Facebook Awards Researchers $100k For Detecting Emerging Class of C++ Bugs

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has awarded $100,000 to a team of researchers from Georgia Tech University for their discovery of a new method for identifying "bad-casting" vulnerabilities that affect programs written in C++. "Type casting, which converts one type of an object to another, plays an essential role in enabling polymorphism in C++ because it allows a program to utilize certain general or specific implementations in the class hierarchies. However, if not correctly used, it may return unsafe and incorrectly casted values, leading to so-called bad-casting or type-confusion vulnerabilities," the researchers explained in their paper.

Comments

Yawn -- Another Closed Source Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Thankfully, I only use FOSS software which is not vulnerable to this problem. Many eyes are sure to catch anything like this in the rigorous peer reviews that happen on every commit.