<story><title>Curl’s backdoor threat</title><url>https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/09/12/the-backdoor-threat/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angrygoat</author><text>The sort of hypothetical security vulnerability here is likely to depend on undefined behaviour (buffer over-runs, subverting parsers, etc etc). Just another reason to continue moving over to safe languages, especially for the lower level bits of our stacks. HTTP is big and complicated, I&amp;#x27;m much happier exposing Rust&amp;#x2F;Go&amp;#x2F;C#&amp;#x2F;... to it than I am exposing C to it.&lt;p&gt;In safe languages, backdoors must be far more explicit, so we close off the likely scenario posited here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>yjftsjthsd-h</author><text>&amp;quot;Safe&amp;quot; languages make it harder to write some classes of bugs; this is good. I wonder, though, whether it&amp;#x27;s not a better return on investment to focus on sandboxing wherever possible? I can run curl in firejail &lt;i&gt;right now&lt;/i&gt; with no code changes whatsoever. On supported systems, pledge() and SELinux  rules can mitigate attacks with minimal effort. And we get to keep existing programs without investing the man-years to rewrite something that works.</text></comment>
<story><title>Curl’s backdoor threat</title><url>https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/09/12/the-backdoor-threat/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>angrygoat</author><text>The sort of hypothetical security vulnerability here is likely to depend on undefined behaviour (buffer over-runs, subverting parsers, etc etc). Just another reason to continue moving over to safe languages, especially for the lower level bits of our stacks. HTTP is big and complicated, I&amp;#x27;m much happier exposing Rust&amp;#x2F;Go&amp;#x2F;C#&amp;#x2F;... to it than I am exposing C to it.&lt;p&gt;In safe languages, backdoors must be far more explicit, so we close off the likely scenario posited here.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>moxious</author><text>There&amp;#x27;s a good chance that if you were to rewrite some of today&amp;#x27;s existing stack in new languages you&amp;#x27;d end up with more bugs, not fewer.&lt;p&gt;C may be awful in some respects but for quality it&amp;#x27;s going to be hard to beat 15 years of peer review with any new languages cool features.</text></comment>