Slashdot Mirror
Is Netscape's Code Falling Apart At The Seams?
bobby writes: "There a commentary on SecurityFocus that has me thinking: they argue that the infamous Brown Orifice holes in Navigator are examples of a new type of security hole that results, not from bad coding practices, but from coders haphazardly interconnecting disparate components without considering how they'll work together. 'The most dangerous, well-concealed, complex, and noteworthy security flaws in the future will be of this sort,' they write, adding that only the Mozilla project can save Netscape. "
From everything I hear MS puts a lot of emphasis on the software process. This doesn't prevent them from succumbing to the same failures. Complexity is the enemy of security, and paraphrasing Brook's law... The complexity of a piece of software goes up as the square of the number of modules (features?) involved. Examining a product like Netscape, or IE, even good engineering practice cannot prevent such an extremely complex systems from behaving chaotically at some point. Now add to this short deadlines, and insufficient knowledge: of programming, of the off-the-shelf modules being used; and of the design of the system by the programmers writing it and you have holes waiting to happen. It is a credit to the people writing the software that such holes are not discovered more often.
--locust
I read the SecurityFocus article and was impressed by how the article pinpointed what I have begun to fear is a major blight on software development. More and more software is being developed haphazardly without a clear design, coherent engineering or a well defined development roadmap. This is will only get worse with the growing number of people who refuse to go to college and learn how to engineer software and instead believing hacking code is all there is to software development.
Unfortunately instead of the article to then discuss ways to attack the cause of the problem (badly engineered software), it describes ways to attack the symptoms (release the source so bugs can be found).
There is more to creating robust software than simply testing most the bugs out of a system. Proper engineering practices need to be set in place to allow the extensibility and modularity of the code. Releasing source code may catch buffer overflow exploits and the like but it doesn't solve problems like improper interfaces/protocols being chosen and several other bad design decisions.
Mozilla has already proved this with the fact that it is a complete rewrite of the original Netscape code. After a year wasted hacking at the code, the Mozilla developers realized that all the Open Source in the world could not change the fact that Netscape Navigator was badly engineered software. Mozilla is better than Netscape not simply because it is Open Source and all bugs are shallow but because it is being properly designed and engineered instead of being a series of unmaintainable hacks like Netscape's Navigator.
As the saying goes you cannot make a silk purse out of pig's ear.
There have been several recent articles in some of the major software engineering journals, which question the feasibilty of using C or C++ for large projects. C/C++ have been demonstrated to be unsuitable for todays huge software projects, and all other software companies who persevere with C/C++ will eventually run into the same problems as Netscape.
So what is the solution? The academic community's research advocates the use of a new programming language, Logo, in order to solve the problem of scalability. The amazing levels of abstraction provided by Logo mean that Logo is certain to become the major programming language of the future.
"Oh my god it's falling apart at the seams"
"Only mozzila can save us now"
[Cue big green monster]