[ On Tuesday, November 28, 2000 at 10:15:22 (-0500), Todd Vierling wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Addition to force open to open only regular files 
>
> That's just not true.  Solving buffer overflows involves writing smarter
> code.  Buffer overflows happen _exclusively_ because of programmer laziness.

Yeah, but buffer overflow exploits are successful exclusively because
the code that suffers them still has set-ID privileges.

> It's really not that hard to see that strcat(), sprintf() (without size
> limiters in the format), etc. are just not safe to use in any well-written
> program, setuid or not.

Bull.  That statement implies that programmers can't even count.  Those
kinds of functions can be used safely, and removing them from libc
doesn't prevent a sloppy programmer who can't count from making similar
mistakes in his or her own for/while/do loops!  I.e. blaming the
buffer-overflow problem on the likes of strcat() is extremely naive.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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