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Choice of Programming Language Doesn't Matter For Security
An anonymous reader writes "The Security Ninja has written a blog post which discusses web programming languages and the fact that they are all insecure. It's based on a report from WhiteHat Security and aims to dispel the myth that some languages will guarantee that an application will be more or less secure than other languages. '... secure code is the product of a secure development process and real business commitment to deliver secure applications which includes developer education. The absence of these processes and business commitments will lead to web applications being developed insecurely regardless of the language being used.'"
I think that in average programs written in haskell (exempli gratia) tend to be more secure because it takes a better programmer to write them than a quick and dirty VB application.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
Anyone who says all programming languages are equally exploitable is a fool. Sure, secure coding practices and standards are the way to approach the issue- not language selection, but it is, for instance, impossible to overrun a buffer in interpreted byte code and executed native code. The fact that stack crashing doesn't exist in interpreted code alone demonstrates that languages (or their runtime environments that are inherent to a language) are not all equal in exploit-ability levels. To say they are all the same is simplifying things too much. Yes, all languages have their exploitable bad practices, but some have more than others.
Yeah cause a language that makes it trivially easy to overrun a buffer, dereference null pointers and smash the stack is clearly a highly secure language. Oh wait...
People who do anything because it interests & fascinates them on a personal level do better than those who are only in it for the paycheck. Doesn't matter whether it's programming, auto repair, landscaping, or anything else.
PHP really is that bad. Because they still haven't removed the cruft. If they were really serious about any kind of security, they would have gotten rid of magic quotes completely, as well as things like mysql_escape_string. Instead they left these gaping security holes in there, for the sake of compatibility. Meanwhile you have a bunch of cheap web hosts who turn things like magic quotes on by default, thinking it will solve all their customers' security problems, when really it just extends the problem by leading them down the wrong path. While they've added things (MySQLi/PDO for prepared statements, mysql_real_escape_string, and others) the amount of legacy stuff they left in there is amazing, and for a language with so many novices working with it, ends up being a real disaster.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I think php is rather an interesting case. Looking at SQL injection: the language is strong enough and easy enough to protect against attack. Yet if you look at programming documentation, examples and free applets available on the web. Many of them have no protection at all. Also the forums providing answers to novice questions are often being answered by other novices. Best practices do not yet seem agreed on and pointed to in PHP as in other languages. So the bad practices are almost self perpetuating.
Exactly. The culture of a language is as or more important than the language itself. Indeed, the culture shapes the language (but of course, to a degree, the language shapes the culture).
Java itself isn't a very good language, but it's the hordes of incompetent Java programmers who make it such a terrible choice for everything. This goes back to the Python paradox: companies want Python programmers to write Java for them.
I will say this in Java's favor, however: It's a language where the smartest can't write code that confuses the dumbest, and where the dumbest can't write code that does too much damage.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
I'm confused. When I was thinking of learning a new language a few years ago, I took a good look at them all (well, the top 5 to 10), and picked one based on how many jobs there were, pay levels, non-proprietary-ness, etc.
One of the things I liked about Java was that there aren't any buffer overflows to worry about. Well, apart from ones in the JVM, but they are few and far between.
I don't understand when people say that all languages are as insecure as each other. Sure, people can do stupid things like not check input, etc - but when it comes to finding some sort of buffer overflow in a function/library?
If I had to write a website that would be deployed onto a box which was not touched for 5 years, I imagine that a Java-based site would have a better chance of faring than a PHP one.
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I think this is more a testament to the fact that crappy programmers will write crappy code in any language, instead of showing that all languages are equally as crappy for writing secure code. If the same person wrote the same program in different languages then you might have a fair comparison, otherwise this report just shows a similar ratio of bad programmers across different languages which I don't find all that surprising.
I've been thinking about this. Is Java really more secure than C? It is a harder question than it seems at first sight.
Usually when you see claims that Java is more secure than C, it is based on people finding more security bugs in C than in Java, but I am not sure that is a good measurement because C and Java are used in different places, and that makes a huge difference. For example, a buffer overrun in a desktop app (excel, photoshop, whatever) is not a security breach, it's just annoying. C is used in a lot of system level code where errors do become vulnerabilities. So, I'm not sure that statistic is a very useful true measurement.
Looking at it from a practical point of view, almost every buffer overflow that you find in C is a string. Java has much better string libraries than C does, and they prevent overflows (they don't even give you access to the level where you could make overflows). So, if I were going to write webservices in C, I would create/find a decent string library that encapsulates all that, so I don't have to worry about string buffer overflows either. This would not be hard (you'd still have to worry about array overflows, but I can't think of a time that I've ever used an array in a webservice).
So really, I'm not sure there's a reason you couldn't write a webservice as securely in C as in Java. It's just a matter of setting it up right. BTW if you say C is insecure because of pointers, don't because they really are not a problem if you have the remotest idea of what you are doing.
Qxe4
But, hey, if you are a good programmer you know how to avoid them.
So then how do you explain the existence of these problems even in code written by supposed "good" or even great programmers?
Oh no! Someone is wrong on the internet. I must correct them.
What's missing, obviously, are 'real' programming languages such as C, Java, FORTRAN, Ada, C++, Eiffel, etc.
No, many of the test pages are "real" programming languages, for any definition of "real" used by reasonable people. JSP and DO are Java. ASPX is based on the .NET framework. PL is Perl.
A lot of these languages share a common (C) heritage, and I'd assert "inherit" a lot of the security weaknesses of C. That's particularly true of weak typing for scalars, including array bounds.
No, Java, Perl, and C# do not share a type system with C.
In the case of an advanced JVM like HotSpot (the official Sun/Oracle JVM), you also get the performance back.
If the array bounds checking can be removed without compromising security, HotSpot's JIT compiler will do so when compiling the Java bytecode into native instructions.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Ye Olde Excuse: “you’re just not good enough”
You know, in modern languages, you can once abstract that concept out that you don’t want buffer overflows and dereference null pointers, and you’re done.
In C, you have to re-invent the wheel again and again and do the same micromanagement over and over. It’s like the man with three buttocks on Monty Python: We’ve done that! We’ve solved it. We have nice standardized solutions. (Java doing runtime checks by default. And Haskell doing them at compile time.) Use them!
With modern languages, you can use your mental resources to tackle the actual problem, instead of having to constantly think about decades old and long solved problems that should long be included by default.
And the biggest joke is, that most C programmers manually implement those systems themselves, and then act all proud, because they re-invented the wheel, except that it never received the literally decades of testing of the well-studied existing solutions.
It’s dumb. Like those people re-implementing standard library functions. It’s unprofessional and inefficient. And very error-prone for no reason at all.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
There are still tasks that are better suited for languages like C and C++. The interesting ones. The alternatives?
"You mean I get to build another boring business web application using the latest kludgy framework du jour so that it's obsolete two weeks later when the more popular kludgy framework comes out. Oh boy!" (OK, it's a little bit better than that. But not much. :) )
Games development, systems development, OS development, embedded programming and the like are places where it pays for development to be done by people who know what they're doing using tried and true programming tools that demand such expertise. When did Slashdot become so dull that nobody was interested in this stuff anymore?
Happy people make bad consumers.
Bad choice of examples. That's what we were saying and thinking in 1998: IT to PHB: "Don't open any EXE files mailed to you, however Excel spreadsheets, Word docs etc, are fine".
A exploitable buffer overrun in any application where malicious inputs exist is a security hole.
Never underestimate incompetence. Sure, Java protects you against some kinds of buffer overflows (but then a couple of versions had such vulnerabilities in their native parts of the JRE instead), but it doesn't protect against any other kind of incompetence.
There are probably a few SQL injection vulnerabilities and an XSS exploit being written somewhere right now. And someone out there is writing a servlet which reads and writes files off the hard drive, but isn't checking the paths, so really you can request the registry of that machine or anything. Someone else is putting a confidential document in there, betting on no more security than that nobody will think to look in that directory. Someone else is configuring a Lucene indexing and search which can bypass any access controls and find it. Someone else is coding a remote admin backdoor in the client's site, because it makes supporting it easier. Someone else thinks the users never reach pages except by clicking on the provided links, so he actually never checks parameters, and you can substitute your own id with the admin's ID on the page to change your password. (I've actually seen that one in a big money B2B site coded by expensive consultants from a big corporation.) Someone else out there is running half the company on the same user ID and password, because they can't be arsed to get a different password for the secretary than for the CEO, or because dealing with the IT department to get one involves more bureaucracy than that Asterix episode. (Invariably when some employee which used that account leaves the company, that account doesn't get its password changed or anything.) Yet someone else packs data the user shouldn't see or edit in hidden input fields or uses XPaths for input field ids, and blindly trusts whatever he gest back in those fields. (Then wonders why the user accepted the price for a Fiat 600 but could change the car model to a Lamborghini;)) Etc, etc, etc.
And, ironically, the myth that C is more dangerous than "sweating" dynamite while Java is physically impossible to break, only generates complacency in QA and hiring even less qualified burger-flippers for Java. I've seen I R Java Dev types which didn't even know what an SQL injection was before seeing it demonstrated to them. On the production machine.
And worse yet, you see a bunch of them arguing online, that SQL injection and XSS vulnerabilities are harmless and unavoidable, that the supposed danger is only hype, and that asking them to fix it is just stupid. And at least one such article was even linked to by Slashdot in the past.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sure these categories of applications occasionally have bugs. They're difficult to do. What do you expect?
However, how often they happen are pretty exaggerated as well. The Linux kernel is mostly written in C, of course. How often do you see it lock up for as difficult of a piece of software that is to write? How about all the millions of embedded pieces of code for mission-critical application that perform flawlessly day after day to the point that nobody notices them?
Besides for every C++ desktop app that crashes, there's a Java equivalent that eats up memory until it's unresponsive. People only focus on the C and C++ varieties of problems because they're taught Java or something similar as a first language and assume that lower level languages must be unmanageably difficult.
Happy people make bad consumers.
That alone makes it the best language for large business projects. Your coworkers will be a mix of good and bad, and pretending the bad programmers is a more damaging mistake than anything you can do to the code.
We did all that years ago...it's only the uneducated C hackers who keep giving C++ a bad name.
Well, that and the facts that
anyway.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yeah totally! Who's ever seen a null pointer dereference crash a Java program?
I didn't RTFA but I agree with the sentiment of the summary. It's NOT THE LANGUAGE, it's the programmer and their knowledge of the interfaces they are working with.
plenty of things can and should be written in C. It is perhaps a sharper blade than Java, but were professionals. There's 100 other mistakes you will make being uncareful when programming that have nothing to do with language choice that are far more important to worry about.
this checked exception hands tied stuff is worse than baby boomer nanny state bullshit
Long live the BSD license
As you probably know already, virtually any CPU manufactured in the last years has some form or another of "no execute" flag. So someone could overflow your buffer all right, and... simply not be able to execute any code injected that way. And someone from the BSD gang could even add here that in their world they had a solution for that even before that.
And someone who is security-minded, since that was the thrust of the article anyway, will have used some C++ library or another that checks string bounds. Heck, it's trivial to write one yourself if you don't find one to your liking.
So being only 99% as vulnerable as before, well, still sucks.
In the end, the point isn't "Java sucks" or anything, but that basically the largest difference is in having your people be security minded. Between the team who programs in language X and is basically a bunch of paranoid pessimists who know that Murphy rules supreme and anything that can be broken will be broken, and the team who ploughs through language Y thinking the language alone lets them not bother with that kinda stuff, generally the former is the safest bet. Regardless of whether X = Java and Y = C++, or viceversa.
And knowing that about the prepared statements, or even that SQL injection can be a problem, well, that's already one step closer to the former.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The problem is that *because* people are protected from certain very basic screw ups in Java companies automatically downgrade the quality of programmer and the level of oversight they use. The result, I believe, is that the end product is *even worse* than it would have been for the "more vulnerable" language.
So - if you are talking academically about languages - Java is more secure by a long way. C has all the vulnerabilities that Java has plus a lot more. If you are talking about actual outcomes in the real world - C is probably more secure. But this in no way means you can take the same sloppy programmers and methodologies that you used for your Java app, tell them to write in C and get a more secure product. Quite the opposite.