FW: What's the next tech problem to be solvedin softwaresecurity?

[rcs at cert.org (Robert C. Seacord)]

The Ariane 5 disaster was due to a variety of software development
failures:  process, reuse, design, and coding.  the coding error was an
uncaught exception resulting from a floating point to integer conversion
error. 

My only point was that choice of language does not in and of itself
protect you from security/safety failures.

rCs

> At 9:16 AM -0400 6/10/07, Robert C. Seacord wrote:
>   
> > ljknews,
> >
> > Yes, it is virtually impossible to get a serious runtime error in an Ada
> > program.  For example:
> >
> > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYUrqdUyEpI
> >     
>
> It amazes me that someone in a discussion of software security would point
> to a page that requires Javascript to be viewed.
>
> But I see the topic of the page was Ariane 5, a well known case of running
> software in an environment other than that specified in the design of the
> software.
>
> That is a management issue - my comments were about buffer overflows,
> as were the comments of David Crocker which I quoted.  If you have
> secret knowledge that the Ariane 5 failure was related to buffer
> overflows, please share it.
>
> Not reading what was going on, in fact, was the cause of the Ariene 5
> failure.
>
>   
> > > At 9:51 PM +0100 6/9/07, David Crocker wrote:
> > >
> > >   
> > >       
> > > > If instead we pay people to perform the more skilled tasks of establishing
> > > > requirements and specifying the systems to meet them, and use computers to
> > > > generate programs that meet the specifications, then such things as freedom from
> > > > buffer overflow come free of charge. By "freedom" here, I don't mean the sort of
> > > > freedom that comes in "safe" languages such as Ada and Java - in which the
> > > > buffer overflow raises an exception, probably requiring a restart of the
> > > > subsystem
> > > >     
> > > >         
> > > In my experience with Ada 83, the potential for buffer overflow is detected
> > > at compile time.  When I get an unexpected runtime exception, it is almost
> > > always at the interface to another language.
> > >   
> > >       
>
>