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cowlevel • today at 12:57 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

The bug is integer overflow in a random C data-processing library (specifically regexes) leading to RCE.

Who else is tired of C libraries since this week?


Replies

Gigachad • today at 12:59 AM

I've been calling this out for forever now and have been repeatedly told that actually, competent devs with C are fine and the C software we use has been battle tested so it's largely secure.

And now we are seeing that was all untrue.

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jeroenhd • today at 9:05 AM

Xe Iaso's blog posts poking fun at C(++) titled '"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens' has been quite busy this month.

Getting rid of C isn't the holy grail it might appear to be (Ubuntu has been working hard at rewriting sudo and coreutils in Rust and they have had plenty of bugs in the process), but I do hope the C projects will preemptively start fuzzing/running fil-C/invent new safety mechanisms for old code.

grg0 • today at 2:07 AM

And how does Rust help? As far as I know, an integer overflow in Rust panics in debug but just wraps in release (a bad choice in my opinion). Would it help specifically in the code execution part of the exploit?

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ferrisjoke • today at 2:37 AM

I've heard the joke many times, but I didn't expect that even programming would ever end up wanting to evolve to crabs.