[37148] in bugtraq
RE: Update: Web browsers - a mini-farce (MSIE gives in)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Brodbeck)
Fri Oct 29 20:52:50 2004
Message-ID: <C823AC1DB499D511BB7C00B0D0F0574CC40BB5@serverdell2200.interclean.com>
From: David Brodbeck <DavidB@mail.interclean.com>
To: "'Tim Newsham'" <newsham@lava.net>,
Michael Wojcik <Michael.Wojcik@microfocus.com>
Cc: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu, bugtraq@securityfocus.com
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 15:25:26 -0400
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tim Newsham [mailto:newsham@lava.net]
> But lets assume that a good programmer is writing software and
> it comes to his attention that there is a buffer overflow, or
> that user input is not being filtered, or that user input is being
> passed to a printf type function. What happens next? Well, it
> depends on how many bugs there are, how much other work needs
> to be done, and very importantly, what the perceived impact of
> that bug is. You cannot imagine how many times a bug is pointed
> out and the author of the software says "ok, that bug can only
> happen if the user does something stupid, and it is not exploitable.
> Lets defer that one."
This suggests that it's reasonable for a program to segfault because the
user made a mistake, instead of having some non-fatal form of error
handling. I don't think that should be acceptable at all, though I agree
it's very common. If I had a dollar for every time I've lost work because a
segfault or GPF happened before I saved my document...
