Re: Anyone looked at security features of D programming language compared to Spark?

[Crispin Cowan <crispin () immunix com>]

Jim & Mary Ronback wrote:

I am hard put to find an example of a language feature which makes a 
system more secure but less safe or vice versa, in any context. Can 
anyone else think of one?


Dynamic type checking (or any kind of run-time fail-stop checking) 
enhances security (attacks are halted) but degrades reliability 
(processes that might live with a harmlessly inconsistent state may be 
halted).


Now, that is in isolation, considering only the language impact on an 
individual process, in response to Jim/Mary's question. Of course you 
can compose fail-stop mechanisms with redundancy techniques to archive 
strong availability in the presence of weak individual process 
reliability. In fact, it is much easier to achieve high availability in 
the presence of fail-stop failure modes instead of Byzantine failure modes.


Crispin

--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.  http://immunix.com/~crispin/
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