Quote of the week [LWN.net]

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 21, 2006 0:18 UTC (Sat) by intgr (subscriber, #39733)
In reply to: Quote of the week by sbergman27
Parent article: Quote of the week

Consider that:
(1) Video driver code is uninteresting for crackers since there are so many levels of indirection between the network/file formats and the graphics driver, that even if a bug was found, it will likely be impossible to exploit without direct access to the computer or the X server.
(2) Binary BLOBs take *much* more effort to audit since all the attacker has is the assembly code - which has to be reverse engineered and understood first.

Given these conditions that make auditing binary video drivers particularly unattractive, I think it's grossly unfair to compare it to an average piece of OSS code.

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Quote of the week

Posted Oct 21, 2006 14:02 UTC (Sat) by mday_ii (subscriber, #25315) [Link]

I was first exposed to the acronym "BLOB" in the late 80's by RDBMS developers. It meant "Binary Large OBject." Hence when I see "Binary BLOB" I read it as "Binary Binary Large Object."

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 21, 2006 17:57 UTC (Sat) by dirtyepic (subscriber, #30178) [Link]

try Binary Bigasshuge Large OBject

Quote of the week

Posted Oct 21, 2006 18:40 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767) [Link]

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that closed source code is inherently more secure than OSS code.