Being safe on the internet (was Re: Here we go again - ISP DPI, but is it interception?)

[PlusNet]

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On 7 Aug 2010, at 10:47, Ian Batten <igb at batten.eu.org> wrote:

> So, if I'm three weeks from starting a PhD in which the production of a large slab of secure code (let us gloss over whether that's formally secure or pragmatically secure), what toolchain should I use?  I'm guessing my favoured "first to reach for" tools at my advanced age of C and Perl aren't cool, C++ horrifies me aesthetically, Java is dull.
> 
> I think it's time for a Lisp revival.

The implementation language would not be high up my list of issues at this stage but if you pushed me to make a choice and security was critical, Ada or SPARK.

      Brian Gladman
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> ian
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> 
> On 7 Aug 2010, at 07:07, Peter Tomlinson wrote:
> 
>> Tom Thomson wrote:
>>> Roland Perry wrote:
>>> 
>>>> It seems to be worse than that... why are these products so susceptible
>>>> to vulnerabilities? For example, one that used to occur over and over
>>>> again was "buffer overflow". Surely there must be programming (or memory
>>>> management) techniques that could eliminate them entirely?
>>>> 
>>> There are indeed appropriate techniques, but these techniques involve either or both of using hardware which supports memory management (as implemented by old-fashioned mainframe providers and some old-fashioned mini-computer providers) and programming in languages whose operational semantics requires bound checking and separation of code and data.  Systems using the technologies developed in the late 1960s and the 1970s by companies such as Burroughs, ICL, and even CTL could not have suffered from most of the vulnerabilities that we see today.
>> The memory stirs, taking me back to 1968 when I designed the very simple memory management hardware for the ICL 1904A (and in the process fixed an error in the 1906A's MMU). Took the software people another 2 years to get George 4 running. So that was old-fashioned, was it, Tom? It was state of the art then, in the commercial environment that soon after took a wrong turn...
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>> Peter
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>> 
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>