• whoever loves Digit@piefed.socialBanned from community
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    6 days ago

    how many compiler back doors have we seen versus use-after-free/stack overflow attacks?

    Who cares? Why do you ask?

    The anti-Rust crowd baffles me. Maybe C++ has rotted their brain to the point they can’t “get” the borrow checker.

    I can’t code, so C++ doesn’t have much space in my brain, but Rust still seems a lot more sus to me than C.

    • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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      6 days ago

      You care, you are the one that brought it up as an issue with rust.

      I ask as a rhetorical question to shed light on the fact that compiler back doors are a vanishingly small fraction of total security exploits, while the memory bugs that rust specifically addresses make up the vast majority.

      • whoever loves Digit@piefed.socialBanned from community
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        6 days ago

        You care

        About random numbers? Not really

        you are the one that brought it up as an issue with rust.

        Are you referring to where I said “I want to know some random numbers Rust isn’t giving me, and that’s a problem with Rust?”

        Because that was in your imagination.

        Or are you referring to where I said “Rust wants to know some random numbers it isn’t giving itself?”

        Because that was also in your imagination.

        In reality, I brought up that I’ve heard Rust adds another layer of trusting the compiler isn’t backdoored.

        • aubeynarf@lemmynsfw.com
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          6 days ago

          While you’re spouting nonsense, this is happening:

          https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/11/redis-vulnerability-redishell/

          The vulnerability exploits a 13-year-old UAF memory corruption bug in Redis, allowing a post-auth attacker to send a crafted Lua script to escape the default Lua sandbox and execute arbitrary native code. This grants full host access, enabling data theft, wiping, encryption, resource hijacking, and lateral movement within cloud environments.

          13 years. That’s how long it took to find a critical safety vulnerability in one of the most popular C open source codebases, Redis. This is software that was expertly written by some of the best engineers in the world and yet, mistakes can still happen! It’s just that in C a “mistake” can often mean a memory-safety bug that would put user data at risk (…) That’s the nature of memory-safety bugs in C: they can hide in plain sight.

          • whoever loves Digit@piefed.socialBanned from community
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            6 days ago

            While you’re spouting nonsense

            I’m the guy you were replying to here. I’m not spouting any nonsense in this thread. Did you reply to the wrong person, or is this a false accusation?

            this is happening:

            https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/11/redis-vulnerability-redishell/

            The vulnerability exploits a 13-year-old UAF memory corruption bug in Redis, allowing a post-auth attacker to send a crafted Lua script to escape the default Lua sandbox and execute arbitrary native code. This grants full host access, enabling data theft, wiping, encryption, resource hijacking, and lateral movement within cloud environments.

            13 years. That’s how long it took to find a critical safety vulnerability in one of the most popular C open source codebases, Redis. This is software that was expertly written by some of the best engineers in the world and yet, mistakes can still happen! It’s just that in C a “mistake” can often mean a memory-safety bug that would put user data at risk (…) That’s the nature of memory-safety bugs in C: they can hide in plain sight.

            Why did you make me read these paragraphs without explaining how they connect to the context? Let me guess: they don’t connect to the context, you’re just designing your replies to mislead people dumb enough to be vulnerable to your manipulation tactics? With no consideration for me whose time/energy you’re wasting, much less them who you’re confusing?

              • whoever loves Digit@piefed.socialBanned from community
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                6 days ago

                For anyone confused:

                • Make sure you know exactly what “compiler” and “backdoor” mean. With that, you can probably skip the rest of this comment.
                • aubeynarf seems to be framing things in a way that might make you think C is immune to compiler backdoors, and might also make you think we’re in agreement on that point. That’s based on absolutely nothing. C has no special resistance to compiler backdoors. I hear Rust introduces new risk here, but I don’t see any reason to reframe that as all the risk with C being in other areas.
                • aubeynarf seems to be framing things in a way that might make you think security exploits all have similar levels of severity. Like, if you make a list of 100 exploits, it will be about the same severity as any other list of 100 exploits. That is not true. Scoring would be based on what damage the exploits can do, not how many there are.
                • If aubeynarf’s framing makes it seem like known exploits are scored by sheer quantity, that would also imply security experts put a lot of focus on “scoring” known exploits at all. We don’t. We might put a lot of energy into counting and scoring unknown exploits if we could, but we can’t, so this is again not an honest mistake or a slight twist from reality - it’s completely made up from nothing. Not only would quantity be unrelated if we did have a big use for scoring known exploits, but we don’t. Known exploits are not unknown exploits. We’re trying to expose unknown exploits, and fix them. Counting and scoring the known ones is just something that happens along the way. We would never weigh the entire concept of compiler backdoors by counting the ones we’ve identified.
                • aubeynarf seems to be framing things to set an impression of “oh this guy knows what he’s talking about and he thinks compiler backdoors are no big deal, so they must be no big deal.” If you fall for that, there’s not much I or anyone can do for you.