security-research VS wuffs

> Alright, let's take a step back. First, I am not a mobile developer.

I think you're whichever kind of developer your current position requires. You've been talking about Android non-stop throughout this conversation, and conversations you've had with others on this website [1]. When you were lambasting me about my perceived knowledge of mobile development you were touting your Android knowledge. Now that I've proven Android is actually one of the primary tools Google uses to promote Chrome (and you admitted you don't know much about iOS) you want to distance yourself from mobile development altogether.

> Other examples include whatever iOS does (which I don't know), containers (docker and the likes), VMs, and everything in-between (like what snap or flatpak use).

We're not discussing theoretical means with which you could sandbox an application, we're talking about how apps are actually used in reality. If you need to fire up a virtual machine every time you use your favorite desktop apps, then you're only proving my point that they're not inherently very secure. Not to mention, the average user probably has no idea what Docker or a virtual machine even is. Like I said in my original response, lots of things are possible in theory, but in practice web browsers are much better at sandboxing apps than desktop operating systems (and even better than mobile operating systems).

> If anything, modern browsers are so complex (and getting worse with time) that the attack surface is big

Ironically, a lot of that complexity arises from the web's insistence on security. V8 is complex because it has so many safeguards in place to sandbox JavaScript, and that sandboxing is taken very seriously. There's a reward anywhere from 10,000 to 150,000 USD if you can escape the sandbox [2][3]. Browsers are inherently more secure than desktop apps because they limit access to the underlying platform. Someone developing malware as a web app has to first escape the browser sandbox, just to gain the privileges that a desktop app has natively. If it helps, you can think of every desktop app as a webapp which has already escaped the browser.

> Moreover, Web UIs bring their own class of issues that don't really apply to native apps.

No, web developers have just spent so much time thinking about security, that native app developers haven't even realized these security issues are relevant yet. It took years for Apple and Google to come to the brilliant conclusion that they should notify users when an app is reading from the clipboard, something which at the time was considered just a Browser "class of issue". Maybe in 2034 they'll figure this out for desktop apps.

> But CORS is really a browser thing, I don't think it really makes sense to compare it to anything outside the "webview world".

It makes sense to compare it to things outside of the browser because it protects users and servers. You seem to want to disqualify any point I make that you can't disprove. If you don't think web technology is comparable to anything outside the browser, then what are we even arguing about? This whole discussion has been about comparing the security of web apps to non-web apps.

> If security is your concern (and you seem to insist that it is), then webapps are really not better than the alternatives. Actually, the Apple Store and the Play Store (to give an example in the mobile world) allow Apple and Google to somehow monitor the apps that users install, which is most certainly more secure than a model where anyone can load any webapp from any website.

Apple and Google have to monitor which apps make it to their app stores, BECAUSE apps are so much more prone to security problems. You once again have it completely backwards. No one has to gatekeep websites because browsers are so much better at sandboxing applications. And allow me to remind you that admitted you have no idea how iOS sandboxing works, so you can't really be confident about this stance even if it did make sense.

And now you're arguing in favor of the app store duopoly which contradicts your point about software diversity. You can't have it both ways. You're trying to hold on to two contradictory points at the same time: you don't like the supposed lack of Browser diversity (which is why you seem to detest Chromium), but you like the supposed security guarantees of the mobile app store duopoly, which is even less diverse.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38919389

[2] https://github.com/google/security-research/blob/master/v8ct...

[3] https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/5745167867576320/c...

This research is also available in text form.

But both Nebula and tinc max out at around 1 Gbit/s on my Hetzner servers, thus not using most of my 10 Gbit/s connectivity. This is because they cap out at 100% of 1 CPU. The Nebula issue about that was closed due to "inactivity" [2].

I also observed that when Nebula operates at 100% CPU usage, you get lots of package loss. This causes software that expects reasonable timings on ~0.2ms links to fail (e.g. consensus software like Consul, or Ceph). This in turn led to flakiness / intermittent outages.

I had to resolve to move the big data pushing softwares like Ceph outside of the VPN to get 10 Gbit/s speed for those, and to avoid downtimes due to the packet loss.

Such software like Ceph has its own encryption, but I don't trust it, and that mistrust was recently proven right again [3].

So I'm currently looking to move the Ceph into WireGuard.

Summary: For small-data use, tinc and Nebula are fine, but if you start to push real data, they break.

[1]: https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc/issues/218

[2]: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/issues/637

[3]: https://github.com/google/security-research/security/advisor...

You can run the PoC if you want: https://github.com/google/security-research/tree/master/pocs...

* Visual Studio Code had a Remote Code Execution vulnerability triggered by a simple link https://github.com/google/security-research/security/advisor...

Maybe this is what you are looking for:

https://github.com/google/wuffs

"Wuffs is a memory-safe programming language (and a standard library written in that language) for Wrangling Untrusted File Formats Safely."

It could author its format parsers in https://github.com/google/wuffs, and make them BSD-like open source to maximize adoption.

An even bigger change: It could allow users to choose their iMessage client freely. Why not open up the protocol? I’m sure a security focused client would be popular and in the grand scheme of things easy to author.

Perhaps they could open up more of the OS and apps. Perhaps their claims about the security of users and the App Store is kind of BS.

This is one of the reasons I'm a big fan of wuffs[0] - it specifically targets dealing with formats like pictures, safely, and the result drops in to a C codebase to make the compat/migration story easy.

[0] https://github.com/google/wuffs

There are already huffman-decoding and some parts of webp algorithms in https://github.com/google/wuffs (language that finds missing bounds checks during compilations). In contrary, according to readme, this language allows to write more optimized code (compared to C). WEBP decoding is stated as a midterm target in the roadmap.

Specifically, since performance is crucial for this type of work, it should be written in WUFFS. WUFFS doesn't emit bounds checks (as Java does and as Rust would where it's unclear why something should be in bounds at runtime) it just rejects programs where it can't see why the indexes are in-bounds.

https://github.com/google/wuffs

You can explicitly write the same checks and meet this requirement, but chances are since you believe you're producing a high performance piece of software which doesn't need checks you'll instead be pulled up by the fact the WUFFS tooling won't accept your code and discover you got it wrong.

This is weaker than full blown formal verification, but not for the purpose we care about in program safety, thus a big improvement on humans writing LGTM.

> parsing encoded files tends to introduce vulnerabilities

If we are talking about binary formats, now there are systematic solutions like https://github.com/google/wuffs that protect against vulnerabilities. But SQLite is not just a format - it's an evolving ecosystem with constantly added features. And the most prominent issue was not even in core, it was in FTS3. What will SQLite add next? More json-related functions? Maybe BSON? It is useful, but does not help in this situation.

Regarding traces, there are many forensics tools and even books about forensic analysis of SQLite databases. In well-designed format such tools should not exist in the first place. This is hard requirement: if it requires rewriting the whole file - then so be it.

I agree that Wuffs [1] would have been a very good alternative! If it can be made more generally. AFAIK Wuffs is still very limited, in particular it never allows dynamic allocation. Many formats, including those supported by Wuffs the library, need dynamic allocation, so Wuffs code has to be glued with unverified non-Wuffs code [2]. This only works with simpler formats.

[1] https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/wuffs-the-lang...

[2] https://github.com/google/wuffs/blob/main/doc/note/memory-sa...

There are efforts to do that, notably https://github.com/google/wuffs

RLBox is another interesting option that lets you sandbox C/C++ code.

I think the main reason is that security is one of those things that people don't care about until it is too late to change. They get to the point of having a fast PDF library in C++ that has all the features. Then they realise that they should have written it in a safer language but by that point it means a complete rewrite.

The same reason not enough people use Bazel. By the time most people realise they need it, you've already implemented a huge build system using Make or whatever.

I finally have time to try out wuffs (https://github.com/google/wuffs), which I first heard about here on HN. I want to develop a low-level tokenizer for SDF files, a small-molecule structure file format which started in the 1970s, with lots of, let's call it 'heritage'. Wuffs' ability to process near the data, with a coroutine-like interface, seems like a good fit.

I got the "hello-wuffs-c" example to work, which took some tinkering (see wuffs issue #24). That reads a single string and returns an unsigned int. Despite looking at the example implementations for json parsing, I can't figure out how to go from that example to something which handles multiple input buffer blocks, with string tokens that might straddle two buffers.

Nor could I find third-party examples of people using wuffs-the-language beyond basic experimentation for simple binary data. The handful of non-trivial examples I found only used wuffs-the-library, as a vendored component in a larger project.

The lack of wuffs-the-language use after several years seems a strong sign that I shouldn't look to wuffs for my project. Given the 'workarounds' in #24 are still present after 3 years, it doesn't even seem that widely internally at Google.

Does anyone here have experience to share, or pointers to related projects?

Here's an off-topic answer.

Depends on what you want your toy language to do and what sort of runtime support you'd like to lean on.

JVM is pretty good for a lot of script-y languages, does impose overhead of having a JVM around. Provides GC, Threads, Reflection, consistent semantics. Tons of tools, libraries, support.

WebAssembly is constrained (for running-in-a-browser safety reasons) but then you get to run your code in a browser, or as a service, etc, and Other People are working hard on the problem of getting your WA to go fast. That used to be a big reason for using JVM, but it turns out that Security Is Darn Hard.

I have used C in the (distant) past as an IL, and that works up to a point, implementing garbage collection can be a pain if that's a thing that you want. C compilers have had a lot of work on them over the years, and you also have access to some low-level stuff, so if you were E.G. trying to come up with a little language that had super-good performance, C might be a good choice. (See also, [Wuffs](https://github.com/google/wuffs), by Nigel Tao et al at Google).

A suggestion, if you do target C -- don't work too hard to find isomorphisms between C's data structures and YourToyLang's data structures. Back around 1990, I did my C-generating compiler for Modula-3, and a friend at Xerox PARC used C as a target for Cedar Mesa, and Hans used it in a lower-level way (so I was mapping between M-3 records and C structs, for example, Hans was not) and the lower-level way worked better -- i.e., I chose poorly. It worked, but lower-level worked better.

If you are targeting a higher-level language, Rust and Go both seem like interesting options to me. Both have the disadvantage that they are still changing slightly but you get interesting "services" from the underlying VM -- for Rust, the borrow checker, plus libraries, for Go, reflection, goroutines, and the GC, plus libraries.

Rust should get you slightly higher performance, but I'd worry that you couldn't hide the existence of the borrow checker from your toy language, especially if you wanted to interact with Rust libraries from YTL. If you wanted to learn something vaguely publishable/wider-interesting, that question right there ("can I compile a TL to Rust, touch the Rust libraries, and not expose the borrow checker? No+what-I-tried/Yes+this-worked") is not bad.

I have a minor conflict of interest suggesting Go; I work on Go, usually on the compiler, and machine-generated code makes great test data. But regarded as a VM, I am a little puzzled why it hasn't seen wider use, because the GC is great (for lower-allocation rates than Java however; JVM GC has higher throughout efficiency, but Go has tagless objects, interior pointer support, and tiny pause times. Go-the-language makes it pretty easy to allocate less.) Things Go-as-a-VM currently lacks:

- tail call elimination (JVM same)