I didn't say running untrusted SQL. I said "a lot of attacker control over the database queries". If I meant executing arbitrary SQL, that's what I would have said, and I clearly didn't mean that. Please don't misrepresent my statements any more.
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sqlite.org/whentouse.html
> SQLite does not compete with client/server databases. SQLite competes with fopen().
#2 on list of recommend uses
> Application file format
Also listed:
> Data transfer format
And yes, it is widely used this way in the real world, as intended.
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I believe you. This is a highly irresponsible recommendation, both from a security perspective and a design one, and ppl should ignore it.
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Consider something like the XCF file format used by a program like GIMP including all kinds of fancy structured data. People are certainly exchanging these files. SQLite would be a substantially safer base to build on than the current GIMP implementation. I'm quite sure of that.
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Or heck, .doc or .psd, which are basically just memcpy’d internal structures of Word and Photoshop respectively.
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That's basically XCF too.
github.com/GNOME/gimp/blo
They're collaborating with the Krita developers to make en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenRaster as a replacement. It's probably going to be even more complex though since they're going to want to add more capabilities.
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The solution to the problem cannot be not making this kind of software, or somehow getting users not to exchange media files, image editing files, word processor documents, etc. Really just parse the file format in a memory safe language without dynamic code execution.
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And that memory safe language can certainly be a subset of C with annotations / rules that make it memory safe. No problem with that, I just don't think it's a very useful/practical thing to do personally since I'd rather use a nicer language if it has to be from scratch anyway.
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We know how to write software with decent security and these kinds of capabilities. It's not a mystery. We choose to use software architectures and languages making it unrealistic to provide decent security. Even if you claim that it's due to programmer incompetence, not tools...
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... then clearly there are near 0% competent C programmers. The whole point of safer tooling is that humans aren't being trusted to never make a mistake or miss something. It's extremely hard to right completely correct software and those bugs should not be remotely exploitable.
The tools can't allow assorted little mistakes which are certainly going to happen to cause code execution vulnerabilities. It just isn't a viable way to build a secure computing ecosystem still capable of doing the same kinds of things, like loading up a GIMP / Krita project.
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Should definitely work to avoid bugs as much as possible. A huge part of is eliminating bug classes with better tools. It's also important to prevent the remaining bug classes from being exploitable in ways like gaining code execution and we know how to get 99.9% there.
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You only need to be highly competent at C if you're writing attack surfaces. Otherwise you just need to be very clear that your code is not intended to be used anywhere where it's an attack surface.
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Such code is even usable with untrusted data, if you run it in a safe privilege context. For instance seccomp sandbox, container sandbox, wasm, a virtual machine, ...
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