What never ends? Low severity memory safety bugs in a large C codebase? Probably not.

You may think this is a lot. It's not. This largely appears a lot because OpenSSL treats a lot of very low impact issues as vulnerabilities. A lot of other projecs would rather start arguing that this is not exploitable, should never get a CVE etc. This is a good sign. OpenSSL is taking security seriously by treating even low impact things as vulns. More severe stuff still happens, but I'm pretty positive there is a decline in severe issues.

Exactly. With C, it will effectively never end. Libraries like that would probably benefit most from using a language with strict static analysis, like Rust. Tools Of similar nature for C do exist, but probably they are harder to apply, and likely not free.

I hope I don't come across too harsh.

Is HN still really up for that argument? Yes, we know the downsides of C. But the upside is that _we know the downsides of C_.

Constantly complaining about C isn't going to get anyone anywhere. It's been shown over and over again that secure C coding is possible and doable and feasible and exists in the real world. Some of the most secure software is written in C, and that's not attributed to enough fingers banging at a keyboard over a C program, but because C forces the programmer that _wants_ to write a secure program think about all the issues, the universe and everything.

So please, pave the road and show us the safer OpenSSL-rust you have. Until then good luck and thank you for your feedback.

I've spent a career of 12 years writing, reviewing and breaking C in high-security products such as HSMs. I'm still to see real world, secure C. Maybe you could point me towards the numerous real world examples of people getting this right. I'd prefer scaled-up outcomes here, not just saying 'djb wrote qmail'.

(Incidentally, I don't have a quarrel with C specifically. All memory-unsafe languages expand the range of terrible vulnerabilities available to the engineer. This is not defensible these days, in my view.)

> So please, pave the road and show us the safer OpenSSL-rust you have.

My contribution here is https://github.com/ctz/rustls

DJB wrote Qmail, then abandoned it like an unwanted child. He might be a good programmer, but he's a really bad maintainer.

OpenSSL was all but abandoned as well. At least now there's a lot of attention being focused on making it better and more maintainable.

There's numerous tire fires out there: ImageMagick, OpenSSL, some Linux kernel drivers, and other projects people just take for granted without pitching in to help fix things.

Re-writing in Rust is a form of helping, and maybe in the process we'll find bugs in the originals or wholesale replace them with something better.

I think OpenBSD beg to differ.

Not to mention I would argue memory exhaustion bugs like this happen in memory safe garbage collected languages frequently too.

There are edge cases for everything. A language is what it makes easy.

Off-topic, but a quick question on your project:

> Kerberos

>broken, obsolete, badly designed, underspecified, dangerous and/or insane

Which list does Kerberos fit in?

There are no standard kerberos ciphersuites that use anything better than RC4/IDEA/DES/3DES: http://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-parameters/tls-parameter.... So: broken and obsolete.

Recent Windows, Linux and Java Kerberos all standardise on AES* and the ones you list are deprecated and for some have to be explicitly enabled.

So .. progress is being made.

> It's been shown over and over again that secure C coding is possible and doable and feasible and exists in the real world. Some of the most secure software is written in C, and that's not attributed to enough fingers banging at a keyboard over a C program, but because C forces the programmer that _wants_ to write a secure program think about all the issues, the universe and everything.

This reasoning doesn't make sense. Use a language that makes a bunch of security flaws impossible (barring OS and compiler bugs anyway) so that you can concentrate properly on the possible security flaws left. Why deliberately make life hard for yourself if there are other language choices (assuming there are other choices to C in what you're doing)?

Even the best developers make mistakes. When you're picking your stack for security sensitive work you should be picking the stack that minimises the chance of mistakes and the impact of those mistakes. C is at high risk of making mistakes and those mistakes have a high chance of being exploitable.

> Use a language that makes a bunch of security flaws impossible

The implicit assumption here is that the language isn't at the same time introducing a number of other vulnerabilities. Is there a language you would like to suggest?

I'd wager the vast, vast majority of Java, Python and OCaml projects would have significantly less security exploits compared to an equivalent C project. Simply making buffer overflows impossible (as much as they can be) takes a huge burden away from you.

"Actually, more static analysis makes things less secure"

That is a preposterous argument.

I agree. But who are you talking to? I didn't see that argument made.

Come again?

It's not Rust, but: https://golang.org/pkg/crypto/tls/

I know it says "partial" implementation, but it's quite good even so, and has had everything I need. It doesn't do SSLv2, but nowadays that's more virtue than vice.

Erlang has an independent SSL implementation as well; it binds to OpenSSL but as I understand it just uses the heavy-duty math parts, not the protocol parts, which are instead written in Erlang.

Non-C SSL implementations in memory-safe languages exist.

Note that "but are they as well road-tested" or similar such things would be moving the goal posts. Not necessarily wrong or bad objections, but different objections. Probably nothing, not even the other C implementations, is as well "road tested" as OpenSSL, but, then again, OpenSSL hasn't exactly passed that road testing with flying colors now, has it?

(Just my opinion)

I completely agree with everything you point out. The argument I am bringing up is not about implementation, it's about "if they didn't use C, they would have less (security) problems": No.

C is the way it is towards secure coding because there are compromises to satisfy other dimensions. <Fancy new language that promises to solve all of C's problems> is either making huge sacrifices in these other dimensions or is at best an experiment.

We understand C's weak points so well (due to being widespread, battle tested, really simple, or what have you), that most of the time it's safer (read: more secure) to tread dangerous well-understood territories carefully than uncharted ones only promising to be safe.

I would agree with you if it wasn't for Rust. If you don't know it yet, I would advise you read up about it - it is ideal for replacing C, being equal at speed and better at safety from common programming errors.

There are others too, e.g. ATS

What are the sacrifices being made by, say, Rust?

I'm only superficially familiar with Rust, but my understanding was that it was basically "C with strong memory guarantees". I naively thought that its entire purpose was to avoid such trade-offs.

Certain things(circular structures) are harder to represent without dropping down to unsafe code(which is a C equivalent security model).

It's a bit more upfront work to satisfy the compiler but I've found the payoff in debugging memory issues to be completely worth it.

Right, so then it is a net advantage over C, with the (negligible) trade-off of compiler-wrangling. The parent comment seemed to suggest the contrary.

> It's not Rust, but: golang

This is a false choice. Go and Rust are not replacements for each other. They both have qualities which make each better suited for different environments.

Rust is actually capable of replacing all uses of C, Go's runtime will generally be an impediment to using it in certain cases.

Also I would argue that there are entire classes of bugs that are still available in Go that are not in Rust, that make it less suited for security. Null pointer exceptions, and unchecked errors are the two that come to mind.

I don't think they were offering up Go as an alternative to C, but rather giving an example of an OpenSSL implementation in a language that isn't C. Rust is mentioned because the prior comment called for the creation of a pure-Rust OpenSSL library as proof that Rust can be used in this context. No such things exists, but they were trying to offer up a similar example to prove the same point.

I don't know if this has changed, but at one point the author of crypto/tls basically said "this hasn't been audited or carefully looked at; do not use this code". Not exactly a ringing endorsement, even if he's stopped saying that.

It's easy to interpret these arguments as "C sucks, let's use Rust" instead of "C is a very mature language with enormously complicated code-bases in play running mission critical software which is not trivially replaced by something like Rust but which could stand to benefit from building things into the compiler to check for mistakes like the Rust compiler does."

Compiling C code is easy, but auditing C code is hard. Getting Rust code to compile without getting berated about every little thing is hard, but at least you're confident then you've got everything right.

I think the the opposite has been shown. It's not really a complaint, it's a reflection on the facts. C is my favorite language, and a spade is a spade.

Is the "Severity: High" issue here the kind of thing that would be caught by Rust's static analysis, though? The bug isn't a case where the language rules are broken, but rather a failure to set a reasonable limit on the resource consumption that a client can cause.

> Libraries like that would probably benefit most from using a language with strict static analysis, like Rust.

Wont help when developers then go out of their way to write a large amount of unsafe code. OpenSSL went out of its way to reimplement the C standard library wrong, making it impossible to use with analysis tools like valgrind or a checked malloc and generally confusing developers. iirc it even used malloc(pop)/ free(push) as a stack to pass data around at some point.

It's too easy to just blame C, it's their slap-dash, design-by-committee kitchen-sink features, lack of process, absense of rigor and generally amateurish "engineering," if it can be called that, of a now critical security framework. Why isn't every release first run through valgrind tools and some commercial C bug-finding tools used by embedded / safety-critical systems and why aren't there proofs of it's correctness? They have and/or could get the money/resources.

It won't end with Rust either since it is so appealing and easy to jump into unsafe territory.

Easy is not the same as necessary. At least high-security projects like OpenSSL could enforce a policy of not using unsafe code, and it's easy to validate that there's no unsafe code or that the few known instances are very well vetted.

You could do the same with C code -- it is getting everyone to follow the policies that is the hard part. Even compiling Rust code in release mode instead of debug removes some essential safety features. Should be clear by now that "policies" just doesn't work, but no, project are repeating the exact same mistake over and over again. :)

The crucial difference is between a policy, which people can not follow (and you might not catch them), and a language or compiler restriction, which people can't work around without doing something drastic like shelling out to a new process, which you can catch (in a well built language).

Is the beauty you see in C inseparable from its unsafety? Are the unsafe parts that other languages don't have the most beautiful ones?

There's a big difference between arguing for safety and arguing for Rust specifically. Everyone likes some languages and dislikes others. Can you design a safe(r) language that you would consider to be beautiful?

What essential safety features are removed? The only thing I can think of this referring to is assertions, and we do the opposite: assert stays in all builds, debug_assert is only in debug builds.

Integer overflow checking, for example.

Integer overflow cannot result in memory safety violations in Rust.

But it can overflow, which will result in a different value that the programmer might expect, which can give an attacker a nice "information leak" or worse. This could be a security bug!

Exactly. Memory safety is a very nice property, but is not complete by itself. This primary emphasis on memory safety was part of a critique of Rust by Andrei Alexandrescu: https://www.quora.com/Which-language-has-the-brightest-futur....

And even wrt memory, Rust (with the standard library) is not free of its own warts, see the OOM situation. See e.g https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10545877 for a discussion on this.

Just to be clear: I generally like the ideas of Rust. I just dislike its presentation by some as a magic solution to all kinds of concerns.

Since this account seems to have been created solely to violate the guidelines with, we've banned it. We're happy to unban accounts if you email [email protected] and we believe you'll post only civilly and substantively in the future.

This kind of resource DoS attack doesn't seem like it's directly related to safe/unsafe. I think you would be just as likely to forget to put a resource limit if you were writing in Haskell.

> so appealing and easy to jump into unsafe territory.

I've almost never seen unnecessary unsafe code being used in Rust. I've seen it very few times for performance, but it's carefully done.

OpenSSL considers this a "high" severity issue.

I maintain a project (http://freeradius.org) which a similar amount of code, and (arguably) similar complexity. While we've had issues, they aren't as numerous as OpenSSL. And, the issues in the latest major version are negligible.

Why? We have a requirement for code quality. The code can't just work, it has to make sense. The OpenSSL people don't seem to care about badly formatted and/or non-understandable code.

All commits MUST build cleanly without warnings on multiple operating systems, and under multiple compilers. We have test cases for a large chunk of the code base. We scan all releases through three different static analysis tools.

Security is important. We make it important because we care. I wish other projects would do the same.

I would posit another reason you don't have as many issues; you don't have as many people trying to find them.

I think it is pretty foolhardy to assume that just because security issues haven't been found means they don't exist.

There's definitely some truth to this, FreeRADIUS is just not that valuable of a target since not many people have RADIUS exposed to the world, however if you look at other highly valuable targets like OpenSSH, which is probably in the top 10 if not the most valuable target in the world, you see far fewer significant exploits. It's definitely possible to have better quality than OpenSSL and a lot of OpenSSL's issues are due to legacy code and what amount to experiments being run in production software.

For the record, the fixes for that CVE contain new CVEs.

https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv/20160926.txt

<sigh>

No one can reasonably say that the practices of the OpenSSL programmers result in secure code. No one can reasonably say that lots of people examining it later for defects is a good idea.

We have lots of legacy code in C. The only sane way to maintain it is tests: unit tests, functional tests, and static code analysis.

> a lot of OpenSSL's issues are due to legacy code

i.e. the OpenSSL people don't care to actively maintain / clean up their software.

What a depressing statement to make.

1) Which product is more likely to be secure?

a) one which has tests, no build warnings, and is run through 3 different static analysis tools?

b) one which has none of those things?

2) Also, which of these products is more likely to be secure?

a) one which has a lot of third-party analysis?

b) one which has some third-party analysis?

3) Are these two questions the same?

My answer to (3) is "no".

While best combination of answers would be 1(a) and 2(a), OpenSSL is at 1(b) and 2(a). I'd bet they still have more security issues than FreeRADIUS, which is at 1(a) and 2(b).

That's all I meant.

I'm a huge fan of freeradius. I have tried multiple propiortary radius servers and I can honestly say freeradius is the most flexible most reliable radius server in the world. Thanks so much for your effort.

>Why? We have a requirement for code quality.

With all respect to your project, I bet wider adoption of OpenSSL and consequently more interest from "interested" parties plays a bigger part here.

So "many eyes find bugs" is better than using good engineering practices?

What an utterly ridiculous thing to say.

Short answer: unlikely to end anytime soon, but likely that we start to focus on higher level bugs more than lower level issues.

Long answer: If Unix and C hadn't won the fight in the 1980s like VHS did, we wouldn't deal with such low-level bugs. It took 30 years, but we're finally getting CPUs (like lowRISC) that were inspired by BS5000 or i960 and the languages to go with it are getting mainstream. To be fair, had we as an industry taken security more seriously decades ago, we would have written critical pieces of the stack in a high-assurance Ada profile, and put microkernel design capability kernels into production. We can extend 1960s kernel designs with all kinds of features, but without a coherent design it's impossible to provide the same assurance. This is why it's great that we have L4 descendants that incorporate a capability scheme and also support a multikernel scheme (ala Barrelfish) for making better use of a cluster of cpu cores.

>we would have written critical pieces of the stack in a high-assurance Ada profile, and put microkernel design capability kernels into production

You're writing on a computer magnitudes faster than the fastest computers of the 70s, with significant compiler improvement to boot.

Until about 10 years ago, hand crafted Assembler was still faster than C, and the speed improvements were actually needed.

This "let's write a text editor which is pretty much an advanced nano/pico in JS and have it take up 145MB" is only possible when everyone has a supercomputer in their hands anyways

> Until about 10 years ago, hand crafted Assembler was still faster than C, and the speed improvements were actually needed.

It still is, especially when it comes to vectorization.

And in other areas, but that's largely because C isn't expressive enough, not because we lack the engineering know-how to compile fast vectorisation code.

I am not aware of a general purpose language that is expressive enough to auto vectorize generic code without basically writing in vector intrinsics.

We can't burn the world down and remake it. These things WILL happen over time, the next generations definitely are focused on safety and correctness. 1 we need to remove unsafe-machismo for the landscape, vector that energy into correctness instead of living with danger. 2, we need to figure out how to partition, segment, wrap the unsafe legacy stuff into a safe operating regime. The single biggest win is if we could load a library in another process and make cross-process calls to it.

> The single biggest win is if we could load a library in another process and make cross-process calls to it.

What?

Setting aside the fact that this can already be done in numerous different ways on many platforms, how is this a win?

It's hard enough for developers to write correct code, let alone maintaining the correctness of that code while loading and executing unknown code from other parties (see web browsers, and the last 20 years of security bugs related to plugins, extensions, addons, etc).

The user should be able to load 3rd party libraries in out of process sandboxes, transparently for applications which weren't written with that in mind. I am not asking for new programmer features, new end user / sys admin features in the loader.

Why would it end? There is no perfect software if that's what you're looking for.

If you don't know what you're talking about, please refrain from commenting. It only proves your ignorance. In the Rails land (as your profile says you are), you wouldn't have these issues, and quite frankly these types of thing seem to be beyond you at this point. You're in no position to criticize the OpenSSL project.

What never ends? Dramatic over reaction for the ske of internet prosthelytising