[cap-talk] Midori in The Register

[Ben Laurie]

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 2:28 AM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <shap at eros-os.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 02:22 +0100, David-Sarah Hopwood wrote:
>> In any case, I have not seen Microsoft make any specific claim along
>> the lines of "managed code necessarily implies better security".
>> At least, nothing beyond quite reasonable statements about benefits
>> of memory safety and type safety in addressing certain classes of
>> "programming mistakes that often lead to security holes", as [*]
>> puts it.
>
> I agree. But it would be completely fair and reasonable for MS to claim
> that all managed code is type safe, and type safe code is a
> *precondition* to security.
>
> That is: managed code cannot guarantee security, but type-unsafe code
> (which is not quite the same as unmanaged code) does guarantee the
> absence of security.

I don't believe that's true. It may make it harder, but I don't see
why I could not get effective "type-safety" in a non-type-safe
language. For example, the work I've been doing in OpenSSL provides
type checking. It can be circumvented, but if the coder does not go
out of his way to do so, the code is effectively type-safe.


>
> shap
>
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