Code Execution Bug In Broadcom Wi-Fi Driver

2U*U2 writes to mention an EWeek article about an entry in the Month of Kernel Bugs. John Ellch has discovered a critical vulnerability in the Broadcom wireless driver: a driver used in machines from HP, Dell, Gateway, and eMachines. From the article: "[The bug] is a stack-based buffer overflow in the Broadcom BCMWL5.SYS wireless device driver that could be exploited by attackers to take complete control of a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop. The vulnerability is caused by improper handling of 802.11 probe responses containing a long SSID field and can lead to arbitrary kernel-mode code execution. The volunteer ZERT (Zero Day Emergency Response Team) warns that the flaw could be exploited wirelessly if a vulnerable machine is within range of the attacker."

Comments

Re:Please stop using C.

[FireFury03]

C is the source of all these problems. Please stop using it.

It's not that simple. C is used in high performance code specifically because it's fast and compact. You get these improvements by avoiding needless length checking. Obviously there are cases where you _do_ need to length check buffers (and exploits are the result of not doing this), but you don't have to length check everything. If you ditch C in favour of a language that does the length checking for you then you will sacrifice speed and compactness since it will be checking _everything_.

What language would you suggest is more suitable for writing high performance kernel code?