61–70 of 102 posts
I would seriously recommend against building your own network stack for production use. Or writing your own web server for production use. Or database (whatever SQL or NoSQL) also for production use. These sort of things are more complicated than you could expect and have plentiful pitfalls. Whatever you can do in reasonable amount of time is probably not that good compared to existing alternatives. If you have actua…
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This is just an opinion and not a very sensible one at that. The Linux TCP/IP stack is one of the most scrutinized network stacks in the world and more than likely free of bugs that coud lead to a server takeover.
This article might be a bit tongue-in-cheek but it's actually something I've been thinking seriously about for a while. I can imagine a future where every country and company writes their own operating system and that might actually be a very good thing. There is a security advantage in not using popular technology stacks and rebuilding everything public-facing in-house. Because with Mythos-level AI capabilities, it…
This article might be a bit tongue-in-cheek but it's actually something I've been thinking seriously about for a while. I can imagine a future where every country and company writes their own operating system and that might actually be a very good thing. There is a security advantage in not using popular technology stacks and rebuilding everything public-facing in-house. Because with Mythos-level AI capabilities, it…
They won't be compatible with each other, guaranteed. Compatibility in reality comes from everyone using the same reference implementations that have been compatibility-tested, not from everyone implementing the same specifications.
its been very sad for me to see standardization get ignored, and the implementation become the point of reference. for a long time the only way to implement QUIC was to try to extract it from the Chromium code base - a pointless waste of time. but they spec for years was a couple of pages of meeting notes and a sample compression dictionary.
if we continue down this road we are impeding our own ability to evolve. if compatibility is defined by the implementation then were left with nasty balls of antiquated source that we carefully move around and try to plumb into our new environments, but no one really understands.
at the core, things like IP are very straightforward. we can and should specify the semantics of every bit, and have a wide variety of other implementations to test against. this provides a path for us to build new techniques and environments that are still useful in the world that exists today.
The real nightmare scenario is not just finding a vulnerability in the Linux network stack but finding vulnerabilities at the protocol level in TCP/IP itself or HTTP. That’s a problem that cannot be fixed. Has there ever been a precedent for this in computing?
This is just an opinion and not a very sensible one at that. The Linux TCP/IP stack is one of the most scrutinized network stacks in the world and more than likely free of bugs that coud lead to a server takeover.
They thought QubesOS was secure but they found a trivial sandbox escape to root today.
All software is to be considered insecure, formally speaking.
Everyone should build their own ** is the general advise I would give just about anything. Otherwise it is hard to appreciate how much effort it goes into things that we take for granted. Everything looks simple from the outset until you try to build it yourself.
I recently saw this guy on HN who had written a web server for an Atmel AVR and also implemented a TCP/IP stack to boot. It obviously was far from feature complete, but it did work. He used SLIP to communicate with the "server."
well that's the trick. If you look at implementing a Web browser or a physics engine you instantly give up, and you are right about it, it's just too hard. If instead you write a partial HTTP client which can display some text from a URL or have a 3D scene and in it an object Y coordinates get smaller each millisecond then suddenly in terms of the essence of each, you are 80% there really. Now if you want to implement the "rest" you might need an entire lifetime, or more. Still IMHO it's definitely worth doing very compact and limited versions of all those in order to learn, even if done only once in your life.
Huh, I thought the thesis was going to be "... because it's a good learning experience everyone should do to understand how networking works" but the reason offered comes down to security. However, I'm going to go with what I had thought originally and actually make this an assignment for students. Anyone have experience witht that, could this be done in a semester?
the parts I was most proud of was (a) your score was directly related to the number of tests passing, so you know in advance what your score would be and could decide how much effort. (b) every assignment came with a relevant visualization that showed things like the routing table as a directed graph, or the TCP sequence diagram. I was available in the lab for a good 2-3 hours a day on weekdays to answer questions.
I think some of the students got a pretty good picture of how things worked, but the overwhelming opinion was that it was just too much work. a lot of the students just copied off each other. we also had quarters, so ...