Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262346AbVA0CBo (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Jan 2005 21:01:44 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262034AbVAZXqe (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Jan 2005 18:46:34 -0500 Received: from mail-ex.suse.de ([195.135.220.2]:26271 "EHLO Cantor.suse.de") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261836AbVAZTPX (ORCPT ); Wed, 26 Jan 2005 14:15:23 -0500 Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:15:01 +0100 From: Olaf Hering To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Jesse Pollard , linux-os , John Richard Moser , dtor_core@ameritech.net, Bill Davidsen , Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu, Arjan van de Ven , Ingo Molnar , Christoph Hellwig , Dave Jones , Andrew Morton , marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com, Greg KH , chrisw@osdl.org, Alan Cox , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: thoughts on kernel security issues Message-ID: <20050126191501.GA26920@suse.de> References: <1106157152.6310.171.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> <41F6A45D.1000804@comcast.net> <05012609151500.16556@tabby> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: X-DOS: I got your 640K Real Mode Right Here Buddy! X-Homeland-Security: You are not supposed to read this line! You are a terrorist! User-Agent: Mutt und vi sind doch schneller als Notes (und GroupWise) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1070 Lines: 21 On Wed, Jan 26, Linus Torvalds wrote: > The biggest part of that is having nice interfaces. If you have good > interfaces, bugs are less likely to be problematic. For example, the > "seq_file" interfaces for /proc were written to clean up a lot of common > mistakes, so that the actual low-level code would be much simpler and not > have to worry about things like buffer sizes and page boundaries. I don't > know/remember if it actually fixed any security issues, but I'm confident > it made them less likely, just by making it _easier_ to write code that > doesn't have silly bounds problems. And, did that nice interface help at all? No, it did not. Noone made seqfile mandatory in 2.6. Now we have a few nice big patches to carry around because every driver author had its own proc implementation. Well done... - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/