Re: FY Ammo: Study about Security Bugs

[Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com>]

In article <m366yqk69o.fsf@kiuk0156.chembio.ntnu.no>,
  Preben Randhol <randhol@pvv.org> wrote:
> I know C and C++ programs can be, if not coded
> properly, but I would think Ada 95 programs wasn't (unless one
> are
> perhaps interfacing towards C?). If somebody could shed some
> light on
> this, it would be great.


That's right, Ada 95 programs are FAR less susecptible to the
buffer overflow problem (not impregnable, bad coding can achieve
any desired goal, and for example, an Ada program interfacing
directly to memcpy is at risk).

There are two reasons for this

1. If checks are on, out of range subscripts will be caught
by exceptions.

2. Even if checks are off, the kind of low level programming
approaches used in C (memcpy for example) are typically not used
in Ada, so it is far less likely that Ada code would be
susceptible to such attacks.


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