Re:TLS/SSL implementation in Haskell
by PeterisP on Wednesday April 09, 2014 @03:04AM
(#7558036)
I'd rather say that the long list of overflow-related vulnerabilities would be a good argument to ensure that all crypto libraries are implemented in some kind of a strict language that disallows a large class of vulnerabilities, even if it costs us some time and effort.
Seriously, for many languages bugs cause unintended behavior within bounds of implemented logic - such as the recent logic bug that returned an 'okay' response even if the certificate was invalid; however, the fact that ordinary bugs tend to have effects of "read arbitrary memory" or "execute arbitrary code" is a very specific niche of C and friends.
In a language appropriate for security, a bug in heartbeat extension would break the heartbeat extension - maybe disable heartbeats not work, maybe cause different heartbeats - but it should be unable to affect the rest of application. In a language appropriate for security, if a single module is secure (i.e., the limited number of API/method calls it exposes are secure), then bugs in all other modules shouldn't be able to affect the insides of that module; so if your app has a tiny core that does some signing w/o exposing the key secrets, then the rest of the app can't touch it even deliberately, much less by an acidental bug.
Seriously, for many languages bugs cause unintended behavior within bounds of implemented logic - such as the recent logic bug that returned an 'okay' response even if the certificate was invalid; however, the fact that ordinary bugs tend to have effects of "read arbitrary memory" or "execute arbitrary code" is a very specific niche of C and friends.
In a language appropriate for security, a bug in heartbeat extension would break the heartbeat extension - maybe disable heartbeats not work, maybe cause different heartbeats - but it should be unable to affect the rest of application. In a language appropriate for security, if a single module is secure (i.e., the limited number of API/method calls it exposes are secure), then bugs in all other modules shouldn't be able to affect the insides of that module; so if your app has a tiny core that does some signing w/o exposing the key secrets, then the rest of the app can't touch it even deliberately, much less by an acidental bug.