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Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2014 12:21:19 +0200
From: Hanno Böck <hanno@...eck.de>
To: oss-security@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Thoughts on Shellshock and beyond

Am Tue, 7 Oct 2014 18:11:10 +0800
schrieb Pavel Labushev <pavel.labushev@...box.no>:

> What works is recognising and eliminating whole bug _classes_, or
> deploying exploitation mitigation measures against them.

I am fully with you on that. I advocate CSP and prepared statements
where I can and Softbound+CETS (trying to kill all C-memory-errors)
looks really interesting.

However I won't go as far as claiming that fixing bugs is pointless.
Two thoughts on that:
* We have to live with what we have now. We can talk that it'd be
  better to re-write all our operating systems in better languages, but
  even considering that happens it won't happen any time soon. We have
  to fix the bugs in the software we use today.
* Heartbleed is an out of bounds memory read. Well understood and yes,
  it should be possible to implement mitigations against these kinds of
  things. What class of bug is Shellshock? "Weird feature invented in
  pre-Internet era"? How do you conquer this class of bugs?

My point is: Even if we eliminate classes of bugs there will still be
security issues that don't fit in your bug class cateogries.

-- 
Hanno Böck
http://hboeck.de/

mail/jabber: hanno@...eck.de
GPG: BBB51E42

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