Re:Zcoin implementation bug enabled attacker to create over ...
by lmm on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @06:37AM
(#13809661)
Ah, the error was the other way around.
The idea that you form a value by creating an uninitialized one and then filling in its fields is dumb. (I suspect the field value wasn't even 0 as such but rather undefined, and the implementation happened to make it 0?). Better languages have you initialize the value directly and you can't access it until it's fully initialized. C/C++ are just really bad at expressing nontrivial values, even value literals.
(Discarding a value ought to be an error too, though that's more cumbersome to work with)
The idea that you form a value by creating an uninitialized one and then filling in its fields is dumb. (I suspect the field value wasn't even 0 as such but rather undefined, and the implementation happened to make it 0?). Better languages have you initialize the value directly and you can't access it until it's fully initialized. C/C++ are just really bad at expressing nontrivial values, even value literals.
(Discarding a value ought to be an error too, though that's more cumbersome to work with)