Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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That title is clearly constructed to imply that Go's parsers are insecure. The text of the article isn't about parsers at all, and only tangentially about Go[1].

It's deliberately misleading clickbait. You know it. I know it. We all know it.

If you want to have a considered discussion about pitfalls with the use of automatic serialization paradigms across trust boundaries, I'm here for it. If you just want to flame about Go, get better source material. This one isn't the hill to stand on.

[1] Which, again, has a really first rate serialization story; but not one fundamentally different from any of a zillion others. Cooking data from untrusted sources is just plain hard, and not something that anyone (much less the author of this awful blog post) is going to solve with a serialization API.

I think you and I read a different article. For example, about treating JSON keys without case sensitivity:

> In our opinion, this is the most critical pitfall of Go’s JSON parser because it differs from the default parsers for JavaScript, Python, Rust, Ruby, Java, and all other parsers we tested.

It would be kind of difficult to argue that this is not about Go.

Don't get me wrong, I love Go just as much as the next person, but this article definitely lays bare some issues with serialization specific to Go.

I disagree.

It was a bad design choice to allow JSON keys with different capitalisation and to serialise all public struct members by default.

These decisions can easily result in the creation of an insecure system.

I don’t think the title is clickbait. You’re fixating on just one example in the post, but the others demonstrate a clear pattern: there are footguns in Go’s various parsers, including forms of malleability or flexibility that enable parser differentials.

This isn’t intended to be a ding against Go; it’s a universal problem across programming languages (otherwise there’d be no differentials at all). But they’re worth noting, and I think the post amply demonstrates their security relevance.

Of course it's about Go. They decided to build not just opt-out unmarshaling of objects, but fragile opt-out.

See eg rails' strong params for the opposite approach: opt-in.

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