[OffTopic] A vulnerability postmortem on Network Security Services

[Paulo Pinto]

On Thursday, 2 December 2021 at 11:44:28 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> On Thursday, 2 December 2021 at 11:27:01 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>
>> Another nail in the coffin of C.  Still many more nails to go, 
>> but the inevitable draws ever nearer.
>>
>>
>> T
>
> Would it be impossible to add bounds checking in C?
>
> It's been over 4 decades and it seems like there is some 
> profound resistance to add this.

Yes, mostly due to culture, all major C compilers have extensions 
and secure libraries.

For example,

https://access.redhat.com/blogs/766093/posts/1976213

https://access.redhat.com/blogs/766093/posts/3606481

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Object-Size-Checking.html#Object-Size-Checking

Red-Hat and Android make use of FORTIFY_SOURCE among other 
features, for example,

https://source.android.com/devices/tech/debug/native-memory

Oracle has given up almost a decade ago, that is why Solaris on 
SPARC is basically a C Machine, thanks ADI.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37838_01/html/E61059/gqajs.html

While Intel has borked their MPX implementation, ARM also got 
into the C Machine concept, which is being adopted across mobile 
OSes.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/preparing_your_app_to_work_with_pointer_authentication

https://source.android.com/devices/tech/debug/tagged-pointers

So eventually hardware memory tagging will take care of killing 
processes that don't behave, and we will have C Machines with 
memory tagging, because the powers that could fix the language 
don't want to (ISO C, WG 14).