Re:Mozilla's Servo Engine Now Capable of Rendering GitHub
by jxn on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @12:25PM
(#10086604)
Eventual security, perhaps, but that's a loooong stretch-goal. The fact of the matter is, even Servo, which is written-from-scratch and lacks all the UI goodies, is only a fraction Rust. It'll be a long time before supported libraries could be rewritten and rust, and I reckon a rewrite of all these things is likely to cause more new human-error security flaws than it will eliminate pointer/memory related security issues. In the (very) long run, though, I agree.
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Re:Mozilla's Servo Engine Now Capable of Rendering GitHub
by pcwalton on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @02:17PM
(#10087383)
I don't think that's true for layout/graphics at least. Generally, the worst that can go wrong for incorrect layout, beyond memory safety, is that a box ends up in the wrong place, or the engine harmlessly panics with a crashed tab. There can be spoofing issues with boxes being drawn in the wrong place, but those are minor compared to RCE.
Re:Mozilla's Servo Engine Now Capable of Rendering GitHub
by MichaelGG on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @12:47PM
(#10086754)
What percentage of critical vulnerabilities in Firefox were due to memory safety issues? Is it changing dramatically?
Re:Mozilla's Servo Engine Now Capable of Rendering GitHub
by pcwalton on Wednesday August 19, 2015 @12:50PM
(#10086781)
> What percentage of critical vulnerabilities in Firefox were due to memory safety issues?
The vast majority of them.
(I haven't done the exact analysis, but I have performed similar ones and the fact that memory safety issues dominated was clear. Note also that I am not claiming that solving memory safety issues is a panacea. "Merely" that we're defending against the vast majority of critical security vulnerabilities.)