MSRC-Security-Research
abseil-cpp
MSRC-Security-Research | abseil-cpp | |
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9 | 54 | |
1,292 | 13,989 | |
0.4% | 1.6% | |
5.1 | 9.5 | |
7 months ago | 3 days ago | |
Python | C++ | |
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 | Apache License 2.0 |
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MSRC-Security-Research
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A reactionary take on memory safety
You’ll find more primary sources across different organizations that all arrive at the 60 - 70% number. But what really grinds my gears here is that you take a piece from the article you’re criticizing and pretend that it’s a quote from Matt Miller.
It’s actually quite easy to find a primary source here because the slides from the talk that the article is based on are available: https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...
To quote from those slides: „~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues“.
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Zig and Rust
> It's still bizarre though that Rust is capturing such ridiculous mindshare.
I don't think it's that bizarre. The two big headline features that bring Rust such popularity are: #1 "70% of bugs are memory-safety bugs" [1] and Rust can help solve those, and #2 C/C++ have a couple of package manager solutions - none of which have critical mass and Rust "comes with" cargo.
Those two make me really eager to continue experimenting with Rust.
> It seems to be a temporary low-level programming zeitgeist driven by YouTube and Reddit recommendation algorithms to an audience that has never done it and probably never will.
This is some weird gatekeep-y kinda thing. Most of us didn't start out with low-level programming. Wouldn't it have been odd and frustrating for someone to tell your younger self that you have "never written C and probably never will"?
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research
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Will Carbon Replace C++?
https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...
- How CastGuard Works [BHUSA 2022]
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Arm releases experimental CHERI-enabled Morello board
Windows is likely a big task for the same reasons as SMAP (https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...). XNU should be comparable to FreeBSD, which CheriBSD is a fork of, as both use Mach's VM for memory management and have a bunch of shared code in various places, but userspace is more of an unknown quite how much effort it'd be (you'll need to port Objective-C and, now, Swift, for example). For Chromium we have ported WebKit, so I'd imagine Blink isn't too dissimilar. V8 is likely interesting, though we have a version of WebKit's JSC JIT for Morello, which gives confidence in V8 being doable.
- Security Analysis of CHERI ISA
- Security Analysis of Cheri ISA [pdf]
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BleedingTooth: Linux Bluetooth Zero-Click Remote Code Execution
A related post from Google Security Blog[0]:
> "A recent study[1] found that "~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” Another analysis on security issues in the ubiquitous `curl` command line tool showed that 53 out of 95 bugs would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language. [...]"
[0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2021/02/mitigating-memory-sa...
[1]: https://github.com/Microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/blob/mas...
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Rust for Windows
Here is some of the internal advocacy going on at Microsoft.
- Managed languages if you can afford a GC
- Rust
- C++ with Core Guidelines
https://github.com/microsoft/MSRC-Security-Research/tree/mas...
Note that there are still some teams like Azure Sphere and Azure RTOS, which are only providing C based SDKs, so no everyone is on the same wave length.
abseil-cpp
- Sane C++ Libraries
- Open source collection of Google's C++ libraries
- Is Ada safer than Rust?
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Appending to an std:string character-by-character: how does the capacity grow?
Yeah, it's nice! And Abseil does it, IFF you use LLVM libc++.
https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/string...
The standard adopted it as resize_and_overwrite. Which I think is a little clunky.
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Shaving 40% Off Google’s B-Tree Implementation with Go Generics
This may be confusing to those familiar with Google's libraries. The baseline is the Go BTree, which I personally never heard of until just now, not the C++ absl::btree_set. The benchmarks aren't directly comparable, but the C++ version also comes with good microbenchmark coverage.
https://github.com/google/btree
https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/contai...
- Faster Sorting Beyond DeepMind’s AlphaDev
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“Once” one-time concurrent initialization with an integer
An implementation of call_once that accommodates callbacks that throw: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/base/c...
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[R] AlphaDev discovers faster sorting algorithms
I wouldn't say it's that cryptic. It's just a few bitwise rotations/shifts/xor operations.
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Deepmind Alphadev: Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep RL
You can see hashing optimizations as well https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sort..., https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/commit/74eee2aff683cc7d...
I was one of the members who reviewed expertly what has been done both in sorting and hashing. Overall it's more about assembly, finding missed compiler optimizations and balancing between correctness and distribution (in hashing in particular).
It was not revolutionary in a sense it hasn't found completely new approaches but converged to something incomprehensible for humans but relatively good for performance which proves the point that optimal programs are very inhuman.
Note that for instructions in sorting, removing them does not always lead to better performance, for example, instructions can run in parallel and the effect can be less profound. Benchmarks can lie and compiler could do something differently when recompiling the sort3 function which was changed. There was some evidence that the effect can come from the other side.
For hashing it was even funnier, very small strings up to 64 bit already used 3 instructions like add some constant -> multiply 64x64 -> xor upper/lower. For bigger ones the question becomes more complicated, that's why 9-16 was a better spot and it simplified from 2 multiplications to just one and a rotation. Distribution on real workloads was good, it almost passed smhasher and we decided it was good enough to try out in prod. We did not rollback as you can see from abseil :)
But even given all that, it was fascinating to watch how this system was searching and was able to find particular programs can be further simplified. Kudos to everyone involved, it's a great incremental change that can bring more results in the future.
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Backward compatible implementations of newer standards constructs?
Check out https://abseil.io. It offers absl::optional, which is a backport of std::optional.
What are some alternatives?
rust-zmq - Rust zeromq bindings.
Folly - An open-source C++ library developed and used at Facebook.
wuffs - Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely
Boost - Super-project for modularized Boost
PowerShell - PowerShell for every system!
spdlog - Fast C++ logging library.
windows-rs - Rust for Windows
Qt - Qt Base (Core, Gui, Widgets, Network, ...)
Cargo - The Rust package manager
EASTL - Obsolete repo, please go to: https://github.com/electronicarts/EASTL
winapi-rs - Rust bindings to Windows API
BDE - Basic Development Environment - a set of foundational C++ libraries used at Bloomberg.