Re: On compilers and bounds checking (was: EMERGENCY: new remote

From: der Mouse (mouseat_private)
Date: Wed Jul 22 1998 - 05:17:14 PDT

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    > There will always be poor programmers out there so long as we don't
    > require authenticated IQ results with each software packages :).
    
    True.  But I'd place the period after "there".
    
    Even requiring "authenticated IQ results" wouldn't help much, though:
    
    (a) The presence of intelligence is no guarantee of its use.  (Anyone
    who's hung out with Mensans knows this.)
    
    (b) Even the best programmers make mistakes.  (I recently installed inn
    2.0.  It comes with inndstart, a little set-uid program that's designed
    to be small enough to be vetted by hand by paranoid sysadmins.  Reading
    over the code, I found two buffer overruns - sprintf of user data into
    a fixed-size buffer.  I've mailed inn-bugs about them, and don't mind
    mentioning them here anyway because they aren't obviously exploitable.
    My point is just that inn is *not* the work of the room-temperature IQ
    crowd, and it *still* has a classic buffer overrun, in a program
    specifically intended to be a tiny little secure do-one-thing.)
    
                                            der Mouse
    
                                   mouseat_private
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