281–290 of 408 posts
Why don't Apple & Google spend a few billion dollars over a few years to rewrite their (non-crypto) unix stack from scratch? It seems like that would be an enduring competitive advantage, good for their users, and reduce future liabilities. Every programming language can result in bugs, but some are worse/more frequent/harder to solve afterwards than others. Better yet, why wasn't "rebuild commonly used standard libr…
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Apple, or Microsoft, or Samsung, or Ubuntu, or Google, or whoever can do all the system level bulletproofing they want. People will still write apps. And those apps, probably upwards of 99.999999% of them will be unsafe. It would take a sea change in the mindsets of software engineers globally to centralize the software development process around a security mindset. That's not going to happen unfortunately. The vast…
> And those apps, probably upwards of 99.999999% of them will be unsafe. Apps are sandboxed, so the damage should be limited to only the exploited app. Pegasus exploits exploited iMessage et al, which are Apple's own apps with special permissions.
AFAIK, the hacker broke out of the sandbox in addition to rooting iMessage.
Also, the surface area available to a sandbox is too large. Firecracker like VM isolation is required for safety, which Apple seems to be moving towards when it comes to parsing from their apps at least.
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It's worth engaging with the fact that essentially nobody disagrees with this (someone will here, but they don't matter), and that it's not happening not because Apple and Google don't want it to happen, but because it's incredibly, galactically hard to pull off. The Rust talent pool required to transition the entire attack surface of an iPhone from C, C++, and ObjC to Rust (substitute any other memory safe language,…
They wrote it the first time, didn't they? C isn't special, and training isn't special.
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Forcing their employees to learn rust doesn't mean Google has the capacity to rewrite all their software in rust. They have tons and tons of code which would need to be rewritten from scratch. Of course if they dropped all other development and told their employees to rewrite to rust, they may end up with a piece of software written in rust but no customers.
I agree, but there's so many people at Google (132,000 if you can believe the search results), it's hard for me to believe they couldn't devote a small percentage of them to moving to a secure stack.
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I was about to say the same thing in response to people claiming security is getting worse. Zero-Click is just another name for a worm. I guess mayyybe you could consider Zero-Click as more like a class of worm whose entry into the system is visible (you can see that you got the strange message or image). And you're definitely right that they are far more rare. Worms used to be nasty is now fast and easily they sprea…
Wormable bugs are a subset of zero-click bugs. Worms are very rare, and always have been, even during "the Summer of Worms".
Few vaguely reliable RCE bugs aren’t wormable. Even ones requiring significant user interaction are wormable, office macros are wormable.
Workable bugs are far more common than actual worms.
Why don't Apple & Google spend a few billion dollars over a few years to rewrite their (non-crypto) unix stack from scratch? It seems like that would be an enduring competitive advantage, good for their users, and reduce future liabilities. Every programming language can result in bugs, but some are worse/more frequent/harder to solve afterwards than others. Better yet, why wasn't "rebuild commonly used standard libr…
Why don't Apple & Google spend a few billion dollars over a few years to rewrite their (non-crypto) unix stack from scratch? It seems like that would be an enduring competitive advantage, good for their users, and reduce future liabilities. Every programming language can result in bugs, but some are worse/more frequent/harder to solve afterwards than others. Better yet, why wasn't "rebuild commonly used standard libr…
This is particularly true of the US government which, if you've seen their IT systems, is not going to be anyone sane's first choice for doing from-scratch rewrites.
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Nobody said it would be easy, but it is already happening. https://medium.com/@tinocaer/how-microsoft-is-adopting-rust-... https://preettheman.medium.com/this-is-what-apple-uses-rust-...
I don't think Apple is shipping anything customer facing that's built on Rust?
Not to go all 'Rust Evangelism Strike Force' but almost universally, these exploits leverage memory unsafety somewhere in the stack, usually in a parser of some kind (image, text, etc). The fact that this is still tolerated in our core systems is a pox on our industry. You don't have to use Rust, and it won't eliminate every bug (far from it), but memory safety is not optional . We truly need to work more towards eli…
Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just use a C compiler that produces memory-safe code? I'm sure someone else has already thought of this, but in case not... All you need to do is represent a pointer by three addresses - the actual pointer, a low bound, and a high bound. Then *p = 0 compiles to code that checks that the pointer is in bounds before storing zero there. I believe such a compiler would conform to the C stan…
Why don't Apple & Google spend a few billion dollars over a few years to rewrite their (non-crypto) unix stack from scratch? It seems like that would be an enduring competitive advantage, good for their users, and reduce future liabilities. Every programming language can result in bugs, but some are worse/more frequent/harder to solve afterwards than others. Better yet, why wasn't "rebuild commonly used standard libr…