33rd Chaos Communication Congress Livestreams • Hacker News Board

Re: 33rd Chaos Communication Congress Livestreams

#41

Post by Mithaldu » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 10:38 PM UTC

fnord123 wrote: post #39

Mithaldu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He found vulnerabilities in (very old) third-party software written in Perl (that's the 1%) then did nothing but lie and attribute them to the language while demonstrating his (accidental or willful) lack of understanding of the language. His code slides often aren't even valid Perl, which is an achievement in itself.

Are you talking about CGI.pm? That was removed from core modules in 5.22 (in 2015) which was only the year before his talk. Debian Jesse even has Perl 5.20 as the stable version[1]. Centos 7 ships with 5.16. Of course you can have your sysadmin install an up to date version, but CGI.pm is still in play as part of Perl. Maybe this year he'll talk about Perl 6 since 5.x is all old hat. ;) [1] https://packages.debian.or…

No, the vulns were in software that used CGI.pm and used it naive ways. CGI.pm had a design decision in its API, that can lead to, but does not constitute a vulnerability, and is a feature to those using it appropiately.

Re: 33rd Chaos Communication Congress Livestreams

#42

Post by Mithaldu » Tue, Dec 27, 2016, 10:53 PM UTC

berdario wrote: post #32

Mithaldu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He found vulnerabilities in (very old) third-party software written in Perl (that's the 1%) then did nothing but lie and attribute them to the language while demonstrating his (accidental or willful) lack of understanding of the language. His code slides often aren't even valid Perl, which is an achievement in itself.

I watched both of his talks, but I've never heard before about this "code on the slide was not valid Perl" complaint. You're not talking about a small typo, are you? Can you point to the wrong examples/slides?

Examples, with explanation of wrong in comment. First talk:

  print $hash;   # he accompanied this by a dump of the hash, when in reality it would print the reference id
  print ($a, $b, $c);   # same thing as above, pretends it does a dump, when the reality is wildly different

He does these repeatedly in his second talk:

  $arg1, $arg2 = @_;   # assigns the length of @_ to $arg2, instead of unpacking args. only the newest of newbies would get this wrong
  if(ref $arg1 eq 'HASH') print $arg1{'key'};   # perl does not have block-less pre-fixed ifs
  else print $arg1;   # same with this, entirely nonsense

The entire style of his code (paren-usage, quoted hash keys) also smells of code copied from bad (w3schools) perl tutorials.

Re: 33rd Chaos Communication Congress Livestreams

#43

Post by berdario » Wed, Dec 28, 2016, 12:09 PM UTC

Mithaldu wrote: post #42

berdario wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watched both of his talks, but I've never heard before about this "code on the slide was not valid Perl" complaint. You're not talking about a small typo, are you? Can you point to the wrong examples/slides?

Examples, with explanation of wrong in comment. First talk: print $hash; # he accompanied this by a dump of the hash, when in reality it would print the reference id print ($a, $b, $c); # same thing as above, pretends it does a dump, when the reality is wildly different He does these repeatedly in his second talk: $arg1, $arg2 = @_; # assigns the length of @_ to $arg2, instead of unpacking args. only the newest of ne…

Yeah, quite damning and sloppy on his behalf...

Thanks for pointing this stuff out!