Ask HN: What is the most common security mistake you see?

Re:Ask HN: What is the most common security mistake you see? by lmm on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @11:59AM (#14402309)

Using bad programming languages, honestly. Most security problems boil down to type errors, but it's poor language choice that leads to making those.

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most common security mistake you see? by ravenstine on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @12:03PM (#14402353)

What's an example of a bad programming language?

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most common security mistake you see? by Bladtman on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @12:19PM (#14402510)

Those that aren't "strict" in certain areas. Examples:

* Those without memory management (I'm not talking about garbage collection, though there seems to be a correlation). Buffer overflows/overruns and its cousins have caused many security flaws, including heartbeat and even flaws in java, where it interops with C programs for performance's sake.

* Syntactical leniency wrt. scope can lead to errors like apple's infamous "goto fail"

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Re:Ask HN: What is the most common security mistake you see? by lmm on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @12:10PM (#14402420)

I didn't want to say, as most languages have their fans. But anything missing the features ML had; any language with null, without memory safety checking, without sum types and pattern matching, without type safety or generics (really any language without HKT, though I guess you don't need it for small programs).

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