the flaw yourself on real life targets. For example to drop ransomware payloads; these days ransomware groups even offer franchises - they'll take, say, 15% of the ransom cut and provide assistance with laundering/exploiting the target/etc; and claim your infection in the name of their group.

I'd imagine the skills needed to get paid from ransomware victims without getting caught to be very different from the skills needed to find a vulnerability.

[consumer451]

I am far from the halls of corporate decision making, but I really don't understand why bug bounties at trillion dollar companies are so low.

[arcfour]

Because it's nice to get $10k legally + public credit than it is to get $100k while risking arrest + prison time, getting scammed, or selling your exploit to someone that uses it to ransom a children's hospital?

[kspacewalk2]

Is it in fact illegal to sell a zero day exploit of an open source application or library to whoever I want?

[IggleSniggle]

Depends. Within the US, there are data export laws that could make the "whoever" part illegal. There are also conspiracy to commit a crime laws that could imply liability. There are also laws that could make performing/demonstrating certain exploits illegal, even if divulging it isn't. That could result in some legal gray area. IANAL but have worked in this domain. Obviously different jurisdictions may handle such issues differently from one another.

[consumer451]

Thanks, great answer. I was just thinking from a simple market value POV.

[sailfast]

What about $500K selling it to governments?

[bell-cot]

Issue 1: Governments which your own gov't likes, or ones which it doesn't? The latter has downsides similar to a black market sale.

Issue 2: Selling to governments generally means selling to a Creepy-Spooky Agency. Sadly, creeps & spooks can "get ideas" about their $500k also buying them rights to your future work.

[wepple]

> but demonstrating a reliable way to exploit them

Is this a requirement for most bug bounty programs? Particularly the “reliable” bit?

[saagarjha]

This depends on the program.

[bicepjai]

So basically Firefox is not affected ?

[hdgvhicv]

The listed browsers are basically skins on top of the same chromium base.

It’s why Firefox and Safari as so important despite HN’a wish they’d go away.

[autoexec]

HN doesn't want firefox to go away. HN wants firefox to be better, more privacy/security focused, and to stop trying to copy chrome out of the misguided hope that being a poor imitation will somehow make it more popular.

Sadly, mozilla is now an adtech company (https://www.adexchanger.com/privacy/mozilla-acquires-anonym-...) and by default firefox now collects your data to sell to advertisers. We can expect less and less privacy for firefox users as Mozilla is now fully committed to trying to profit from the sale of firefox users personal data to advertisers.

[ddtaylor]

As a 25 year Firefox user this is spot on. I held out for 5 years hoping they would figure something out, but all they did was release weird stuff like VPNs and half baked services with a layer of "privacy" nail polish.

Brave is an example of a company doing some of the same things, but actually succeeding it appears. They have some kind of VPN thing, but also have Tor tabs for some other use cases.

They have some kind of integration with crypto wallets I have used a few times, but I'm sure Firefox has a reason they can't do that or would mess it up.

You can only watch Mozilla make so many mistakes while you suffer a worse Internet experience. The sad part is that we are paying the price now. All of the companies that can benefit from the Chrome lock in are doing so. The web extensions are neutered - and more is coming - and the reasons are exactly what you would expect: more ads and weird user hostile features like "you must keep this window in the foreground" that attempt to extract a "premium" experience from basic usage.

Mozilla failed and now the best we have is Brave. Soon the fingerprinting will be good enough Firefox will be akin to running a Tor browser with a CAPTCHA verification can for every page load.

[hdgvhicv]

So Firefox suffers because people like you choose a chrome skin rather than fork.

[linkregister]

What would be an acceptable revenue model? Google Chrome has the same privacy profile with the exception that Google retains the data for their own ad platforms.

Selling preferential search access is legally precarious due to FTC's lawsuit against Mozilla.

[autoexec]

> What would be an acceptable revenue model?

They could start with the one they've refused for ages even though many have asked for it. Let people directly donate to fund the development of firefox (as opposed to just giving mozilla money to funnel into any number of their other projects). They could even make money selling merch if they didn't tank the brand. Firefox could have a very nice niche to fill as a privacy focused browser for power users who desire customization and security, but sadly they don't seem interested in being that. For whatever reason they'd rather spend a fortune buying adtech from facebook employees and be a chrome clone that pushes ads and sells user data, and that isn't going to inspire support from users.

That said, I'm not convinced that every open source project needs to be profit generating. Many projects are hugely successful without resorting to ads. What makes it possible for VLC or even Arch Linux to thrive without advertising that couldn't work just as well for firefox? The solution is certainly not to turn Firefox into a project that their users no longer want to support or use at all, but that seems to be where they are headed by selling out their userbase.

[DiggyJohnson]

Well said. Do you know of any recent reports or if anyone has actually gone through the funding calculations regarding the funding model you described (let’s call it “FF-direct”) versus Mozilla’s status quo funding model?

Primary questions are: How much does FF cost to sustain? How much is spent on new performance, functionality and feature development? What number does Firefox need to compete directly with Chrome? If you asked an experienced FF project contributor what is the delta between the previous two questions?

- a 20+ year Firefox power user very familiar with the FF project, web browsers, and how they compete

[hajile]

The biggest problem is a failure of trust. I won't donate to the Mozilla foundation because I have zero faith in them using that money wisely.

[wtfwhateven]

Wait the FTC is suing Mozilla?

[bicepjai]

I did not know this. Why are you doing this Mozilla !? How does the words privacy-safe measurement and targeting in the same sentence make any sense.

>> Anonym will now become a separate business unit within Mozilla to develop new solutions for privacy-safe measurement, targeting and optimization.

At this point can someone fork Firefox and maintain separately ?

[jacquesm]

HN wants Firefox but with better stewardship and fewer misdirected funds.

Mozilla - wrongly - believes that the majority of FF users believe in Mozilla's hobby projects rather than that they care about their browser.

That's why - as far as I know - to this day it is impossible to directly fund Firefox. They'd rather take money from google than to be focusing on the one thing that matters.

[BrendanEich]

A mundane reason for why donations to the 501c3 parent Mozilla Foundation can't go to Firefox or Gecko engineers is U.S. tax law. We found out the hard way after the IRS San Jose office said we could run only as a foundation and take "sponsorship income" tax-free. They reneged and litigated; this led to the creation of the arms-length Mozilla Corporation that's wholly owned by the Foundation. Per IRS regulations, it cannot be funded by grants from the parent Mozilla Foundation.

The corporation could let users pay for Firefox, and pay tax on that revenue. While I was there, no one thought this would help enough to be worth the effort, compared to just working on other things while taking Google search revshare.

With Brave, I've pushed for user-pays as an option. We let a user buy Premium Search (no ads, but this is possible for free) to support us. It's a small but non-negligible amount of revenue per year, and growing slowly, but we did it on principle. Same will go for buy-once zero-telemetry Brave Origin, stripped down Brave coming in a month or two.

[array_key_first]

HN, and firefox users, can never decide where the money should go or what the goals should be. The problem with producing the better product is the amount of in-fighting increases exponentially. Google produces a "fuck you got mine" type browser and everyone knows it, so nobody really cares when they make god awful privacy decisions or intentionally produce worst standards to try to fuck their customers up the ass in new and exciting ways.

When Firefox introduces a new feature, half the people complain it's stupid and worthless while the other half complain it's not enough. And, when it inevitably gets axed, it magically turns out actually it was beloved the whole time and oh no my Grandma used Pocket as life support and now she can't breath.

When Firefox implements new web standards half the people complain that they're bending to Google's whim and that these standards are stupid. We don't want them, just focus on performance and what people really care about! ... While the other half complains that it took so long, and in the meantime they switched to a real browser, like Chrome.

Of course, Safari is even further behind Firefox in standards and frankly it's not even close, but does anyone care? Of course not. Apple is another "fuck you got mine" type company. People love that.

And it doesn't just end at Firefox. Oh, no. Firefox OS? Depending on who you ask it's either the biggest missed opportunity ever or one of Mozilla's worst money burning schemes. It's Schrödinger's software - in a parallel universe where it took it off everyone would've always wanted it, and in the current universe nobody ever wanted it.

The biggest mistake Mozilla made was extending any kind of goodwill to their customer base. Clearly, that doesn't work and people do not like it. Let's all stop fucking around and be real for a second - nobody, and I do mean nobody, is switching to Google Chrome because Mozilla made some mistake. They're not, because the reality is that Firefox is truly irreplaceable and ahead of Chrome in so many aspects. They're switching to Chrome because they just don't care about being fucked up the ass, or worse, they secretly want to be.

[moring]

> HN, and firefox users, can never decide where the money should go or what the goals should be.

Without ever having dealt with this problem, it sounds like an embarrassingly solved problem, in the sense of: He who gives the money, decides where it goes.

The other half is to provide features that are actually detrimental if you don't want them as plug-ins / extensions / whatever. Pocket is an example for this. Firefox OS is not because it's not force-bundled with Firefox to begin with.

> They're switching to Chrome because they just don't care about being fucked up the ass, or worse, they secretly want to be.

The point where you stop trying to understand your users is the point where you start losing them.

[LunaSea]

I don't think that Mozilla believes that their pet projects are what the use community wants. I think they just don't care. Google's check will clear next year anyways.

[jacquesm]

That's probably true.

[fguerraz]

We have no idea what is in that contract with Google. They get to be the default search engine, but what else? Does it prevent Firefox from accepting some sources of funding, like donations?

It would be great to get transparency on this…

[abirch]

Do you mean Firefox specifically? Because you can donate to Mozilla: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ it's that you can't specify where you want the funds to go.

[fguerraz]

yes, I do mean Firefox specifically. Mozilla fundation is not Mozilla corporation. The money you give to the fundation is for their charity work, none of that goes to the development of Firefox.

[afiori]

I am pretty sure that the issue is that they either admit to being so l stuck as a vassal beholden to Google, or they pretend to be enterprising and forward looking with many promising projects

[3oil3]

I just want Firefox's search box to be on the top of the window so I don't have to bend my neck when I'm surfing in bed... I don't use it just for that.

[capitainenemo]

If you're talking about url/search bar at the bottom on mobile, that's customisable - actually they ask you which you prefer when you install it, but you can change it at any time in settings. (personally I prefer all that stuff at the bottom since it's more conveniently where all my other phone nav is, and visibility fits in well with how I scroll)

[3oil3]

I mean on the computer, and I haven't found a way to have it at the top.

[wvbdmp]

Particularly weird impulse for technically inclined people…

Although I must admit to the guilty pleasure of gleefully using Chromium-only features in internal apps where users are guaranteed to run Edge.

[hdgvhicv]

Are you old enough to have suffered through the ie6 corporate mess?

[zozbot234]

Firefox is safe from this because their CSS handling was the first thing they rewrote in Rust.

[bawolff]

I mean, even if it was written in c or c++, its unlikely two separate code bases would have the exact same use after feee vuln.

[jacquesm]

It's unlikely, but it does actually happen. I've seen more than one complete rewrite of something important that had exactly the same bug. And I'm very sure that those sources were not related somehow.

[ceteia]

Does the Rust implementation not use any unsafe and does not use libraries using unsafe?

[nish__]

No. What would be the point of that?

[ceteia]

Not Firefox, but Servo has quite a lot of unsafe, even though some of the results are false positives.

https://grep.app/search?f.repo=servo%2Fservo&f.repo.pattern=...

So Servo at the very least cannot be said to be 'safe'. And I believe the Rust code in Firefox is similar.

[jsheard]

Firefox and Safari are fine in this case, yeah.

[vntok]

No, though Firefox has its own CVE this week: https://thecyberexpress.com/firefox-v147-cve-2026-2447/

[DetroitThrow]

It's pretty hard to have an accidental a use after free in the FireFox CSS engine because it is mostly safe Rust. It's possible, but very unlikely.

[topspin]

That came to my mind as well. CSS was one of the earliest major applications of Rust in FireFox. I believe that work was when the "Fearless Concurrency" slogan was popularized.

[koito17]

Yup. To this day, Firefox remains the only browser with a *parallel* CSS engine. Chromium and WebKit teams have considered this and decided not to pursue since it's really easy to get concurrency wrong.

If I recall correctly, the CSS engine was originally developed for Servo and later embedded into Firefox.

[moritzwarhier]

Firefox and Safari developers dared the Chromium team to implement :has() and Houdini and this is the result!

/s

[dzhiurgis]

Yes, because nobody uses it

[deanc]

Presumably this affects all electron apps which embed chrome too? Don’t they pin the chrome version?

[comex]

Yes, but it's only a vulnerability if the app allows rendering untrusted HTML or visiting untrusted websites, which most Electron apps don't.

[seanhunter]

Lots of apps like slack and discord will show you an opengraph preview of a website if you post a link. I could of course be wrong but expect you could craft an exploit that just required you to be able to post the link - then it it would render the preview and trigger the problem.

Secondly as a sibling pointed out lots of apps have html ads so if you show a malicious ad it could also trigger. I’m old enough to remember the early google ads which which google made text-only specifically because google said that ads were a possible vector for malware. Oh how the turns have tabled.

[letrix]

Open Graph is a standard for HTML meta tags. Apps like Slack and Discord just make a request to the given URL (locally or in their servers) and read those tags. Then they choose how that information should be displayed. No HTML injection occurs.

https://ogp.me

[mixologic]

pretty sure I've had slack show me whole web pages without kicking me out to the mobile browser.

[spartanatreyu]

Except: Spotify (through ads), Microsoft Teams (through teams apps), Notion (through user embedded iframes), Obsidian (through user embedded iframes), VSCode (through extensions), etc...

[pjmlp]

Yeah, but lets keeping downplaying use-after-free as something not worth eliminating in 21st century systems languages.

[pheggs]

I love rust but honestly I am more scared about supply chain attacks through cargo than memory corruption bugs. The reason being that supply chain attacks are probably way cheaper to pull off than finding these bugs

[kibwen]

But this is irrelevant. If you're afraid of third-party code, you can just... choose not to use third-party code? Meanwhile, if I'm afraid of memory corruption in C, I cannot just choose not to have memory corruption; I must instead simply choose not to use C. Meanwhile, Chromium uses tons of third-party Rust code, and has thereby judged the risk differently.

[JoeAltmaier]

Maybe it's more complicated than that? With allocate/delete discipline, C can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C). But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for. By that point of view, we reverse the conclusion.

[nemothekid]

>can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C)

We are currently in a thread, where a major application has a heap corruption error in its CSS parser, and it's not even rare for such errors to occur. This doesn't seem true.

>But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for.

Last year there was a backdoor inserted into xz that was only caught because someone thought their CPU usage a little too high. I don't think the whole "C is safer because people don't use dependencies" is actually sound.

[stackghost]

>With allocate/delete discipline, C can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C)

The last 40-50 years have conclusively shown us that relying on the programmer to be disciplined, yourself included, does not work.

[JoeAltmaier]

That personal slam was inappropriate. Save it for other pop-culture sites.

[nagaiaida]

yes, people often invoke "simply write safer c" but that doesn't make it any more realistic of a proposition in aggregate as we keep seeing.

[JoeAltmaier]

Yet so many language features that 'help' with this issue, end up not helping. Null pointers are endemic in Java, as well as leaks. Heap fragmentation becomes difficult to address when the language hides it under layers of helpful abstraction.

In the end, discipline of some kind is needed. C is no different.

[cogman10]

If you can bring in 3rd party libraries, you can be hit with a supply chain attack. C and C++ aren't immune, it's just harder to pull off due to dependency management being more complex (meaning you'll work with less dependencies naturally).

[jacquesm]

It's not more complex in C or C++, you just have less of a culture of buying into a whole eco-system. C and C++ play nice with the build system that you bring, rather than that you are forced into a particular way of working.

It's 'just a compiler' (ok, a bit more than that). I don't need to use a particular IDE, a particular build system, a particular package manager or even a particular repository.

That is not to throw shade on those other languages, each to their own, but I just like my tools to stay in their lane.

Just like I have a drawer full of different hammers rather than one hammer with 12 different heads, a screwdriver, a hardware store and a drill attachment. I wouldn't know what to do with it.

[skydhash]

You’ll find more quality libraries in C because people don’t care about splitting them down to microscopic parcels. Even something like ‘just’ have tens of deps, including one to check that something is executable.

https://github.com/casey/just/blob/master/Cargo.toml

That’s just asking for trouble down the line.

[bigfatkitten]

You also won’t typically find C/C++ developers blinding yolo’ing the latest version of a dependency from the Internet into their CI/CD pipeline.

They’ll stick with a stable version that has the features they need until they have a good reason to move. That version will be one they’ve decided to ship themselves, or it’ll be provided by someone like Debian or Red Hat.

[pjmlp]

Unless of course they are using vcpkg, conan or FetchContent.

Most corporations are already using the likes of Nexus or JFrog Artifactory, regardless of the programming language.

[pheggs]

yes, the average amount of dependencies used per dependency appears to be much larger in rust and thats what I meant and is worrying me. In theory C can be written in a memory safe manner, and in theory rust can be used without large junks of supply vulnerabilities. both of these are not the case in practice though

[kibwen]

> both of these are not the case in practice though

No, people routinely write Rust with no third-party dependencies, and yet people do not routinely write C code that is memory-safe. Your threat model needs re-evaluating. Also keep in mind that the most common dependencies (rand, serde, regex, etc) are literally provided by the Rust project itself, and are no more susceptible to supply chain attacks than the compiler.

[dbdr]

One difference is that it's an incredibly hard problem to check whether your C code is memory safe since every single line of your code is a risk. On the other hand, it's easy to at least assess where your supply vulnerabilities lie (read Cargo.toml), and you can enforce your policy of choice (e.g. whitelist a few specific dependencies only, vendor them, etc).

[vsgherzi]

I'm sympathetic to the supply chain problem I even wrote a whole thing on it https://vincents.dev/blog/rust-dependencies-scare-me/

That being said as many above have pointed out you can choose not to bring in dependencies. The Chrome team already does this with the font parser library they limit dependencies to 1 or 2 trusted ones with little to no transitive dependencies. Let's not pretend C / C++ is immune to this we had the xz vuln not too long ago. C / C++ has the benefit of the culture not using as many dependencies but this is still a problem that exists. With the increase of code in the world due to ai this is a problem we're going to need to fix sooner rather than later.

I don't think the supply chain should be a blocker for using rust especially when once of the best C++ teams in the world with good funding struggles to always write perfect code. The chrome team has shown precedent for moving to rust safely and avoiding dependency hell, they'll just need to do it again.

They have hundreds of engineers many of which are very gifted, hell they can write their own dependencies!

[pheggs]

Yeah I am not saying don't use rust. But the average amount of dependencies used by a dependency makes a big difference in my opinion. The reality is, most people will use wast amounts of dependencies - especially in vibe coded environments, where LLMs try to save a few tokens.

The problem exists in C/C++ too, but the depth of dependencies are much smaller though, making the attack surface smaller, and damage gets spread to fewer products.

If I personally had to choose between a product written in C without dependencies to run on openbsd versus the same product written in rust with a few dependencies I would probably choose the C implementation. Even if there is a memory bug, if the underlying system is right they are extremely difficult/expensive to exploit. Abusing a supply chain on the other hand is very easy

[vsgherzi]

But the thing is these DO get exploited in the wild we see that again and again in high value targets like operating systems. That's why apple and google go to such high extremes to work in things like bounds checking. ROP JOB chains have gotten good and LLMS are even able to help these days (if you have the bankroll)

It's a culture problem and I still have hope we can change that. My big hope is that as more big players get into it, windows, linux, android, chome, we'll get high quality stand alone packages. Many of these products have to reach certain standards. We saw this recently with JPEGXL. It got accepted into chromium and they've been diligent as to not bring in additional external dependencies.

Projects like sudo-rs take the same approach. As always good engineers will make good code as more of a niche for rust gets carved out I belive we'll see an ecosystem more like c / cpp and less like nodejs (of course this is just my sepeculation)

[pheggs]

> But the thing is these DO get exploited in the wild we see that again and again in high value targets like operating systems.

Yes but so do supply chain attacks. I mean we both know there's never a way to be absolutely secure and it's all just about probability. The question is how to determine what product may have better chances. All I am saying is that I personally prioritize fewer dependencies over memory safety.

I like your optimism, which I unfortunately struggle to share. I believe the quality of code will go down, there will be a lot of vibe code, and in general inexperienced people who don't put in the cognitive effort to pay attention to it. As software gets cheaper with AI, it will also become increasingly difficult to find the good things in a sea of slop. A good time for all the security engineers though ;)

[chlorion]

The statistics we have on real world security exploits proves that most security exploits are not coming from supply chain attacks though.

Memory safety related security exploits happen in a steady stream in basically all non-trivial C projects, but supply chain attacks, while possible, are much more rare.

I'm not saying we shouldn't care about both issues, but the idea is to fix the low hanging fruit and common cases before optimizing for things that aren't in practice that big of a deal.

Also, C is not inherently invulnerable to supply chain attacks either!

[staticassertion]

Google already uses `cargo-vet` for rust dependencies.

[pheggs]

thats good, but it wont eliminate the risk

[staticassertion]

Nothing eliminates the risk but it is basically a best-in-class solution. If your primary concern is supply chain risk, there you go, best in class defense against it.

If anything, what are you doing about supply chain for the existing code base? How is cargo worse here when cargo-vet exists and is actively maintained by Google, Mozilla, and others?

[pheggs]

true, but rusts success in creating an easy to use dependency manager is the curse. In general rust software seems to use a larger amount of dependencies than c/c++ due to that, where each is at risk of becoming an attack vector. my prediction is that we will see some abuse of this in future, similar to what npm experienced

[ceteia]

https://materialize.com/blog/rust-concurrency-bug-unbounded-...

Edit: Replying to ghusbands:

'unsafe' is a core part of Rust itself, not a separate language. And it occurs often in some types of Rust projects or their dependencies. For instance, to avoid bounds checking and not rely on compiler optimizations, some Rust projects use vec::get_unchecked, which is unsafe. One occurrence in code is here:

https://grep.app/pola-rs/polars/main/crates/polars-io/src/cs...

And there are other reasons than performance to use unsafe, like FFI.

Edit2: ghusbands had a different reply when I wrote the above reply, but edited it since.

Edit3: Ycombinator prevents posting relatively many new comments in a short time span. And ghusbands is also wrong about his answer not being edited without him making that clear.

[pjmlp]

Those kind of arguments is like posting news about people still dying while wearing seat belts and helmets, ignoring the lifes that were saved by having them on.

By the way, I am having these kind of arguments since Object Pascal, back when using languages safer than C was called straighjacket programming.

Ironically, most C wannabe replacements are Object Pascal/Modula-2 like in the safety they offer, except we know better 40 years later for the use cases they still had no answer for.

[ceteia]

People made similar arguments regarding C++ versus Ada. The US military and defense industry even got something like a mandate in the 1990s to only write in Ada.

And then there was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 , where US$370 million was lost. The code was written in Ada.

And using seat belts and wearing helmets do not help in those cases where 'unsafe' is used to take the seat belts and helmets off. And that is needed in Rust in a number of types of cases, such as some types of performance-sensitive code.

[pjmlp]

Yes, people like to point out Ariane explosion, without going into the details, and missing out on F-35 budget explosion much worse, with ridiculous failures like having to reboot its avionics in flight.

It is like bringing the news of that lucky soul, that only survived a car crash, because it was thrown out of the car, managed to land in such a way that it survived the crash, survival statistics be dammed.

[ceteia]

Wasn't the F-35 budget "explosion", or overruns, caused in general by mismanagement? But I will not argue that C++ is perfect. Instead, the ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88 , where US$370 million was lost, with code written in Ada, is an example where Ada was presented as a safer language and even mandated in the military industry, but where it turned out less well in practice. Even proclaimed "safer" languages can have catastrophic failures, and one can suspect that they might even be less safe in practice, especially if they need mandates to be picked. Instead of Ada companies or other organizations lobbying to force industry to use their language, maybe it is better if there is free competition, and then the onus is on the software development companies to deliver high quality. Ada has improved since the 1990s, perhaps because it has been forced to compete fairly with C, C++ and other languages. Following that thinking, increased, not decreased, competition should be encouraged.

Your lucky soul analogy argument doesn't make any sense.

[ghusbands]

Yes, once you use 'unsafe' to bypass the safety model, you don't get safety.

Edit: If you reply with a reply, rather than edits, you don't get such confusion.

[StilesCrisis]

It would also require a sandbox escape to be a meaningful vulnerability.

Unfortunately, "seen in the wild" likely means that they _also_ had a sandbox escape, which likely isn't revealed publicly because it's not a vulnerability in properly running execution (i.e., if the heap were not already corrupted, no vulnerability exists).

[staticassertion]

I'd bet that the sandbox escape is just in the underlying operating system kernel and therefor isn't a matter for Chromium to issue a CVE.

[waynesonfire]

"Actually, you forgot Brave."

[mpeg]

I quoted directly from NIST, there's many other browsers and non-browsers that use chromium

[waynesonfire]

It was intended as a joke reference to the 2004 Kerry / Bush debate. It's not a coincidence that Google would leave off an ad-blocking variant of Chrome.

[order-matters]

they listed the top 3 most popular chromium browsers, covering 90%+ of chromium users

[ipaddr]

But not 90% of users here.

[pear01]

did you also take poland being omitted to be some sort of conspiracy? seems you missed the point of why that "Actually, you forgot..." moment became such a punchline. Like it or not Brave is a very niche browser with rather insignificant market share why you would expect them to be mentioned in the first place is entirely lost on me. there are dozens of chromium forks also with under 1% market share, should we be forced to mention them all?

[waynesonfire]

It semeed to me like an obvious telegraph of bias.

I understand the meme very well. What made the Poland meme was that Poland's membership in the coalition was irrelevant to the "grand coalition" narrative--Kerry's omission of Poland is therefore in the same vein as Google's.

[pear01]

If you understand the meme "very well" then what do you mean by "telegraph of bias"? The joke is that Poland was largely irrelevant compared to the United States in that context, making Bush's (and your own) comeback laughable. It's not a conspiracy or "bias" that you don't mention Poland or the other members of the coalition for the same reason you don't mention every single Chromium fork, because realistically its not relevant.

And just to get ahead of it, I sure hope you are not tempted to make an equivalency between a Polish death and not mentioning Brave in a vain effort to resuscitate your position. Because not only would that be extremely misplaced given you provided the clumsy reference in the first place, but Kerry's point in of itself doesn't negate that. You can both understand any life lost is a tragedy while also understand there is no "grand coalition" when the United States shares > 90% of the costs. Just like (even though again, these things should not be compared, but just to indulge the comparison you yourself invoked) maybe Brave or some other under 1% fork does some good things, but that doesn't mean it is relevant to list them for this kind of announcement or any time chromium comes up.

Honestly I have no idea what you're trying to say. Following the allusion to the meme you brought up would be to realize that saying "Actually, you forgot about Brave" is a funny thing to say because its irrelevant and thus a dumb thing to say. It seems you understand there is a joke being made here but perhaps don't realize you're on the wrong side of it.

[sumtechguy]

Steam and VSCode pop into my mind.