Comment by rsweeney21 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsweeney21 | Hacker News Reader

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Shortly after I joined Microsoft in 2004, all new feature work on Windows Longhorn (Vista) was halted. There had been yet another high profile computer virus on Windows XP caused by a buffer overflow. It was an all-hands-on-deck type moment. Everyone spent weeks adding SAL (source-code annotation language) annotations to the entire Windows code base. SAL annotations enabled automated source code analysis to identify potential buffer overflow bugs and other common security vulnerabilities. Once annotated, we identified and fixed who knows how many hundreds of security vulnerabilities in Windows.

This colossal security update was released as Windows XP Service Pack 2. This is the beauty of software.

Hardware vulnerabilities scare me. There are millions of Intel CPUs and DRAM modules installed in data centers and PCs around the world. When we find vulnerabilities in hardware how are we supposed to fix them?

The past few years have been really scary for me as a software engineer. I keep thinking that the next one will pop the software bubble.

Maybe hardware will have to become more programmable in the future so you can fix some of these flaws without needing to replace anything.

It can't just be turtles all the way down.

Can you make an FPGA out of an FPGA?

Yes

  user: FPGAhacker
  created: January 14, 2018

Checks out!

I'm already done making an fpga out of my fpga, and I never had one!

Is it a known phrase or your good sense of humour?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Ah, thank you. William James keeps chasing me.

> SAL annotations

Are there tools for developers to use these (e.g. with VC++), or are they all Microsoft internal?

I have read about this: https://github.com/google/styleguide/tree/gh-pages/cpplint

There is also this: https://github.com/mre/awesome-static-analysis

I was specifically asking about SAL.

There is also this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/u...

I think they talk about the annotation but not the analysis tools?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/code-quality/c...

It's part of VC++.

But I do not recommend using SAL for modern code.

Oh wow. I'd used /analyze before but I hadn't realized it takes SAL into account. I thought it just does limited extra analysis without SAL. Thank you!

Yup there are a few static code analysis tools that support using annotations afaik

SAL specifically, or other kinds?

I am wondering if/when the first class action lawsuits will fly against the hardware manufacturers.

Dependent types can prevent buffer overflow attacks without any additional runtime overhead.

Firmware and microcode updates.

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