I've been reading Bruce Schneier's Secrets & Lies and frankly I'm scared out of my wits! There are so many ways to foil computer security that I'm almost afraid to touch my computer. Luckily for the machines, I've been addicted since the 4th grade and probably couldn't stop even if I wanted to.
My question is this, and I ask because some of these problems seem to plague applications written in C (and Perl is written in C as far as I know), but how vulnerable is Perl? I don't mean run of the mill CGI stuff-- we've discussed all of that to death on PM. What I'm curious about is whether Perl is susceptible to things like stack smashing or bugs related to null terminators in strings? Is printf vulnerable?
Does Perl have a history of security incidents? If I wrote a daemon that sat on my firewall to do X, Y, or Z, are there particular areas that I would want to be careful about? In my experience, most of the holes we've discussed related to Perl are not faults of the perl interpreter, but logical flaws in the scripts themselves.
What else should I be watching out for? And as a general practice, how much bullet-proofing do programmers put into code before they say that enough is enough. I mean, theoretically I could check every variable all the time to make sure it is about what I expect it to be like, I could wrap almost everything in evals to trap errors, I could go on. But how do you draw the line?
My question is this, and I ask because some of these problems seem to plague applications written in C (and Perl is written in C as far as I know), but how vulnerable is Perl? I don't mean run of the mill CGI stuff-- we've discussed all of that to death on PM. What I'm curious about is whether Perl is susceptible to things like stack smashing or bugs related to null terminators in strings? Is printf vulnerable?
Does Perl have a history of security incidents? If I wrote a daemon that sat on my firewall to do X, Y, or Z, are there particular areas that I would want to be careful about? In my experience, most of the holes we've discussed related to Perl are not faults of the perl interpreter, but logical flaws in the scripts themselves.
What else should I be watching out for? And as a general practice, how much bullet-proofing do programmers put into code before they say that enough is enough. I mean, theoretically I could check every variable all the time to make sure it is about what I expect it to be like, I could wrap almost everything in evals to trap errors, I could go on. But how do you draw the line?
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