SEPostgres

Posted Sep 15, 2011 4:58 UTC (Thu) by dpquigl (guest, #52852)
In reply to: SEPostgres by Cyberax
Parent article: PostgreSQL 9.1 released

Safe languages aren't a miracle cure. For example type JRE into the CVE database and you find a couple hundred exploits against just the JRE [1]. Then there is one of my favorites from last year [2].

[1]http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/search-results?query=JR...
[2]http://blog.cr0.org/2010/04/javacalypse.html

SEPostgres

Posted Sep 15, 2011 12:52 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

Duh. VMs also should be written in a safe language.

Additionally, JVM's trust model and Code Access Security in CLR are braindead and should die.

SEPostgres

Posted Sep 15, 2011 18:58 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

if the VM is what's required to implement a safe language, you have a chicken and egg problem. somehow you need to implement a safe language in an unsafe language or you never get started, at that point everything is tainted and vulnerable.

SEPostgres

Posted Sep 15, 2011 20:30 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, we already have Jikes RVM (Research Virtual Machine) - that's a JVM implemented in Java. It does have a problem of chicken-and-egg, but it's solved with a fairly small layer for direct RAM management and other utility functions.

There will be problems with insecurely JIT-ed machine code, but I believe they can also be solved.

SEPostgres

Posted Sep 22, 2011 4:53 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

Periodically partisans of ${LANGUAGE} appear to tell the world that all existing software is doomed to be rewritten in ${LANGUAGE} within the next 5 years. Normally there are objections by reasonable people like "but I need to process text, and ${LANGUAGE} isn't very good at that" or "but I need to poke memory registers, and ${LANGUAGE} runs in a managed environment." These objections from lesser mortals are swept aside by the high priests of ${LANGUAGE} as the misguided rantings of the uninitiated.

But lets assume that "this time is different" and you really succeed in rewriting absolutely everything in ${LANGUAGE}. Well, once you have this perfect operating system (we'll assume it's bug-free, despite being written by humans), running on perfect hardware which somehow exists, you'll still get hacked.

Why? Because you'll give a login to someone who has a password sniffer installed on his computer. Or put his password on a post-it note near the monitor. Or who uses the same login for multiple accounts, one of which gets hacked. Or who uses a password that can be guessed. Or who you never should have trusted in the first place. Or any one of the million ways that your security can be breached that have nothing to do with what language your operating system is written in.