Note that you can also upgrade Google Chrome by going to he 3 vertical dots menu, Help -> About Google Chrome.
I reckon that’s a little less scary for inexperienced users than typing in an arcane URL into the address bar…
Serious Chrome zero-day
281–290 of 377 posts
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux is another good example how C doesn't cut it, even among top developers. They have a very strict patch review process in place. They have kernel static analysers. The kernel has been adding security gates through the years. Yet 68% of 2018 CVE's were caused by memory corruption bugs, with the others ones left out being UB, numeric conversions, and very tiny fraction remaining of the logic error kind that are bo…
I still wonder what the plans for Fuchsia are. Is Google really thinking about just throwing out the millions of man-years which have been sunk into Linux?
They don't need to please everyone, just make their use case work.
Also porting the drivers to Fuschia should be relatively easy, thanks the Treble changes that kind of made their Android Linux kernel into a kind of hybrid-microkernel.
Android is already being ported to run on top of Fuchsia.
Google isn't the only one, the IoT space is getting crowed with BSD/MIT/Apache POSIX compatible OSes, including Zephyr from Linux Foundation, which is completly unrelated to Linux.
28 years ago no would would believe that Linux distributions would eventually kill commercial UNIX.
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question is, how much effort is it to keep users safe given language X vs C++. Apparently, when the language is C++, the value is somewhere above many millions of dollars, and we don't know what it is. Can we reasonably expect that price to be lower with language X? For many reasons, I would argue 'yes'.
I suggest that the most expedient (cheapest) language to migrate the existing code base to would be a memory safe subset of C++ [1]. In practice most of the safety benefit could be obtained from a just a partial migration. Specifically, just banning raw pointers/views/spans and non-bounds-checked arrays and vectors. From a quick glance at the code in the (quite small) patch diff, the code in question includes: DOMArr…
Ug. After closer inspection, it looks like those particular raw pointers seem to be managed by a garbage collector. (Specifically, the "Blink GC" [1].) As others have pointed out, this particular bug may not actually be a C++ issue. (Or at least not a typical one.)
[1] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/thir...
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#284I'll be that guy. Chrome has probably invested > 1 billion dollars into their codebase at this point. Certainly >100million into security. They sandbox their code aggressively . They build this project with security in mind from day 1 - it's been architected for it. The Chrome security team(s) has a lot of power for a product security org. They fuzz. They invent new fuzzers. They cluster their fuzzers. They have a wo…
Your claim that Chrome can be used a lesson in choosing programming languages is quite weak, because almost no one will build such a complex application and despite the risk all successful browsers still chose C++. An application that: a) has downloading and executing untrusted code as its main feature b) supports a ton of media formats, with DRM to boot c) is going through rapid changes, including adding very comple…
>Firefox is the only odd one out, slowly but surely sliding into irrelevance.
That is very false.
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#285Darn, now I have to update chromium and get the new tab design. I've been avoiding it for a while.
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#286This is why you don’t run TV ads stating you’re completely immune to viruses.
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#287I'll be that guy. Chrome has probably invested > 1 billion dollars into their codebase at this point. Certainly >100million into security. They sandbox their code aggressively . They build this project with security in mind from day 1 - it's been architected for it. The Chrome security team(s) has a lot of power for a product security org. They fuzz. They invent new fuzzers. They cluster their fuzzers. They have a wo…
> you can't write safe C++ in a codebase this complex.
And yet they did. And it worked great for more than a decade. Until just today when someone found...one.
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#288I'll be that guy. Chrome has probably invested > 1 billion dollars into their codebase at this point. Certainly >100million into security. They sandbox their code aggressively . They build this project with security in mind from day 1 - it's been architected for it. The Chrome security team(s) has a lot of power for a product security org. They fuzz. They invent new fuzzers. They cluster their fuzzers. They have a wo…
Linux is another good example how C doesn't cut it, even among top developers. They have a very strict patch review process in place. They have kernel static analysers. The kernel has been adding security gates through the years. Yet 68% of 2018 CVE's were caused by memory corruption bugs, with the others ones left out being UB, numeric conversions, and very tiny fraction remaining of the logic error kind that are bo…
And almost every operating system in the world is written in C by top developers who are in the know. If there was a better way, everyone would do it, but they don't.
Let's quit pretending that any software written in any other language would be more secure and have less bugs.
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#289I'll be that guy. Chrome has probably invested > 1 billion dollars into their codebase at this point. Certainly >100million into security. They sandbox their code aggressively . They build this project with security in mind from day 1 - it's been architected for it. The Chrome security team(s) has a lot of power for a product security org. They fuzz. They invent new fuzzers. They cluster their fuzzers. They have a wo…
Your claim that Chrome can be used a lesson in choosing programming languages is quite weak, because almost no one will build such a complex application and despite the risk all successful browsers still chose C++. An application that: a) has downloading and executing untrusted code as its main feature b) supports a ton of media formats, with DRM to boot c) is going through rapid changes, including adding very comple…
Your last two sentences have nothing to do with language choice.
Re: Serious Chrome zero-day
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux is another good example how C doesn't cut it, even among top developers. They have a very strict patch review process in place. They have kernel static analysers. The kernel has been adding security gates through the years. Yet 68% of 2018 CVE's were caused by memory corruption bugs, with the others ones left out being UB, numeric conversions, and very tiny fraction remaining of the logic error kind that are bo…
And almost every operating system in the world is written in C by top developers who are in the know. If there was a better way, everyone would do it, but they don't. Let's quit pretending that any software written in any other language would be more secure and have less bugs.
Let stop hand waving C security exploits caused by top developers, in spite of best practices.
C only got outside UNIX in the mid-90's.
Its ubiquity is an historical accident, by no means permanent, and thankfully some vendors are finally walking away from it, as proven by Microsoft security advisor for future Windows development best practices.