On Sunday 15 May 2005 04:14, Anthony G. Atkielski wrote: > Ian G writes: > > By way of comparison, in the same time frame, > > my company chose Java for desktop clients for > > security reasons, and even though our result is > > much more secure and robust, we can't get people > > to install Java without violence or blackmail, so > > much so that Java on the desktop is pretty much > > a failure for commercial purposes. > > Java has severe performance issues and some functionality issues, and > it's no more secure than C/C++. You cannot secure software just by > using a particular programming language; you can only secure it by > hiring good programmers.
LOL... yes, this was simply a comparison of the choices available at the start of a project; there was no implication that other choices would solve all our problems, just that whatever choices we made would haunt our projects forever. Which is to say you cannot escape responsibility for your choices. Mozilla is stuck with mostly C/C++ and that means buffer overruns. I'm stuck with mostly Java, which means difficulty in distribution. But I'm not blaming my users for their lazyness in installing Java... (Don't get me started on what's wrong with Java... :) ) > > OK, but practically, I don't see what can be done > > about it. Buffer overflows are very hard to detect, > > outside and before the case. > > Before the case they are easy to avoid, by proper coding. They are very > difficult to detect in a non-human way, but human programmers with even > a modicum of competence can avoid running into them just by writing > their software carefully. No, we are specifically talking here about the case of plugins into Firefox, etc. So we can talk about proper coding all we like, and we can can almost promise that everyone in the Mozilla development team will never do a buffer overrun. But that's simply not useful if we then offer a plugin interface that links in someone else's code. (I am sort of presuming here that plugins to FF are indeed linked in C/C++ code... I haven't looked.) iang -- http://iang.org/ _______________________________________________ Mozilla-security mailing list [email protected] http://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/mozilla-security
