Secure Coding mailing list archives

BSIMM: Confessions of a Software SecurityAlchemist(informIT)


From: ljknews at mac.com (ljknews)
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 09:11:05 -0400

At 11:41 PM -0400 3/20/09, Gary McGraw wrote:

once long ago I spilt a bottle of wine with dan geer

we argued for hours about whether a buffer overflow was
a bug or a flaw.  if you find one in a code pile (say,
caused by a local variable on the stack and a gets call) ,
it is a bug.  Or is it a flaw that the C stack grows in
an incredibly stupid way?

That reasoning has a bit of not being able to see the forest
for the trees.

The root problem (and I do not care about the terminology)
is that the C programming language promotes the use of
uncounted strings.
-- 
Larry Kilgallen


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