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The Security of Popular Programming Languages
An anonymous reader writes "Deciding which programming language to use is often based on considerations such as what the development team is most familiar with, what will generate code the fastest, or simply what will get the job done. How secure the language might be is simply an afterthought, which is usually too late. A new WhiteHat Security report approaches application security not from the standpoint of what risks exist on sites and applications once they have been pushed into production, but rather by examining how the languages themselves perform in the field. In doing so, we hope to elevate security considerations and deepen those conversations earlier in the decision process, which will ultimately lead to more secure websites and applications."
I wonder how Ada 2012 would do in this test, although I don't know of any websites that use this language for a backend.
Do they mean Classic ASP? They list .NET separately so I don't think they mean ASP.NET, but they also don't include ASP in their list of "legacy" languages. I also seriously doubt 16% of companies are still using Classic ASP.
ASP isn't even a language, it's a framework. You can write a Classic ASP app in vbscript or javascript. You can write ASP.NET in any .NET supported language. Then there is ASP.NET MVC.
If they can't get their list of tested "languages" straight, I doubt the rest of the article.
It may be cliche, but how secure a language is depends on who is using it. PHP is very accessible, and used by a lot of newbies, so "in the field" there turns out to be a lot of vulnerabilities found. However, by following some relatively simple guidelines, code can be made pretty secure. Most of the problems in PHP code are either due to SQL injection, which can easily be avoided by using parameterized queries, or from turning on options that are known to be insecure, like register_globals. C on the other hand would only be used by a small number of highly trained individuals, at least for web applications, so it's less likely to experience problems in the wild, but due to buffer overflows and other memory management problems, it's much easier to shoot yourself in the foot without realizing it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
In the wake of Heartbleed, one might think that this would be talking about array bounds checking or buffer overflow mitigation. No. It is talking about web site frameworks.
examined the vulnerability assessment results of the more than 30,000 websites
First of all: this is not measuring the security of the programming language. This is measuring the security of the OS infrastructure and toolchains. Notice C/C++ is not on the list, since it is hardly ever used for creating web sites.
There was no significant difference between languages in examining the highest averages of vulnerabilities per slot.
What the heck is a slot?
Any summary where Perl scores the best must be deeply questioned. I doubt this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Surely these Perl sites are not doing nearly as much as the sites written in other languages.
It's the hip and cool language. If you owned vinyl records and were a vegan, like me, you would know that. But then again, I don't even *OWN* a TV and I was into that band way before they became all commercial. So I can't expect the rest of you to understand.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
If the language specification doesn't expressly say what happen when things "outside the design" happen, then different implementations may work differently.
For example:
If the language design spec says
"If an array index is out of bounds, exit the program and return a value of ABEND_ARRAY_BOUNDS_VIOLATION to the calling program,"
that may seem very specific, but if how to "exit the program and return a value of ABEND_ARRAY_BOUNDS_VIOLATION to the calling program," isn't specified by someone (usually the operating system), then it may not be specific enough. if different operating systems specify how to do this differently, then expected "under the hood" behavior will not necessarily be consistent across operating systems.
For example, does "exit the program" mean simply returning control to the caller, or does it mean explicitly returning any resources that were previously granted to the program by the operating system first? Or is that optional? If it's optional as far as the operating system is concerned, does the language provide a compile- or run-time switch to force such a cleanup? Does returning memory to the operating system guarantee that the OS will sanitize the memory, and if not, does the language guarantee it? If the language doesn't guarantee it, does the language provide a compile- or runtime switch so the program will sanitize memory prior to returning it to the operating system?
These differences in language implementations and even differences in how operating systems handle the starting and stopping of processes can lead to differences in what the code actually does. Usually these differences are unimportant but sometimes they are very important.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Hey, some of us find manual memory management sexually fulfilling, you insensitive clod!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
The security level of a piece of code with good security is 95% coder competence and 5% language, i.e. language is irrelevant. One thing though is that language can add to the security problems if it has insecure tun-rime implementation errors.
One reason most security-critical software is written in C is that there, the coder gets full control. A good coder with skills in secure coding will do fine with C. A coder that does not understand software security will to badly in any language, but in C he/she might not even produce anything that works, which will be an advantage. Also in C, it will be far more obvious if somebody is clueless, which makes review easier.
But "language is important for code security" is even more wrong than "language is important for code reliability". Language is important for code performance though, but only in the sense that it can kill it. Good language choice can also make a good coder more productive (a bad coder has negative productivity, so it hardly matters...). This nonsense about the language being capable of fixing problems with the people using is comes from "management" types that are unable to handle people that are individuals. These utterly incompetent "managers" can be found in many large companies and they believe that in IT, individuals do not matter. Typically these "managers" are not engineers and have no clue what a good engineer can do but a bad one cannot. They also believe that engineering productivity can be measured in hours spent or that all coders are equal and just implement specifications, so outsourcing is a good idea.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.