Post #2429443

We cannot afford to merely fix this specific flaw; we must address the systemic issues it exposes. [proceeds to list a bunch of stuff that isn't the root systemic issues with the architecture] Well. Article became a lot more boring. Not necessarily wrong but more like... those are steps you do after you start with a good architecture. Improvement of tools isn't really the necessary thing to consider here. The very first standardized version of Ada would've caught this problem. The tools have had the adequate features for a while now. The problem is refusal to use them. The dataflow analysis mentioned is again something SPARK functionally does. Architectural resilience must become a paramount design principle. This means designing systems with assume-compromise principles, even for seemingly ‘trusted’ kernel components. Yes, keep that thought in mind, perhaps you'll reinvent the solution yet again. The goal is to contain the blast radius of such fundamental vulnerabilities, ensuring that a compromise at one layer doesn’t automatically grant full control over the entire system. Yes. Furthermore, strengthening developer education is critical. Or yes, you could just educate people on the tools and solutions that already exist so they finally start using them. We must emphasize secure design principles, defensive programming, Indeed. and threat modeling at all levels, especially for systems programmers and maintainers of critical infrastructure code. Sure, and if you start from a "nothing is trusted with anything it hasn't explicitly been passed" helps mitigate that a lot. The understanding that “correctness” is not the same as “security” must be ingrained from day one. And you just completely lost it. A security flaw is the program behaving incorrectly, or the underlying hardware behaving incorrectly. It only becomes fuzzy around things like timing analysis, where defining the correctness of hardware or software features requires knowledge of the threat existing to start with. This isn’t a quick fix; it’s a multi-year effort to build truly resilient software foundations. Indeed, replacing the Linux kernel with something actually reliable isn't the work of a single day. It demands continuous vigilance, sustained investment in research and development, and a cultural shift in how we perceive software trust. I'm not sure how much investment you really need in research when you could just dig up any set of papers written in the last 30 years and you'd be off to a better start. Verdict: Patch Now, Rethink Forever Yes. If you hadn't come to the logical conclusion already, now is always a better time than later or never.