ioctl() forever?

It was yesterday I was commented that modern security practice is to layer incomplete speedbumps one by one and call it "defense in depth." This was in response to new bypass of the M1's hardware pointer checking, a "last line of defense."

None of these half-baked measures qualify as defense in depth. Anyone who calls it that is kidding themselves. They're deployed one by one with large time spans inbetween, reactively to whatever attackers currently favor. It should come as no surprise that attackers have no problem paying a low continual cost to work around each new measure, in return for continued ability to exploit hosts.

Meanwhile, we plaster over the undefined behavior that makes C/C++ static analysis impractical. We don't even talk about how CPUs work. We continue to ignore that actual exploit *theory* exists, like the Weird Machine whose wikipedia page starts: "Exploits exist empirically, but were not studied from a theoretical perspective prior to the emergence of the framework of weird machines." This makes it impossible to analyze systems holistically, and to find and shut out entire classes of exploits.

Civil engineering eventually got past "I think we can cut a small hole in this wall" and reached "lets calculate the loads and strains." Electrical engineering stopped electrocuting frogs and developed Maxwell's laws. Right now computing is still far behind all others and until formal methods and theory take over, we won't ever make statements like "this bridge will stand for 100 years."