A shitpost about languages that generate CVEs
Also, I like how this problem had a really simple solution all along
There really isn’t anything we can do to prevent memory safety vulnerabilities from happening if the programmer doesn’t want to write their code in a robust manner.
Yeah, totally, it’s all those faulty programmers fault. They should’ve written good programmes instead of the bad ones, but they just refuse to listen
Right, those devs with 20+ years C experience don’t know shit about the language and are just lazy. They don’t want to catch up with the times and write safe C. It’s me, the dude with 5 years of university experience who will set it straight. Look at my hello world program, not a single line of vulnerable code.
Yeah, for sure. Human error is involved in C and inertia too. New coding practices and libraries aren’t used, tests aren’t written, code quality sucks (variable names in C are notoriously cryptic), there’s little documentation, many things are rewritten (seems like everybody has rewritten memory allocation at least once), one’s casual void * is another’s absolute nono, and so on.
C just makes it really easy to make mistakes.
lol this same post got flagged and taken down from HN
The “C is bad trope” is getting way too old. I’m surprised the author didn’t plug Rust.
the only programming language in the world where these vulnerabilities regularly happen
Maybe because it’s one of the most widely used languages in the world…
The trope will be “old” once the mainstream view is no longer that C-style memory management is “good enough”.
That said, this particular vulnerability was primarily due to how signals work, which I understand to be kind of unavoidably terrible in any language.
A better language wouldn’t have any need to use POSIX signals in this way.
Well, one of the most widely used that allows to do low-level stuff. The most widely used one is by far JavaScript but good luck making an OS or a device driver with it
Oh gawd. That would be so horrible! Is there a project o compile JavaScript to bytecode? With like LLVM? There must be, but I haven’t heard of it. I shouldn’t even say anything because I will be better off pretending it doesn’t exist.
… the only language where 90% of the world’s memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years
Yeah… That’s a shit post alright.
I’m not a C developer myself, but that’s just a low blow. Also, uncited ;).
This is an overstatement, definitely. C is one of the few (mainstream) languages where memory safety vulnerabilities are even possible. So if you batch C and C++ together, they probably cover more than 90% of all the memory unsafe cove written in last 50 years, which is a strong implication that they will contribute to 90% of memory vulnerabilities.
All that said, memory vulnerabilities are about 65% of all high implact vulnerabilities on Chromium project[1] and about 70% of vulnerabilities at Microsoft [2].
