Re:Hacking with LaTeX
by yk on Thursday March 10, 2016 @08:29AM
(#11259020)
Well, if you can somehow inject arbitrary code, then you can inject an infinite loop. So a program will only halt on all inputs if you can not inject an infinite loop.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Sure.. so how is an infinite loop a security vulnerability?
The argument is the other way around, if a program halts on all inputs, then there is no possibility to inject arbitrary code. ( There may still be important security vulnerabilities, but there are some limits. Consider a debugger that executes the first 10 000 operations of a program, it would halt, but 10 000 operations is a lot of space to do something malicious.)
If you are performing data processing on user-supplied inputs (as online compilers do), then an infinite loop can amount to a DoS attack.