Victor what is your interpretation of the results presented in the syzkaller slide deck?
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ok! so then would it be fair to say that you don't believe these bugs reflect any sort of shortcoming in the C language, but rather they all stem from ineptitude or a refusal to follow best practices?
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Separately from using a memory safe language for most of the code, device drivers usually do not need to run in a privileged context. They can be run in an isolated process with the IOMMU containing the hardware. Exploiting a network driver shouldn't compromise a whole system.
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Even before IOMMU existed, the programming model of letting drivers setup DMA themselves rather than going through a safe public interface that could have imposed IOMMU on them with no source-level changes was bad design.
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iOS implements TCP/IP in userspace and most operating systems have drivers at least partially implemented in userspace. Many of the secondary processors in a computer run a microkernel with isolated components. Most smartphones have *at least* one L4 implementation in them.
You talk about microkernels / isolated drivers and memory safe languages as if they're not already been broadly used in the wild. Most code is written in memory safe languages these days. Systems code is increasingly moving to them too. Kernels and drivers are *mostly* not yet.
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"Most code" in systems with zero relevance to my personal needs...


