> "You" probably can. I can too. That's not the point.
I'm not even sure that's true. I do agree with you that the argument that you need to hire other people is more convincing, but I'd wager that no single human on the planet can actually write a vuln-free parser of any complexity in C on their first attempt - even if handed the best tools that the model checking community has to offer.
Macho is the best word to describe it. It is sheer ego that would cause anybody to say that they can feasibly write a safe program in C or C++.
>Macho is the best word to describe it. It is sheer ego that would cause anybody to say that they can feasibly write a safe program in C or C++.
It reminds me a little of some of the free-wheeling nuclear physicists in the Manhattan Project - probably some of the smartest people on the planet - being hubristically lax with safety: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core#Second_incident
>[...] The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
>Under Slotin's own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used and the only thing preventing the closure was the blade of a standard flat-tipped screwdriver manipulated in Slotin's other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test on almost a dozen occasions, often in his trademark blue jeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they continued performing the test in that manner. Scientists referred to this flirting with the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction as "tickling the dragon's tail", based on a remark by physicist Richard Feynman, who compared the experiments to "tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon".
>On the day of the accident, Slotin's screwdriver slipped outward a fraction of an inch while he was lowering the top reflector, allowing the reflector to fall into place around the core. Instantly, there was a flash of blue light and a wave of heat across Slotin's skin; the core had become supercritical, releasing an intense burst of neutron radiation estimated to have lasted about a half second. Slotin quickly twisted his wrist, flipping the top shell to the floor. The heating of the core and shells stopped the criticality within seconds of its initiation, while Slotin's reaction prevented a recurrence and ended the accident. The position of Slotin's body over the apparatus also shielded the others from much of the neutron radiation, but he received a lethal dose of 1,000 rad (10 Gy) neutron and 114 rad (1.14 Gy) gamma radiation in under a second and died nine days later from acute radiation poisoning.
Beat me to it. The macho effect is there for sure, but on what grounds do you claim you can write secure C? As far as I know, you can't really prove anything about C unless you severely restrict the language, and those restrictions include pointer usage. So at best, you can do a hand-wavy read through code and have some vague notion of its behaviour.
It doesn't do enough. It's so low level that you have to run another OS on top of it. So all it does is provide a virtual machine. Typically people load Linux on top, which means you have all the security holes of Linux. You just get to run a few copies of Linux, possibly at different security levels.
I would have liked to see a secure QNX as a mainstream OS. The microkernel is about 60Kb, and it offers a POSIX API. All drivers, file systems, networking, etc. are in user space. You pay about 10%-20% overhead for message passing. You get some of that back because you have good message passing available, instead of using HTTP for interprocess communication.
i was responding to the claim "It is sheer ego that would cause anybody to say that they can feasibly write a safe program in C or C++". of course, the feasibility part is questionable.
It was written by top experts of the field through multiple years and is formally verified. It could have been written in brainfuck as well, since at that point the language is not important.
I'm not even sure that's true. I do agree with you that the argument that you need to hire other people is more convincing, but I'd wager that no single human on the planet can actually write a vuln-free parser of any complexity in C on their first attempt - even if handed the best tools that the model checking community has to offer.
Macho is the best word to describe it. It is sheer ego that would cause anybody to say that they can feasibly write a safe program in C or C++.