Hi,

cqwrteur (euloanty.delete@this.live.com) on July 10, 2021 6:27 pm wrote:
> Oh. Modern C++ does not save us. Neither C nor C++ are fixable. Using C or C++ will
> destroy the earth and kill everyone. Using C or C++ violates human rights.
>
> Okay. That is exactly the Rust advocator like you's logic. Alex Gaynor, one of the Rustsec
> evanglist (who is actually Rust dev) actively pushes Rust into Linux kernel because he
> treats C and C++ as some kind of great evil like hitler who violates human rights.
>
> Right. Clearly Linus Torvalds is the worst human rights violator
> in the world based on him and people like you's logic.

Let's pretend that you are responsible for Linux and everyone blames you each time a new CVE is found; and you want Linux to improve and be the best/most secure kernel it can be.

Let's pretend you started by investigating the causes of the last 200 CVEs, and found that there's lots of causes (CPU/hardware bugs that aren't the kernel's fault at all, overflows, etc) but "memory safety" is one of the top causes.

Now; what could you do?

You could try implementing some kind of "strict safe coding guidelines" (e.g.) like MISRA (but that's not going to be fun). You could start requiring extensive peer review (but that's already done by maintainers so it's hard to see how it'd help much). You could make use of all kinds of detection tools (static analyzers, etc) to detect the bugs before a stable release (but that's already done too). You could admit that (for memory safety as a security concern) monolithic kernels are incredibly idiotic (but that would mean replacing Linux with a completely different kernel). You could try a different language that at least tries to prevent some of the memory safety issues (but apparently you don't like that idea).

What else could you do?

What would you do?

- Brendan