Hacker News Reader

Comment by bloaf | Hacker News Reader

How many really truly secure C programs have ever been released into the wild? Maybe qmail? But qmail did it by completely rewriting the C standard library.

View on HN

Admittedly few, but generally in native land you have the ability to plaster over platform deficiencies with equally-well-performing code. On the web, you can never really compete with the execution speed or integration of the native code in the browser, so you have to accept whatever is there.

I'd say OpenSSH (since SSH2) has a better track record than most webapps, as unfair a comparison as that is. In terms of local robustness, there's SeL4, which is also a bit unfair (since it took about a decade for a team of geniuses to prove enough properties to make it probably not very buggy).

I wouldn't consider seL4 to be a "C project". Yes, their github repository is mostly C, but the process of writing seL4 was extremely involved: write the kernel in Haskell, then write it again in C, then prove that the C is equivalent to the Haskell. seL4 is ~9000 lines of C, ~600 lines of asm, and ~200,000 lines of Isabelle (theorem prover).

I don't disagree with your use of OpenSSH as an example.

And yet the code that controls the spacecraft launch and control is written in C. I'll still agree with you that it's really hard to write good secure C code.

I'm sure you've seen this; it's posted here regularly:

http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com