Re: Thoughts on Shellshock and beyond

[Florian Weimer <fweimer () redhat com>]

On 10/14/2014 11:45 PM, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> The most obvious example of an underused tool is memory-safe languages.
> Shellshock would not have been countered by them,
> but Heartbleed (and many others) *would* have been countered.

Buffer reuse is common in languages with memory safety (so that I/O 
throughput is not bounded by garbage collector throughput).  The impact 
is reduced (you only leak prior buffer contents, whatever that might be, 
not anything which happens to be in the vicinity on the heap).  But I 
don't think it's true that memory safety prevents such information leaks.

--
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security