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Comment by okl | Hacker News Reader

Parent said: "Good code requires discipline, doesn't it?"

You retort: "I have yet to see code that has remained secure solely on the “discipline” of programmers remembering to check things."

I think that is a dishonest misrepresentation of what the parent comment said, isn't it?

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The “discipline” in this case (see the whole thread) is “have programmers remember to insert checks”, which has historically been a good way to have security holes crop up. So I’m not sure what was dishonest about it?

I don't think that's fair in this case because nulling out pointers isn't the first line of defense. If you forget to do it once, it's not going to cause a bug in and of itself. You can easily grep the code periodically to find any cases you missed.

Indeed, it shouldn't be a first line of defense (nulling + an assert seems reasonable, fwiw), and accessing a nulled out pointer is just as UB as any other UB. It's probably more likely to crash immediately in practice, but it's also easier for an optimizer to "see through", so you may get surprising optimizations if you get it wrong.

Honestly, unless you really cannot afford it time-budget wise, I would just ship everything with ASAN, UBSAN, etc. and deal with the crash reports.

Shipping code with Address Sanitizer enabled is generally not advisable; it has fairly high overhead. You should absolutely use it during testing, though!

That's why I added the "afford it" bit.

I think that's the misunderstanding, then, because to me it seemed to be a defensive coding practice (I think it was certainly presented as such in the top comment). My "you need extra checks" claim was mostly aimed at the additional things you add on to your code assuming that you are now zeroing out freed pointers, which I think can lead to dangerous situations where you may come to rely on this being done consistently when it's a manual process that is easy to forget.

Left unsaid due to the fact I was out doing groceries this morning when I posted that was that I don't think this is even a very good practice in general, as I explained in more detail in other comments here.

They argued that discipline is necessary, not sufficient, to produce good code. You represented the argument as: "discipline is sufficient for secure (good) code"

You took the original argument, changed it to be fallacious, and used it as a strawman. That's what was dishonest about it.

I appreciate you defending me, but I don't think he was trying to be dishonest.

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