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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.

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