DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language [LWN.net]

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 3, 2022 13:16 UTC (Tue) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589)
In reply to: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language by farnz
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

>The documentation written by the programmer asserts several security claims that are true on the assumption that a secure keystore is used, and false otherwise.

This is an error in the downstream software, not in Hare. We cannot prevent programmers from making untruthful claims about their software. And, *again*, storing secrets in the heap in the face of the lack of a kernel-managed keystore *does not directly make your program insecure*.

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DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 3, 2022 13:40 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

It's also a bug in Hare, because it claims to be a secure keystore, but it's not on some systems. And while storing secrets in the heap does not directly make your program insecure, I'm not talking about that - I'm referring to the case where the program does things to ensure that it's secure as long as the keys are not on the heap or stack outside of the times they're used.

And again, it's trivial to fix in Hare - just an is_secure_store function that returns true on Linux, false on other platforms for now.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 3, 2022 13:43 UTC (Tue) by ddevault (subscriber, #99589) [Link] (1 responses)

Again, the "claims" it makes are, verbatim, the following:

> On platforms without a suitable feature, a fallback implementation stores the secrets in the process heap, providing no security. This is an opportunistic API which allows your program to take advantage of these features if available.

In my opinion, this is very clear.

DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language

Posted May 3, 2022 13:45 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

And in my opinion, it's not clear at all - which platforms have secure storage? How do I tell my users that they've chosen a platform that doesn't work the way I want it to? How do I prevent use of the keystore when it's not actually secure?