[18486] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Clearing sensitive in-memory data in perl
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Gilmore)
Sat Sep 17 11:56:03 2005
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To: cryptography@metzdowd.com, gnu@toad.com
In-reply-to: <r02010500-1039-1A37D222266511DA8F8A0030658F0F64@[192.168.1.5]>
Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 18:39:38 -0700
From: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>
> >Generally speaking, I think software with a security impact should not
> >be written in C.
Hooey.
The C language is not the problem. The C library is not the problem.
Both of these things were fixed during ANSI standardization, so that
standard-conforming programs will not fail runtime checks for
overrunning arrays (strings are just arrays of characters).
There have been various C implementations that did these checks,
including both compilers and interpreters. Some are free, some are
proprietary. (I proposed to fund adding these checks to GCC, but the
price I was quoted was too high for me.) I fault the people who don't
use such tools -- not the C language.
(Aside: What ever happened to Saber C? Oh, it was renamed to
Centerline CodeCenter, never made it out of the Unix workstation
market, used "FlexLM" per-cpu licensing crap, has gone morbid, and was
acquired a year ago by ICS.com, a graphics library company, with a
promise to port it to Linux. There's no evidence of such a port, and
the "product support matrix" was last updated in June 2001. The
product doesn't appear on ICS's product pages. I wonder how cheaply
the source could be bought and freed up, to bring it back to life? It
was a nice product, fifteen years ago.)
The reason there's fewer security bugs in PL/1 programs than C
programs is because almost nobody has written programs in PL/1 since
about 1985. Google did find me a compiler you can download -- it runs
on VMS, on Vaxes or Alphas. Anybody still running those space-heaters
is welcome to program in PL/1. The rest of us have real work to do,
and it's likely to get done in C or C++.
John
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