Re: Re: CVE-2023-5217: Heap buffer overflow in vp8 encoding in libvpx

[Demi Marie Obenour <demi () invisiblethingslab com>]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2023 at 05:10:09PM -0700, nightmare.yeah27 () aceecat org wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 28, 2023 at 04:42:33PM -0400, Demi Marie Obenour wrote:
>
> > How long will it take for corporations to accept that writing media
> > codecs in C, C++, or any other memory-unsafe language is a
> > fundamentally bad idea, and that it is better to rewrite the codecs
> > in a safe language (such as Wuffs or Rust) than to try to secure the
> > existing ones?
>
> Wouldn't the low-level code have to ultimately depend on unsafe Rust
> modules, or similar feature in other safe language?

In Wuffs, every memory access is checked for safety at compile-time, and
that includes being in-bounds.  If the compiler cannot prove that every
access is safe, the code will not compile.  There are no bounds checks
at runtime.

Interfacing with hardware accelerators obviously will need unsafe code,
but my understanding is that most vulnerabilities are in various
parsers or in the code the accelerators replace, not in the code that
interfaces with the accelerators.
-- 
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)
Invisible Things Lab

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