Start shipping the compiler with your code for infrastructure-agnostic RCEs
Anyway, turns out that shelling out to an external binary fed with bytes from the Internet is good fun
b) It's a legacy misfeature that I hope new compiled languages don't copy. There are much much better better interfaces for running processes that don't rely on an intermediate shell.
c) Shell escaping is much more stable than some hipster language like PHP where you'd need to update your escaping for new language changes all the time.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=crypt+site:reddit.com/r/lolphp
>crc32($str) and hash("crc32",$str) use different algorithms ..
>Password_verify() always returns true with some hash
>md5('240610708') == md5('QNKCDZO')
>crypt() on failure: return <13 characters of garbage
> strcmp() will return 0 on error, can be used to bypass authentication
> crc32 produces a negative signed int on 32bit machines but positive on 64bit mahines
>5.3.7 Fails unit test, released anyway
The takeaway from these titles is not the problems themselves but the pattern of failure and the issue of trusting the tool itself. Other than that if you've used php enough yourself you will absolutely find frustration in the standard library
If you're looking for something more exhaustive there's the certified hood classic "PHP: A fractal of bad design" article as well that goes through ~~300+~~ 269 problems the language had and/or still has.
https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
Though most of it has been fixed since 2012, there's only so much you can do before the good programmers in your community (and job market) just leave the language. What's left is what's left.
Lingering bad reputation, from the bad old days
Minimal barrier to entry - which both makes it a go-to for people who should not be writing production code in any language, and encourages many higher-skill folks to look down on it
The non-sensicalness of it is just a phase. Remember the Tower of Babel didn't stop humanity.
Here is a link that was posted a few days ago regarding how great things are compared to 200 years ago. Ice cream has only become a common experience in the last 200 years..
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
“be the change” or some such
Our computer security analogies are modeled around securing a home from burglars, but the actual threat model is the ocean surging 30 feet onto our beachfront community. The ocean will find the holes, no matter how small. We are not prepared for this.
Well, no home is burglar-proof either. Just like with computer security, we define , often just implicitly, a threat model and then we decide which kind of security measures we use to protect our homes. But a determined burglar could still find a way in. And here we get to a classic security consideration: if the effort required to break your security is greater than the benefit obtained from doing so, you're adequately protected from most threats.
It's no huge loss if the sea takes all the cat photos off my phone. But if you're a hospital or civil services admin hooking up your operation to the Internet, you gotta be prepared for it all to go out to sea one day, because it will. Is that worth the gains?
(Possibly even negative, when people go out and deliberately install apps that, by backdoor or by design, hoover up their data, etc. And when the mainstream OSes are disincentivized to prevent this because it's their business model too.)
There was a time, not very long ago, when I could just tcpdump my cable-modem interface and know what every single packet was. The occasional scan or probe stuck out like a sore thumb. Today I'd be drinking from such a firehose of scans I don't even have words for it. It's not even beachfront property, we live in a damn submarine.
While I wouldn't have too much of an issue with that, I'm pretty sure I'm a minority with that
Correct.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak
https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/glitch-makes-data-fro...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/apple-patches-clickl...
Of course there is, and things are only getting more secure. Just because a lot of insecurity exists doesn't mean computer security isn't possible.
Computer security is impossible at the prices we can afford. That doesn't mean we can't use computers, but it does mean we need to assess the threats appropriately. I don't think most people do.
> People are building new software all the time. It all has bugs. It will always have bugs.
No. Most bugs these days are due to legacy decisions where security was not an issue. We are making advances in both chip and software security. Things are already vastly more secure than they were 20 years ago.
20 years from now, security will be a lot closer to being a solved problem.
> The only way to build secure software is to increase its cost by a factor of 100 or more (think medical and aviation software). No one is going to accept that.
What are you basing that cost on?
> Computer security is impossible at the prices we can afford.
No, it really isn't. There's a reason some organizations have never been hacked and likely never will be. Largely because they have competent people implementing security that very much exists.
I don't want to live on this planet anymore