Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/13/fbi_cisa_unforgivable_buffer_overflow/

by chrisjj • 1 year ago

15 9 1 year ago

gnabgib• 1 year ago

Source: https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/secure-design... (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43033450

Pet_Ant• 1 year ago

This is why I think it's so crucial to move Rust into the Linux kernel. It's not about new-school-cool vs old heads. It's not about getting off someone's lawn, it's about solving a really basic but important problem. Sure we can just get not into accidents and be rid of seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones, and ABS, but it's not a real world.

Any solution that just adds to C, will make it a new C, that will take years to prove itself and still require relearning and push-back.

I'd love a real world suggestion that does it better. The best I can imagine is annotations on C that are checkable formal methods... but that just sounds like reinventing the borrow-checker.

RKearney• 1 year ago

I'd just be happy if organizations stopped doing business with software vendors that still mandate disabling DEP, ASLR, and the dreaded "Please disable your antivirus before installing".

astrange3• 1 year ago

You'd be able to code memory bugs into an OS kernel written in Rust. It's the same problem as a JavaScript JIT - the fundamental operations it has to do are unsafe, so it doesn't matter what language it's in.

Among other things, you need more secure hardware to make progress.

yencabulator• 1 year ago

Able to, sure. As probable? Definitely not. Practically all kernel exploits are accidents in buffer handling.

(Getting machine-readable syscall descriptions that describe the rules for pointers to buffers and their lengths in ways that can get safe code generated from them would be a huge win, on top of "just use Rust".)

greatgib• 1 year ago

So much a joke, the "buffer overflow" that is a good perfect "straw man", when most current world issues are: intentional defects like backdoors, business logic failures, ...

stevetron• 1 year ago

A lot of coding needs to run on hardware for which there simply isn't a memory-safe alternative.

Can the mainframe over at the IRS swap-in Rust for all that legacy unsafe COBOL code?

astrange3• 1 year ago

Some memory-safe languages are capable of code generation. I think the ones that aren't should be.

Admittedly, I don't know any compiler backends that generate COBOL.

astrange3• 1 year ago

The headline sounds like there's a specific kind of bug called an unforgivable buffer overflow - was hoping to find out what it was.

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow

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