It's Time to Abandon Insecure Languages

[Matthew Byng-Maddick]

On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 01:08:55PM -0700, bear wrote:
> Agreed.  And I particularly like Scheme.  However, it's also not
> hard to compile your C code with bounds checking turned on if you're
> willing to sacrifice maybe a few things you shouldn't be using anyay,
> so it's pretty inexcusable IMO to still be having buffer overflows.

Erm, what things do you think you can sacrifice? Pointer arithmetic,
perhaps, except that it's a fairly fundamental part of C. The problems
of buffer overflows are slightly screwy. Can you tell me, for example,
what the length of s needs to be on
a) a 32-bit machine
b) a 64-bit machine
and notice that most people don't even consider this.

  sprintf(s,"%l",long_val);

And, how big (on the same platforms) is:

  sprintf(s,"%lf",double_val);

You should also note that snprintf(3) is widely regarded as non-portable
due to its non-existence on many platforms.

Most code is susceptible to this kind of thing, because people don't
necessarily know to look for it.

MBM

-- 
Matthew Byng-Maddick         <mbm at colondot.net>           http://colondot.net/

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