[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]
Message-ID: <200310270511.h9R5B111009187@turing-police.cc.vt.edu>
From: Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu (Valdis.Kletnieks@...edu)
Subject: Coding securely, was Linux (in)security
On Sun, 26 Oct 2003 23:07:18 EST, Bill Royds <full-disclosure@...ds.net> said:
> such as OpenSSH has been found to have security problems. If you look at
> security advisories, find out how many come from Ada code. C makes it hard
> to write secure code.
I wasn't aware there was enough of a code base of actual Ada programs out in
the wild for there to be statistically valid results. I gave up on any
prospects of Ada when the DoD dropped the requirement that the compiler and
runtime support libraries pass the test suite for exception handling because
otherwise *no* compilers would validate. Given this, and the truly huge and
byzantine nature of the *rest* of the language, I'm not convinced that Ada was
actually any good for writing *secure* code.
Think about how many programs have had bugs because programmers didn't
understand how *their particular* C++ compiler (in the current version, as
opposed to the version 6 months ago) handled constructors, and consider that
Ada was even worse. True, it may have been safe against simple buffer
overflows, but a breeding ground for more subtle bugs caused by
misunderstanding the semantics of *all* the language features.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 226 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/attachments/20031027/3ab62cbe/attachment.bin
Powered by blists - more mailing lists