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Simply has to be taken with a grain of salt!

I doubt that. More likely they intend to make its detection and negation easier.

After all, the best language man can devise can only work as well as the coders who utilise it. If they are forced to cut corners in order to meet deadlines, errors will creep in, and we all know the urge to be first to profit is a prime reason for such things.

So what you're saying is..

Using just one half of NaCl could be poisonous, but when sprinkled atop the web as one all is well?

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
- Knuth

where the scientist is saying he's covered all the bases, and nothing can go wrong.

Admittedly, it's after past 1AM, so maybe my maths stopped working by now, but isn't 2^13 about 8000 dollars for the grand prize? It seems a bit low for all the work of basically reviewing their code and concepts.

Hostile code disassembly? If it were that simple to disassemble someone else's code and automatically prove that it can't do anything wrong -- including by having security holes exploitable by a third party -- forget the browser, we'd have it standard in the OS or in the last step of make/ant/whatever. We could all stop worrying about antiviruses (who, in turn, would stop needing signatures and heuristics updated all the time anyway), reviewing code by hand to see if all buffers are checked, etc. Just run the magic utility and it'll tell you.

I'm willing to bet that at least the antivirus makers have tried that before, you know, what with all of them offering some forms of heuristics by now, and none of them got it past the level of hit-and-miss. More miss than hit, in fact.

Not saying that Google couldn't have got some genius that actually made it work, but at the very least it's not going to be a trivial job digging through all their cases to check if they really checked all possible attack vectors.

And 8192 dollars doesn't really seem to be much incentive for doing that work.

Hah! Was that a jab at Adobe?

You could beat them up for many things, but they have a working system of arbitrary code execution that generally doesn't expose your system to risk (unless you tell it to, and only when the code is signed, though self-certs are ok).

I'm sure there have been plenty of security advisories over the years, but the general philosophy is sane.

The problem with Java's implementation is that the code is run within Java, which itself has sand-box protection for all executed code. Unless Google is seeking an interpreted language client-side or Google only wants to allow execution of trusted signer code, I think their task is probably a fruitless one.

I've read Google's paper, and I'm reasonably impressed. Basically, they've defined a little operating system, with 42 system calls, the same on all platforms, and defined a subset of 32-bit x86 machine code which can't modify itself and can't make calls to the regular OS. This requires using the seldom-used x86 segmentation hardware, which is quite clever and rarely used. But 64-bit mode has no segment machinery, so this approach doesn't translate to the current generation of 64-bit CPUs.

The biggest headache with Google's model is that they have to use a sort of interpreter to check all "ret" instructions, so someone can't clobber the stack and cause a branch to an arbitrary location. What's really needed is a CPU with a separate return point stack, accessed only by "call" and "ret" instructions, so return points are stored someplace that code can't clobber. (Machines have been built with such hardware, but there was never a compelling reason for it before.) Google has to emulate that in software. This adds a few percent of overhead.

Note that you can't use graphics hardware Google's OS. Conceptually, they could add a way to talk to OpenGL, which is reasonably secureable. But they haven't done that. They have a Quake port, but the main CPU is doing the rendering.

Interestingly, it would be quite possible to make a very minimal operating system which ran Google's little OS directly. You don't need the gigabytes of baggage of Windows or Linux.

It would also be possible to develop an x86 variant which enforced in hardware the rules of Google's restricted code model. That would be useful. Most of the things Google's model prohibits, you don't want to do anyway. (I know, somebody who thinks they're "l33t" will have some argument that they need to do some of the stuff Google prohibits. Just say no.)

The main question is whether the implementers will have the guts to say "no" to things that people really, really want to do, but are insecure. The Java people wimped out on this; Java applets could have been secure, but in practice they trust too much library, and library bugs can be exploited.

NSA Secure Linux has a similar problem. If you turn on mandatory security and don't put any exceptions in the rules, the security is quite good. But your users will whine and applications will have to be revised to conform to the rules.

Incidentally, the people who talk about "undecidability" and "Turing completeness" in this context have no clue. It's quite possible to define a system which is both useful and decidable. (Formally, any deterministic system with finite memory is decidable; eventually you either repeat a previous state or loop. For many systems, decidability may be "hard", but that's a separate issue. If termination checking is "hard" for a loop, just add a runaway loop counter that limits the number of iterations, and termination becomes decidable again. Realistically, if you have an algorithm complex enough that termination is tough to decide, you need something like that anyway. Formal methods for this sort of thing are used routinely in modern hardware design. Anyway, none of this applies to Google's approach, which merely restricts code to a specific well-formed subset which has certain well-behaved properties.)