Esthetics (or worse?) of Secure Pointers

[Robert Bernecky]

On Wed, 18 Apr 2001, Jimen Ching wrote:

> Robert Bernecky <bernecky at acm dot org> said:
> >As computing professionals, we have a responsibility to
> >provide provably reliable tools. C without secure pointers
> >is not reliable. We (the computing community) are going to
> >be forced to move programming from a craft to an engineering
> >discipline. Issues of performance and memory use are going
> >to be swept aside by the threat of lawsuits.
>
> Why is it that people think software professionals should always look for
> silver bullets?

BP is a stone club, not a silver bullet. It does, howver, detect
one set of EXTREMELY serious security holes in
C programs. A silver bullet might be a switch to languages
that treat collections of data in a more disciplined manner
that is more amenable to static analysis.

> Btw, isn't one of the motto's of the C programming language go something
> like--trust the programmer.  Now, if we could do that, then we would have
> finally become a professional discipline.

Unfortunately, time has shown that we can not trust the programmer.
Programmers are good at algorithm creation, and lousy at memory
management, loop-bounds writing, etc. That's why there's a huge
demand for find-the-dangling-pointer-finder products.

> Don't get me wrong, I think BP is a great tool.  But until the overhead is
> reduced to less than 3%, I don't think it should be forced on anyone.

I don't think anyone disagrees that lower is better, except maybe
Intel.

Bob

Robert Bernecky                  Snake Island Research Inc.
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