Clearing sensitive in-memory data in perl

[Adam Shostack]

On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 08:36:11PM +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
| Adam Shostack wrote:
| >On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 11:40:26AM -0400, Victor Duchovni wrote:
| >| On Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 11:53:20AM +0100, Ben Laurie wrote:
| >| 
| >| > >My view is that C is fine, but it needs a real library and programmers
| >| > >who learn C need to learn to use the real library, with the bare-metal
| >| > >C-library used only by library developers to bootstrap new safe
| >| > >primitives.
| >| > 
| >| > So wouldn't the world be a better place if we could all agree on a 
| >| > single such library? Or at least, a single API. Like the STL is for 
| >C++.
| >| > 
| >| 
| >| Yes, absolutely, but who is going to do it?
| >
| >The glibc people?  The openbsd people?
| >
| >I recall that for a while if you used gets, the linker would
| >complain.  I can't recall what platform this was on.  BSDi, maybe?
| 
| gets is so not the problem. Using strings that _can_ overflow is the 
| problem. That means wrapping the entire standard library.
| 
| And, of course, the issue is that every other library in the universe 
| uses C-style strings (etc.), so unless we can all agree on a better 
| paradigm, we're screwed.

I didn't mean to imply that gets was the issue, only that when your
linker laughed at you for trying to use a function, it was an
encouragement to move to other functions.  That is it possible to get
people to move, when there's something to move to.

Adam

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