Re:15 years later: remote code execution in qmail
by kbenson on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @07:26PM
(#23253227)
> Problem is, these switches were not default, people didnt use it because they are dumb
Pushing complexity from a very small group (in this case, one person) who knows the system intimately to many orders of magnitude more people that are meant to have a functional knowledge of how it operates but not necessarily be intimate with it is a losing proposition, and not any tenet of how I would consider developing secure software.
If the software is only supposed to be run under process limits, and over a specific process limit all bets are off security wise, then the program should probably check and report problems with large process limits when it starts. Or, as you posit, dying if built for 64 bit, since its assumptions don't necessarily hold.
Pushing complexity from a very small group (in this case, one person) who knows the system intimately to many orders of magnitude more people that are meant to have a functional knowledge of how it operates but not necessarily be intimate with it is a losing proposition, and not any tenet of how I would consider developing secure software.
If the software is only supposed to be run under process limits, and over a specific process limit all bets are off security wise, then the program should probably check and report problems with large process limits when it starts. Or, as you posit, dying if built for 64 bit, since its assumptions don't necessarily hold.