The dream was bidding me to do what I was already doing, in the same way that the competitor in a race is bidden by the spectators to run when he is already running. But I was not certain of this...

- Plato, the Phaedo

I was over on Slashdot, and I read their interview of Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD guy. I was psyched, and decided to recite some quotes here. It's not Perl, of course, and we've mostly heard it before - notably from some of our local sages - but good advice bears repeating, and good attitude is contagious.

Understand the interfaces which you are coding to! Understand the interfaces which you are coding to! Most of the security (or simply bug) issues we audited out of our source tree are just that. The programmer in question was a careless slob, not paying attention to the interface he was using. The repeated nature of the same classes of bugs throughout the source tree, also showed us that most programmers learn to code by (bad) examples. A solid systems's approach should not be based on "but it works". Yet, time and time again, we see that for most people this is the case. They don't care about good software, only about "good enough" software. So the programmers can continue to make such mistakes.

I suppose the biggest tip would be to become a better programmer. In particular, study what functions that programs are calling, and ensure that the calling code is following the rules of those functions 100%. How many of you understand the complete & correct semantics of every function in libc, or even just the libc functions being called by the program you are looking? (I mean, we went through our entire source tree, and about half the strncat() and strncpy() calls were subtly wrong, even if it only meant they copied a character extra and then zero'd it out -- it is still sloppy).

When you know exactly what the APIs are, you'll spot the bugs very easily. In my mind, it is the same as any other job that requires diligence. Be careful.

In reply to Words from Theo de Raadt by Petruchio

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