Re:Willem Pinckaers on Akamai's flawed OpenSSL allocator patch
by makomk on Monday April 14, 2014 @04:52AM
(#7585151)
There's probably a middle ground here. If you'd taken the time to make sure the patch actually compiled, ran and attempted the things it was advertised to do before releasing it, I suspect problems with it would've been obvious sooner.
Re:Willem Pinckaers on Akamai's flawed OpenSSL allocator patch
by csoandy on Monday April 14, 2014 @09:48AM
(#7586082)
That's quite possible. It's also quite possible that we still wouldn't have released it yet, as we'd be doing that work to make it generally usable this week. Therefore, the critical failure - that we weren't protecting the CRT values - might not have been known yet.
Sadly, the multiverse doesn't yet let me monitor its A/B tests.
I didn't have any part in writing this allocator, but I was asked to do a code review prior to publication. I told Rich Salz that it would take me at least two days to do a thorough one, and we both made the decision that it was better that we just get this code out there for public review and discussion than that we wait until we thought it was perfect.
So, with the caveat that we're still evaluating most of Willem's technical claims (and I'm probably going to be in the office all night doing so), the only sentence in Willem's report that I really take exception to is this one:
This statement is self-refuting. If we hadn't published this patch, we wouldn't be having this discussion, and some of the bugs that Willem and others are finding would have gone unnoticed. I almost certainly would have caught the issue with the CRT intermediates if Willem hadn't done so first, but I doubt I'd have caught everything that has or will be identified through public scrutiny.