Tips on Avoiding Security-Related Bugs
Software engineers define errors as mistakes made by humans when designing and coding software. Faults are manifestations of errors in programs that may result in failures. Failures are deviations from program specifications. In common usage, faults are called bugs.
Why do we bother to explain these formal terms? For three reasons:
To remind you that although bugs (faults) may be present in the code, they aren’t necessarily a problem until they trigger a failure. Testing is designed to trigger such a failure before the program becomes operational...and results in damage.
Bugs don’t suddenly appear in code. They are there because some person made a mistake—from ignorance, from haste, from carelessness, or from some other reason. Ultimately, unintentional flaws that allow someone to compromise your system were caused by people who made errors.
Almost every piece of Unix software (as well as software for several other widely used operating systems) has been developed without comprehensive specifications. As a result, you cannot easily tell when a program has actually failed. Indeed, what appears to be a bug to users of the program might be a feature that was intentionally planned by the program’s authors.[242]
When you write a program that will run as superuser or in some other critical context, you must try to make the program as bug-free as possible because a bug in a program that runs as superuser can leave your entire computer system wide open. ...
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