On Fri, 2014-04-11 at 17:27 -0400, Ted Byers wrote: <some snipping>
I love this paragraph:
+++···················· Lessons
What can we learn from this?
I'm a fan of C. It was my first programming language and it was the first language I felt comfortable using professionally. But I see its limitations more clearly now than I have ever before. ····················++-
My C teacher, about two decades ago, warned us /against/ using C. he spent hours stressing problems with C and how unsafe it was. Apparently, he had been doing some type of audit of C compilers for a government agency, I think. He could not talk about the details, but he was scared, and transmitted some of it to us...
I'm not a fan of C. But I have been paid to use it, so I used it.
His first two recommendations, generally, is the more useful.
He also said we ought to:
1) Pay money for security audits of critical security infrastructure like OpenSSL 2) Write lots of unit and integration tests for these libraries 3) Start writing alternatives in safer languages
When people do not heed warnings from mistakes is recent history, you are bound to make them again. "Pay money for security audits of critical security infrastructure" two weeks before it became publically known that Diginotar was seriously compromised, the company was audited by PWC. Not an administrative audit, but a technical one..... Auditors themselves must be audited them selves, and _ALL_ audit results should be made public (to avoid ending up in a drawer) One might say, that the biggest contribution of Snowdon is, that we all should have learned, that our blind trust in organisations and gouvernements is unfounded. Regarding openssl: it's been compared with menure and spaggetti, almost impossible to test or understand what pieces of code are supposed to be doing. The whole strength op opensource in general, is when lots of people can and will look at the code, and bad pieces are removed. In this case, the original coder detected its "feature" after some years. Clearly this piece of code wasn't reviewed intensively enough. Isn't that what Poul-Henning Kamp has been saying for some time.... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org