Is Python a safe language? It doesn’t seem to have the sorts of problems other languages do. Why is that?
The Insecurity Industry
151–160 of 386 posts
Re: The Insecurity Industry
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a professional software engineer I'm not sure the idea of "safe" or "unsafe" programming languages is a coherent idea, or if it is then all languages are unsafe in my eyes. Yes C/C++ have more footguns than Java but there's no "hard line" in the safety differences and there are real and important things that need doing that it's not always clear can be reasonably done in another language. If you haven't, I'd encou…
That paper has many problems. For example: > There is no particular need to rewrite existing C code, provided the same benefit can be obtained more cheaply by alternative implementations of C To be clear, those "alternative implementations" do not exist , and no-one actually working on C compilers or tools to make C code safer has been able to produce one, or even come up with a credible plan for producing one.
This is false. There are multiple safe C implementations. compcert and https://staff.aist.go.jp/y.oiwa/FailSafeC/index-en.html are two such.
Re: The Insecurity Industry
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have an awfully rosy view of how regulation of programming languages would play out. What will happen (and this is already de facto the case in many "safety-critical" industries) is that Rust is banned and everyone is forced to write straightjacketed C89 and C++03. There's already a congressman on the record complaining about a "native Nigerian" committing code to Rust.
> There's already a congressman on the record complaining about a "native Nigerian" committing code to Rust. Wow. It comes from the Libra hearing I guess? By any chance, do you have an link to the exact quote? Edit: as hsod answered below (I don't really get why this answer was flagged) the congressman isn't really “complaining” and it's not about a Nigerian committing to Rust, but to Libra itself.
It’s around 30 seconds of this clip https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4808083/user-clip-rust-langua...
“I went ahead and did a GitHub search on who’s actually leading the development on the Libra core side and it looks like, I think it’s gonna be international because it looks like a native Nigerian that’s actually building the actual Libra core in front of the code development of Libra core” - congressman Denver Riggleman (R-VA)
He lost his seat in 2020
Re: The Insecurity Industry
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
You have an awfully rosy view of how regulation of programming languages would play out. What will happen (and this is already de facto the case in many "safety-critical" industries) is that Rust is banned and everyone is forced to write straightjacketed C89 and C++03. There's already a congressman on the record complaining about a "native Nigerian" committing code to Rust.
> There's already a congressman on the record complaining about a "native Nigerian" committing code to Rust. Wow. It comes from the Libra hearing I guess? By any chance, do you have an link to the exact quote? Edit: as hsod answered below (I don't really get why this answer was flagged) the congressman isn't really “complaining” and it's not about a Nigerian committing to Rust, but to Libra itself.
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Re: The Insecurity Industry
#155I'm not going to comment on Snowden's view of what liberal western states do when it comes to surveillance. I have my own opinion, but he's been right about stuff I'd disagreed with him in the past before so I'm gun shy about confronting his ideas again. On the topic of unsafe language though, he's absolutely right. We don't have to put up with this. We could pass a law and ban new code in unsafe languages from natio…
Instead of banning unsafe languages how about allowing for tort liability for software? There is a big difference in law between software and other engineering like building bridges. It used to be that software failures were not as severe as a collapsing bridge - but we are close to the point where it reverses.
Re: The Insecurity Industry
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
C and C++ are really versatile, why are there no safe libraries for them (or are there?). If you want to make buffer overflows impossible then add a library that does so and use it. If you want safer memory handling use a library. Or extend C and C++ with standard libraries that are safer to use. Java is implemented in C so anything Java can do, C can do. Many languages are actually implemented in C. What is this fas…
Saying that Java is safe therefor you can write safe C is not actually sensible. The JVM is a virtual machine that runs user's programs, and those programs are in a memory safe language. That doesn't mean the JVM is memory safe... at all. It's like saying "llvm is in C++, and llvm is used to compile Rust, therefor C++ is as safe as Rust". It's just not a tractable argument. As for the rest of your post, sure, you can…
You can actually make a safe C implementation without creating a whole new language, see my other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969373
Re: The Insecurity Industry
#157Is Python a safe language? It doesn’t seem to have the sorts of problems other languages do. Why is that?
Most interpreted languages are "safer" in this regard as they don't leave the memory management up to their users. The interpreter itself could still have such bugs, but that's a comparably much smaller attack surface and has far more eyes on it that any random person's code, so these are less frequent.
And it's not just fully interpreted languages - any language that manages memory for your and doesn't let you mess with it yourself (like Java, C#...) will be safer, assuming the compiler and runtime are secure.
Re: The Insecurity Industry
#158It feels like we've gone full circle back to 1980 when the US Defense comissioned a 'safe' embedded language.
Jean Ichbiah's team won this contract with the language 'Green' in 1979. They subsequently went on to further develop this and standardize it in what was then the Ada 83 language standard.
The more I think about the more it feels that Ada just came about to solve the right problem but at the wrong time.
Re: The Insecurity Industry
#159I doubt "real" engineering is better. It's just that attacking its artifacts doesn't scale, so it looks more secure. In fact, the average bridge or skyscraper is probably absolutely riddled with serious design and manufacturing flaws
I'm not a civic engineer, but I know some, and that doesn't ring true. I know, for example, that with regards to the NYC subway post-9/11 there was rigorous work to plan and implement safety measures against various terrorist threats. That included modeling the impact of various types of bombs in different parts of NYC's subway tunnels, etc. This work was mandated for projects that were, in aggregate, likely billions…
Attacking a cell phone is different in some ways from attacking a subway system though.
The cell phone's defenses are effectively 100% automated, and the attacker can buy a perfect copy of their intended target's phone to and safely try out an indefinite number of attacks on this copy until that attack is perfected. Once the attack is ready it can be deployed with very little exposure to the attackers. If the attack doesn't work, the attackers are unlikely to be discovered and you can make another attempt.
Attacking a subway system in comparison, the planning will be done based on diagrams and theory, the attackers only get one attempt, many of the defenses will be unknown, the target environment is highly unpredictable, includes human defenders, and even if successful the attackers will likely either die or spend the rest of their lives imprisoned.
Re: The Insecurity Industry
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a professional software engineer I'm not sure the idea of "safe" or "unsafe" programming languages is a coherent idea, or if it is then all languages are unsafe in my eyes. Yes C/C++ have more footguns than Java but there's no "hard line" in the safety differences and there are real and important things that need doing that it's not always clear can be reasonably done in another language. If you haven't, I'd encou…
Certainly there's no boundary that clearly delineates "safe" and "unsafe" languages. But certain languages (like C and C++, for instance) have built-in footguns. They were built in for various important reasons, but right now many of these reasons are not as pressing anymore. We can take something like Ada, Rust, OCaml instead, or at least use the extensive tooling that allows to statically check programs written in…
Then punish defects. Give programmers the freedom to define their semantic space, but make sure to punish profit-seeking entities for insecure behavior. It's not that simple of course (it's easier for FB to pay a fine than a startup, for example), but we need to enforce the cost of defects at the organization level. I mean, there's also a world where FB apologizes about how they "forgot" to remove `unsafe` from a part of Rust code.