Re: MIT discovered issue with gcc

Miles, the GCC developers don't consider this to be a bug, and so I doubt
that any of it will be "fixed". For example, here is a "bug" cited in the
paper:

http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30475

If you have a moment, read through that thread. It gets pretty testy as the
developers argue over whether or not it's a bug. Eventually it was closed
as "invalid', i.e. not really a true bug. It's not just GCC, either. Take a
look at this series of blog posts by the LLVM team:

http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-shou...

Compiler developers, for better or worse, reserve the right to do whatever
they want with undefined behavior, and it's up to the person writing the C
code to not include undefined behavior in their own program.

Therefore, a Linux distribution has 2 choices: (1) wait for upstream
patches for bugs/vulnerabilities as they are found, or (2) recompile all
packages with optimizations disabled. I don't think proposal #2 would get
very far...



On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>wrote:

> Going back through the discussion on this thread, I'm taken by two main
> reactions:
>
> - discussion of the specific class of bugs/security holes
> - a lot of comments that "this is an issue for upstream"
>
> What I haven't seen, so I'll add it to the discussion, is that this
> strikes me as an issue for "WAY upstream" - i.e., if gcc's optimizer is
> opening a class of security holes - then it's gcc that has to be fixed,
> after which that class of holes would go away after the next build of any
> impacted package.
>
> Miles Fidelman
>
>
>
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