Re: thoughts on kernel security issues

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Jesse Pollard wrote:
> 
> And covering the possible unknown errors is a good way to add protection.

I heartily agree. The more we can do to make the inevitable bugs be less 
likely to be security problems, the better off we are. Most of that ends 
up being design - trying to avoid design decisions that just drive every 
bug to be an inevitable security problem. 

The biggest part of that is having nice interfaces. If you have good 
interfaces, bugs are less likely to be problematic. For example, the 
"seq_file" interfaces for /proc were written to clean up a lot of common 
mistakes, so that the actual low-level code would be much simpler and not 
have to worry about things like buffer sizes and page boundaries. I don't 
know/remember if it actually fixed any security issues, but I'm confident 
it made them less likely, just by making it _easier_ to write code that 
doesn't have silly bounds problems.

			Linus
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