Conversation

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Replying to

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?

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Replying to

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.

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Replying to

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.

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Replying to

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.

Replying to

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.

9:32 PM · Apr 17, 2019Twitter Web Client

Replying to

"Most code" in systems with zero relevance to my personal needs...

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Show replies

This Tweet was deleted by the Tweet author. Learn more

Replying to

Java is a traditional example of a type / memory safe language. It has a very poor quality type system, like C, and it's not good at safety beyond memory safety. It can't do automatic integer overflow checking either, but at least it doesn't lead right to memory corruption bugs.

Show replies