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Bug Encryption Programming Security Apple

Finding More Than One Worm In the Apple 116

Posted by timothy from the looking-deeper dept.
davecb (6526) writes "At Guido von Rossum's urging, Mike Bland has a look at detecting and fixing the "goto fail" bug at ACM Queue. He finds the same underlying problem in both in the Apple and Heartbleed bugs, and explains how to not suffer it again." An excerpt: "WHY DIDN'T A TEST CATCH IT? Several articles have attempted to explain why the Apple SSL vulnerability made it past whatever tests, tools, and processes Apple may have had in place, but these explanations are not sound, especially given the above demonstration to the contrary in working code. The ultimate responsibility for the failure to detect this vulnerability prior to release lies not with any individual programmer but with the culture in which the code was produced. Let's review a sample of the most prominent explanations and specify why they fall short. Adam Langley's oft-quoted blog post13 discusses the exact technical ramifications of the bug but pulls back on asserting that automated testing would have caught it: "A test case could have caught this, but it's difficult because it's so deep into the handshake. One needs to write a completely separate TLS stack, with lots of options for sending invalid handshakes.""
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Finding More Than One Worm In the Apple More

Finding More Than One Worm In the Apple

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  • From whence the headline? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:20AM (#47018369)

    The "Apple" had only one bug, the Goto Fail bug - since Apple did not use OpenSSL they never had the second bug.

    So why is the headline painting Apple as the source of both bugs?

    • Re:From whence the headline? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:42AM (#47018621)

      The "Apple" had only one bug, the Goto Fail bug - since Apple did not use OpenSSL they never had the second bug.

      So why is the headline painting Apple as the source of both bugs?

      Dude.. chill, it is an actual apple, as in a fruit -- it is a saying. I didn't read the headline your way at all.

      • Dude.. chill, it is an actual apple, as in a fruit -- it is a saying. I didn't read the headline your way at all.

        Actually, you are wrong. If you read the article, you'll see its main focus is on the "goto fail" bug and what the author perceives as the development shortcomings that allowed it to happen in the first place. The focus is pretty Apple-centric, mainly because he's using the "goto fail" bug as the primary evidence to support his central tenet. However I did not get the impression the author was anti-Apple.

        Heartbleed is only mentioned as an afterthought because (as the article mentions) it became public knowl

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Belial6 ( 794905 )
        It is a saying, but it is a very poor author that would use it in this context. When discussing a problem with a company called 'Apple', using a saying that also uses the word "apple" as an object containing a problem would only be used by the most incompetent of writers if they were not trying to make a play on words.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Reziac ( 43301 ) *

        This is why it's not Apple Pi.

    • Re:From whence the headline? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jeffmeden ( 135043 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:45AM (#47018645) Homepage Journal

      They are comparing the test methods that might have cought the Apple SSL "goto fail" bug vs the Heartbleed openssl bug (which was unchecked memory access). How do we know there isn't another SSL bug in either? That's right, we don't. And we won't until testing (automated or otherwise) gets better in both places. Ideally we would have a way to find (and fix) lots of worms in both.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        Though even with automated testing, we still do not 'know'. Striving for perfection is something worth doing, but believing perfection is possible is not.

      • Re:From whence the headline? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by radtea ( 464814 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @12:19PM (#47018981)

        And we won't until testing (automated or otherwise) gets better in both places.

        I'm skeptical of testing (automated or otherwise), and I think point in TFS is well-taken: testing that would have caught this bug would have involved creating tests that virtually duplicated the system under test.

        While some code is susceptible to test-driven development and thorough testing, and that should be done where-ever possible, the resources required to test some code effectively double the total effort required, and maintaining the tests becomes a huge headache. I've worked in heavily-tested environments and spent a significant fraction of my time "fixing" tests that weren't actually failing, but which due to changes in interfaces and design had become out-of-date or inappropriate.

        That's not to say that testing can't be done better, but it's clearly a hard problem, and I've yet to see it done well for the kind of code I've worked on over the past 20 years (mostly algorithmic stuff, where the "right" answer is often only properly computable by the algorithm that is supposed to be under test, although there are constraints on correct solutions that can be applied.)

        So I'm arguing that a culture of professionalism, that implements best-practices including coding standards and code reviews (possibly automated) that check for simple things like open if statements and unchecked memory access would be lower cost and at least as effective as heavier-weight testing.

        This is a static-analysis vs dynamic-analysis argument, and while I certainly agree that dynamic analysis is necessary, both these bugs would have been caught with fairly simple-minded static analyzers checking against well-known coding standards from a decade ago.

        • Okay, but in this case the bug had little to do with the algorithm. The bug was triggered unconditionally for every input.

        • Re:From whence the headline? (Score:4, Informative)

          by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @12:55PM (#47019335) Journal

          both these bugs would have been caught with fairly simple-minded static analyzers checking against well-known coding standards from a decade ago.

          Except they wouldn't. Coverity out right stated that their static analyzer would not have caught the heartbleed bug.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Greyfox ( 87712 )
          It's no so much that -- if your coupling is loose enough, you should be able to test the API of any component in your system. But you have to come up with that test. Programmers often have blind spots for things where "no one would ever do that." It might be OK for programmers to come up with basic tests that exercise the API and make sure it's at least marginally functioning as designed, but you also really need to throw some guys at the code who just like to break things. Paid software houses don't even d

        • I totally agree with you: testing is not a panacea.

          Another good practice is adding bounds checking when building in debug mode (for example in "assert" statements).
          When you develop your code, you use the bounds-checked version, and when in production, the checks are removed.

          Also, you seem to forget that OpenSSL is full of legacy code, and legacy code is a not 2 times harder to unit-test but a hundred times !
          You need to cut the code into little pieces, but the goal of OpenSSL was to write the fastest code.

          So

        • Re: From whence the headline? (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Except the TFS is about how a simple unit test could have found it. The quote from Langley is being rebutted, not reinforced.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          I seem to remember seeing an article on the NASA coding practice, and they do exactly what the summary suggests: every important feature is implemented twice, with two different algorithms, and they are tested against each other to ensure they produce the same result. They also do formal code reviews of every check-in (no matter how minor), and any bug found is treated as a process problem (i.e. how can we fix the process that allowed this bug in), rather than just a software problem.

          As a result they prod

        • At least Apple's bug could've been caught with basic unit-testing. This is the snippet of code from Apple's bug:

          static OSStatus
          SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange(SSLContext *ctx, bool isRsa, SSLBuffer signedParams,
          uint8_t *signature, UInt16 signatureLen)
          {
          OSStatus err;

          • PS: this is pretty obvious while unit-testing but I'll make it clear to avoid any confusion... the real implementation of SSLHashSHA1.update() and SSLHashSHA1.final() would not be called in this unit test, as that'd be outside of the scope of it.

        • If the system had been designed from scratch to be testable, testing would be easier.

          So we can see that testing is a function of specification and design. As many have now realized (TDD etc).

          The problem: "If the system had been designed".

          It wasn't designed. It grew.

      • Of course, it's obvious today that a test for behavior on inconsistent requests should have been done in OpenSSL. As well as a test for each failure cause should have been done by Apple. And next week, when an off-by-one bug bites us on an integer overflow in libfoobar, people will say testing for that condition should have been trivial.

        So, yes, some conditions can be found with fuzzers. Of course, fuzzers work in an erratic way, and not all bugs can be triggered by them. But maybe fuzzing our code (more im

    • I don't know about the headline, but the other day I ran into a bug on OSX (some commandline tools developed problems with UTF-8). "No problem," I thought, "I'll just report it." I had to create an account to report a bug, which was annoying, but then when I got to the bug reporting website, I found this error message [picpaste.com]. "LOL" I thought, "but ok, I'll email them." I told them their bug website was having trouble, and they emailed back and said, "please report that through our bug reporting tool."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cinder6 ( 894572 )

      It's an attempt to get more views, I think. I know I clicked the link when I saw it in my RSS feed because I thought, "Holy crap, they found another glaring security whole in Apple products?" Then it's somebody analyzing others' analyses.

    • link bait. mentioning Apple gets them the most hits.

  • Tests can never catch these bugs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:22AM (#47018395)

    For the same reason new viruses will always defeat anti-virus software: Each virus is tested against existing anti-virus programs and only released into the wild when it has defeated all of them.

    • For the same reason new viruses will always defeat anti-virus software: Each virus is tested against existing anti-virus programs and only released into the wild when it has defeated all of them.

      Not all of them. Malware writers go for the biggest targets for the least effort, and often just test against (and even have active intervention against) the best known/most used free AV programs (Microsoft, Avast, AVG, etc.), since a major volume of users use free solutions, and the major commercial (Symantec, Trend, Kaspersky, F-Secure, McAffee, etc.). It is actually a good bet that if you go with a lesser known commercial AV product you gain a significant protection advantage.

    • Sadly, it's a shame that people put much faith in AV programs given their effectiveness (http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/05/antivurus-pioneer-symantec-declares-av-dead-and-doomed-to-failure/). I think author R.R. Martin has it right (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg), keep separate machine for different purposes - one for serious work and one for messing around with. It doesn't feel like a good idea to use one machine for everything.

      • Sadly, it's a shame that people put much faith in AV programs given their effectiveness (http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/05/antivurus-pioneer-symantec-declares-av-dead-and-doomed-to-failure/). I think author R.R. Martin has it right (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg), keep separate machine for different purposes - one for serious work and one for messing around with. It doesn't feel like a good idea to use one machine for everything.

        Symantec is mixing up stuff here to try to position themselves for the new hot profitable APT market. For one; the context of this quote about AV being dead was a WSJ interview with the CEO where he said it in the context if Symantec being able to increase their profit, as AV has become quite cheap and APT is getting all the nice profit margin - it was not said in a context of user need, but in a context of Symantec profit need.

        Then they mix up some statistics about targeted advanced hacker attacks (APT),

        • Possible, but even assuming this, the main issue is that AV in general is considered a relevant safety measure when perhaps it should not be. The assumption by itself can lead to a false sense of security. Frankly, I'd rather run multiple VMs on a machine at the very least - MS Windows for games and Debian for serious work. I don't do serious work on a Windows machine or on any Apple device for that matter - I'd rather my OSs and apps be open source and subject to comminity scrutiny.

    • Actually, a static checker did find the OpenSSL bug, but nobody used Frama-C to check OpenSSL. Any parametric fuzzing would have caught the OpenSSL bug as well: give it construction of the packet and say, "Vary the data in this fixed length field, vary data and size of this variable-length field." Such tests only account for what types of data come through the program, and may cause strange behavior.

      Test-driven development would also have caught Heartbleed. Similar to fuzzing, TDD would produce valid a

    • Did you actually read the article? The particular apple bug would have been easily caught by testing. In fact, the handshake code was copy-pasted six times in the code, and only one of the copies had the bug... if the developer had thought about about testing at all, that code would have been factored into one function, and even just by doing so the bug would have been less likely.

  • After reading TFA, I'm not sure I like the suggested approach to the "fix" in the code by replacing the two if blocks with a common method where you pass in all sorts of parameters.

    Yes duplicate code is bad, I agree that's a "code smell" (one of the worst coding terms every to be invented BTW).

    But just as odiferous to me, is a method with a billion arguments like the combined extracted method has. Sure duplicate if statements smell bad, but the replacement is worse and also harder to comprehend.

    I know it's

  • Testing isn't Perfect (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you're selling that you coulda/woulda caught all X for X that haven't happened yet, you're selling snake oil. The reality is that this computer stuff is a little harder than it looks to do properly, and if all you have to offer is marketing bullshit and a History of Art degree, maybe you should leave it to the professionals, and push for budget to do things correctly rather than just do them.

    • If you're selling that you coulda/woulda caught all X for X that haven't happened yet, you're selling snake oil. The reality is that this computer stuff is a little harder than it looks to do properly, and if all you have to offer is marketing bullshit and a History of Art degree, maybe you should leave it to the professionals, and push for budget to do things correctly rather than just do them.

      But PC-Lint has been successful at finding _every_ bug in Dr Dobbs...

  • Worth repeating... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:28AM (#47018461)
    The ultimate responsibility for the failure to detect this vulnerability prior to release lies not with any individual programmer but with the culture in which the code was produced.

    .
    I've often said that you don't fix a software bug until you've fixed the process that allowed the bug to be created. The above quote is of a similar sentiment.

    • Re:Worth repeating... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by radtea ( 464814 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @12:06PM (#47018853)

      I've often said that you don't fix a software bug until you've fixed the process that allowed the bug to be created.

      One of the things that struck me about the goto fail bug was that it was specifically engineered out of coding best practices in the '90's.

      Any reasonable coding standard from that time forbade if's without braces for precisely this reason. And yeah, that's a "no true Scotsman" kind of argument (if a coding standard didn't contain such a clause it was not by my definition "reasonable") but the point still holds: software developers at the time were aware of the risk of open if statements causing exactly this kind of failure, because we had observed them in the wild, and designed coding standards to reduce their occurrence.

      So to be very specific about what kind of processes and culture would have prevented this bug: a reasonable coding standard and code reviews would have caught it (much of the code review process can be automated these days), and a culture of professionalism is required to implement and maintain such things.

      The canonical attribute of professionals is that we worry at least as much about failure as success. We know that failures will happen, and work to reduce them to the bare minimum while still producing working systems under budget and on time (it follows from this that we also care about scheduling and estimation.)

      Amateurs look at things like coding standards and reviews and say, "Well what are the odds of that happening! I'm so good it won't ever affect my code!"

      Professionals say, "The history of my field shows that certain vulnerabilities are common, and I am human and fallible, so I will put in place simple, lightweight processes to avoid serious failures even when they have low probability, because in a world where millions of lines of code are written every day, a million-to-one bug is written by someone, somewhere with each turn of the Earth, and I'd rather that it wasn't written by me."

      It's very difficult to convince amateurs of this, of course, so inculcating professional culture and values is vital.

      • For fucks sake, in the 70's we got rid of programming languages where it was even possible to omit the fucking 'braces' - Algol68 replacing algol 60, Fortran 77 replacing FORTRAN 66.

        Then those Pascal and BCPL reborn losers came along, and it all gies go hell.

      • I mean, if unbraced if statements are so deadly, then why are they not outlawed unless specifically allowed by compiler directive. On your head be it.

      • Have you read the BSD style(9) man page? It specifically recommends omitting unnecessary braces. In an organization which follows this style guide, not only would the lack of braces not be flagged in a code review but if there were braces around a single-statement 'if' clause the reviewers might require that they be removed. Now, given that OSX is derived from BSD...

        Use a space after keywords (if, while, for, return, switch). No braces are used for control statements with zero or only a single statement

      • Probably a lack of code reviews, or if they had code reviews not enough reviewers were being pedantic about style. I can actually understand this, because when I give reviews I do get pushback when pointing out violations of the local coding standards. I suspect a lot of people do code reviews only superficially and avoid any review of design/optimization/style specifically to avoid the stress of arguing about it.

      • As you have proven, standards are not enough.
        Modern languages implement this stuff in the tools and compiler and language spec. For example in Go, code is formatted automatically, showing the problem.

        Dead code warnings would also have prevented this. The struct hashOut is given a value but not used. Tools can detect that sort of error. Even compilers can be built that error out on this. If you are willing to go to newer languages.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pla ( 258480 )
      I've often said that you don't fix a software bug until you've fixed the process that allowed the bug to be created. The above quote is of a similar sentiment.

      Sounds great! Now just show me a program (more complex than "Hello World") with no bugs.

      Yes, culture can play a large role in the frequency and severity of bugs released into production code. But humans make mistakes, simple as that. No amount of code reviews or test suites or BS like "pair programming" can ever get around that basic fact.

      Or

      • Yes, culture can play a large role in the frequency and severity of bugs released into production code. But humans make mistakes, simple as that. No amount of code reviews or test suites or BS like "pair programming" can ever get around that basic fact.

        Uh, you have gone perpedicular to the problem here. Code reviews and test suites are things we have because of that basic fact.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jc42 ( 318812 )

        I've often said that you don't fix a software bug until you've fixed the process that allowed the bug to be created. The above quote is of a similar sentiment. Sounds great! Now just show me a program (more complex than "Hello World") with no bugs.

        Of course, it has been occasionally pointed out that the canonical "Hello World" program (from the "C Bible") actually has a bug. Granted, it's not one that you're ever likely to observe in the wild, and good luck writing malware to exploit it. But most programmers, even expert C programmers, can't spot it despite being trivially obvious when pointed out. This is actually a fairly nice example of how difficult it can be to write bug-free software, and I'd wonder if it was done intentionally in that book

        • main()
          {
          printf("hello, world");
          }

          Missing return from main, undefined behavior after the printf. What do I win?

          More seriously, I think it's an overstatement that "even expert C programmers can't spot this". It jumped out at me right when I looked at it. I do a lot of C++, but not much C. I had to do some research to make sure it really was undefined behavior in C when I noticed it, but it did jump right out at me, and I wouldn't have let someone off for thi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shatrat ( 855151 )

      It's like the Einstein quote, "We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them'"

  • Neatness counts (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mariox19 ( 632969 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:31AM (#47018491)
    if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update( &hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)
    goto fail;
    goto fail;

    Those familiar with the C programming language will recognize that the first goto fail is bound to the if statement immediately preceding it; the second is executed unconditionally.

    Sorry, but it needs to be said: this is sloppy, he-man coding. Is there a problem with using brackets? Is it your carpal tunnel syndrome? Are you charged by the keystroke?

    This is how mistakes happen. For shame!

    • if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update( &hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0) {
      goto fail;
      }
      goto fail;

      Seems as though it still would/could have happened. Would it have been easier to catch? Likely. Still would have happened, though.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward


        if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(
        &hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0) {

        goto fail;

        }

        goto fail;

        Seems as though it still would/could have happened. Would it have been easier to catch? Likely. Still would have happened, though.

        True, it COULD have happened. But that's a helluva lot more obvious.

        And if you RTFA (I know....), the author really had to contrive a BS example with mismatched braces to make a case against requiring braces on all conditional code even if they're only one line.

        If mismatched braces is your "proof" that a code standard that requires braces all the time doesn't help prevent the creation of bugs like this, you're really desperate.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by spatley ( 191233 )
          i will go you one further and say that the more open style of braces would have shown the bug quite clearly
          if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update( &hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)
          {
          goto fail;
          goto fail;
          if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.final( &hashCtx, &hashOut)) != 0)
          {
          goto fail;
          }
          }
          // if you always put a brace on the line after the evaluation of an if, and tab in, the nesting will be obvious.

    • if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(
      &hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)

      goto fail;

      goto fail;

      Making an assignment inside the if test makes it also more ambiguous. I would have gone with:

      err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams);

      if (err != 0) {
      /* code... */
      }

      /* code... */

  • So good test should catch this goto fail for sure, either functional test or an unit test. Looks like neither are thorough for the library.

    Bot more importantly, if static analysis or structural coverage of code was done, both would point out that there is something wrong with the code.

    All of these testing strategies should be done for such s critical piece of software.

  • Automated unit test stubs with range checking and input fuzzing. Took me two weekends to build one atop Doxygen. If your build environment does not do this you're maliciously stupid.

  • FTFA:

    Compiler and static-analysis warnings also could have detected the unreachable code, though false warnings might have drowned out the signal if such tools weren't already being used regularly.

    I'd purpose that these tools weren't being used properly rather than turning the issue into a nail for the unit testing hammer.

  • -Wall -Werror (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @11:59AM (#47018777)

    Turning on all warnings and forcing them to errors certainly would have caught the bug in Apple's SSL code. Anyone who just lets warnings fly by in C code is an idiot. Even if the warning is mildly silly, getting it out of the way lets the important warnings stand out. Sensible warnings from C compilers are the very reason we don't use lint anymore. Even then you still have to watch out, because some warnings won't appear at low optimization levels, and I recall hearing that there are a few obscure warnings not turned on by -Wall.

    Also, it could have possibly been introduced by a bad merge. One of the things that putting braces on every if/for/while/etc. does is give merges more context to keep from fucking up, or at least a chance to cause brace mismatch.

    As for Heartbleed, just the fact that the code wouldn't work with a compile time option to use the system malloc instead of a custom one should have been enough to raise some red flags. Because rolling your own code to do something "more efficiently" than the system libraries never introduces new problems, right?

    • Need to explicitly add -Wunreachable-code. Annoyingly, "-Wall" doesn't catch this particular error (at least on the versions of gcc I've used).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Qzukk ( 229616 )

      One of the things that putting braces on every if/for/while/etc. does is give merges more context to keep from fucking up, or at least a chance to cause brace mismatch.

      I'm not so sure. I've lost track of the number of times where patch has chosen a completely random

      ....}
      ..}
      }

      to wedge a new } else { in, because at the end of a block, all the braces look the same.

      I put an end to that by ending blocks with } // if (foo)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rabtech ( 223758 )

      Turning on all warnings and forcing them to errors certainly would have caught the bug in Apple's SSL code. Anyone who just lets warnings fly by in C code is an idiot. Even if the warning is mildly silly, getting it out of the way lets the important warnings stand out. Sensible warnings from C compilers are the very reason we don't use lint anymore. Even then you still have to watch out, because some warnings won't appear at low optimization levels, and I recall hearing that there are a few obscure warnings not turned on by -Wall.

      Let me quote from one of the best-tested and most widely used projects out there, SQLite, from http://www.sqlite.org/testing.... [sqlite.org]

      Static analysis has not proven to be especially helpful in finding bugs in SQLite. Static analysis has found a few bugs in SQLite, but those are the exceptions. More bugs have been introduced into SQLite while trying to get it to compile without warnings than have been found by static analysis.

      The bolded part has been my experience unfortunately. Static analysis is nearly useless.

      An appropriate test for something like an SSL stack is a separate test harness that "fuzzes" the stack by exploring large random combinations of values, some with known good certificates and others with randomly generated (and thus broken) ones. These days one can spin up thousands of VMs, run

  • Reeks of a terrible article (Score:3)

    by rebelwarlock ( 1319465 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @12:14PM (#47018929)
    We have some lovely elements coming together right here on the slashdot blurb:

    1. Stupid pun instead of a descriptive title
    2. Full caps in the article excerpt
    3. Trying to bring up coding "culture"
    4. Assertion that it totally could have been caught beforehand, but they aren't sure exactly how.

    Somehow, I don't think I'm missing much by not reading the article.

  • Merge Conflict (Score:3, Insightful)

    by znigelz ( 2005916 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @12:15PM (#47018933)
    This is clearly the automatic resolution of a merge conflict by the versioning control software. These are such a nightmare to debug and happen all the time. Developers rarely check their entire change visually post merge. Though this can be found using static analysis that force coding standards (such as forcing the use of brackets or proper indentation for the lexical scope). Though the bugs from automatic conflict resolution can only be really improved through better versioning software. These are without question the worst and most frustrating bugs.
    • Oh yeah, you are surely right, now that I think about it. If anyone looks at this code, they will easily see which single line caused the problem:

      if ((err = ReadyHash(&SSLHashSHA1, &hashCtx)) != 0)
      goto fail;
      if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &clientRandom)) != 0)
      goto fail;
      if ((err = SSLHashSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &serverRandom)) != 0)
      goto fail;
      if ((err = SSLHasehSHA1.update(&hashCtx, &signedParams)) != 0)
      goto fail;
      go
  • Who benefitted? The TLAs. Accidental, my ass.

  • The article doesn't give the revision history of how that code got there. Who put it there, when did they put it there, and what did the code look like before and after they put it there. We need the names!

  • It's remarkable how many organizations don't enable aggressive compiler warnings (or worse, ignore or disable them). One of the best practices I've learned is to turn on every warning that you possibly can and use the option that treats all warnings as compiler errors. The code from Apple may have been properly unit tested. However, if this was the result of a bad automated merge, unit tests are often not repeated on the resulting code base headed for system test. The GCC "-Wunreachable-code" option would h

  • The article contains the same flaw that people who rabidly declare unit tests as a panacea. The article basically shows that after discovery of a bug, a unit test can retroactively be constructed that would have caught the bug, therefore it's inexcusable that the bug got released, ignoring the fact that is hindsight. Unit tests are not without their utility certainly, but practically speaking you will not be able to construct unit tests that catches every single possible scenario. This is tricky enough f

    • The article contains the same flaw that people who rabidly declare unit tests as a panacea. The article basically shows that after discovery of a bug, a unit test can retroactively be constructed that would have caught the bug, therefore it's inexcusable that the bug got released, ignoring the fact that is hindsight.

      The function was supposed to check various ways a key exchange message could be screwed up. The minimum set of unit tests appropriate for such a function are pretty clear -- feed it messages t

  • The culture (Score:3)

    by computational super ( 740265 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @01:59PM (#47019953)
    Yeah, the "culture" is "hurry up and get it done so you can get on to the next thing because if something takes more than an hour to do it's not worth doing" and it exists in every single software development organization on planet Earth. Until these things actually start costing real money to people with real power, this will continue.

  • Bug is somewhere else (Score:3)

    by gnasher719 ( 869701 ) on Friday May 16, 2014 @05:15PM (#47021865)
    Ok, writing "goto fail;" twice in a row is a bug. But it's not the real bug. This code was checking whether a connection was safe, and executed a "goto fail;" statement if one of the checks failed. It also executed one "goto fail;" by accident, skipping one of the checks. But one would think that a statement "goto fail;" would make the connecction fail! In that case, sure, there was a bug, but the bug should have led to all connections failing, which would have made it obvious to spot (because the code wouldn't have worked, ever).

    So the real problem is a programming style where executing a statement "goto fail;" doesn't actually fail! If a function returns 0 for success / non-zero for failure like this one, it should have been obvious to add an "assert (err != 0)" to the failure case following the fail: label. And that would have _immediately_ caught the problem. There should be _one_ statement in the success case "return 0;" and _one_ statement in the failure case "assert (err != 0); return err;".

  • With buffer overflows, over and over it's said they can be tested for, that there's no just reason for buffer overflows in this day and age.

    The fact is it takes more money, more time, and can easily be patched if one pops up.

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