> We have a vision of a WebAssembly ecosystem that is secure by default, fixing cracks in today’s software foundations. And based on advances rapidly emerging in the WebAssembly community, we believe we can make this vision real.

> WebAssembly can provide the kind of isolation that makes it safe to run untrusted code. We can have an architecture that’s like Unix’s many small processes, or like containers and microservices. But this isolation is much lighter weight, and the communication between them isn’t much slower than a regular function call. This means you can use them to wrap a single WebAssembly module instance, or a small collection of module instances that want to share things like memory among themselves.

source: HN

> On Nov 12, 2019, we (VUSec) disclose TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA), a new speculation-based vulnerability in Intel CPUs as well as other MDS-related issues, as described in our new RIDL addendum. In reality, this is no new vulnerability. We disclosed TAA (and other issues) as part of our original RIDL submission to Intel in Sep 2018. Unfortunately, the Intel PSIRT team missed our submitted proof-of-concept exploits (PoCs), and as a result, the original MDS mitigations released in May 2019 only partially addressed RIDL. You can read the full story below.

> On July 3, 2019, we finally learned that, to our surprise, the Intel PSIRT team had missed the PoCs from our Sep 29 submission, despite having awarded a bounty for it, explaining why Intel had failed to address - or even publicly acknowledge - many RIDL-class vulnerabilities on May 14, 2019.

When you have so many problems you’re paying out bounties without knowing what for...

> In response to the call for blogs about the vision for Rust for 2020, I’m going to write about GUI. I believe the time is right for a native GUI toolkit written in Rust, and that such a thing would fill a very important niche. There is a demand for performance (which, to me, includes startup time, RAM footprint, and binary size), and Rust is in the best position to deliver on that.

source: HN

> The API blacklist tracks who’s calling a function. If the source isn’t exempt, it crashes. In the first example, the source is the app. However, in the second example, the source is the system itself. Instead of using reflection to get what we want directly, we’re using it to tell the system to get what we want. Since the source of the call to the hidden function is the system, the blacklist doesn’t affect us anymore.

The call is coming from inside the system!

source: grugq

> It went to a national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was awakened on 9 November 1979, to be told that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the combined U.S.–Canada military command–was reporting a Soviet missile attack. Just before Brzezinski was about to call President Carter, the NORAD warning turned out to be a false alarm. It was one of those moments in Cold War history when top officials believed they were facing the ultimate threat. The apparent cause? The routine testing of an overworked computer system.

source: grugq

> Whenever I get a ticket through an agent and they put my first name as Amr, it lands as A only in the Airlines system. That happened with many airlines and different agents. That is pretty much annoying, specially during the online check-in.

> In the case of a Travel Agency connected to Amadeus, for example, this means that they are likely using ATE: the Amadeus Terminal Emulator, which as the name implies emulates the terminals of old.

> Check the Quick Reference Guide, p. 33 on how to create a PNR:

> NM1SMITH/JOHN MR

> Using a space, the parsing is unambiguous, however not all agents put a space

source: HN

> With a better understanding of the root causes, we searched for existing tooling to help us quickly and effectively instrument client codebases. The result was a sample of static and dynamic open-source tools, including several that were Go-agnostic. To complement these tools, we also identified several compiler configurations that help with instrumentation.

Useful for developers who aren’t auditors as well.

source: L

> Problems often appear just because we put some pieces together in the first place.

source: HN

> This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article.

> Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo and, together with a wonderful crew of developers, experts and receiver operators, have learned so much about what I now know are called ‘Global Navigation Satellite Systems’ or GNSS. This has lead to the galmon.eu project, which monitors the health and vital statistics of GPS, Galileo, BeiDou and GLONASS. More about the project can be read in the full article.

I totally missed the fact that there was an outage, but some interesting commentary.

source: HN

> A strange competition has popped up to create levels with audacious passcodes that you could spend a lifetime trying to guess.

source: cox

> Using a generative fuzzer — which creates test cases from scratch, rather than mutating a collection of seed inputs — feels to me a lot like being the drunk guy in the joke: we’re looking for bugs that can be triggered by inputs that the generator is likely to generate, because we don’t have an obviously better option, besides doing some hard work in improving the generator. This problem has bothered me for a long time.

> When you get into the details I found it hard to come away with any strongly actionable takeaways though. Perhaps the most interesting lesson/reminder is this: it takes a lot of effort to tune a Linux kernel. For example:

> “Red Hat and Suse normally required 6-18 months to optimise the performance an an upstream Linux kernel before it can be released as an enterprise distribution”, and
> “Google’s data center kernel is carefully performance tuned for their workloads. This task is carried out by a team of over 100 engineers, and for each new kernel, the effort can also take 6-18 months.”

> Parsing is hard, even when a file format is well specified. But when the specification is ambiguous, it leads to unintended and strange parser and interpreter behaviors that make file formats susceptible to security vulnerabilities. What if we could automatically generate a “safe” subset of any file format, along with an associated, verified parser? That’s our collective goal in Dr. Sergey Bratus’s DARPA SafeDocs program.

> We’ve developed two new tools that take the pain out of parsing and make file formats safer:
> PolyFile: A polyglot-aware file identification utility with manually instrumented parsers that can semantically label the bytes of a file hierarchically; and
> PolyTracker: An automated instrumentation framework that efficiently tracks input file taint through the execution of a program.

source: grugq

> In politics, stock markets, space, and the battlefield, tiny software calculation mistakes have had enormous consequences.

> Sometimes those fractional cents aren’t stolen—they simply vanish. In the early 1980s, a new stock index at the Vancouver Stock Exchange tracked a steady and mysterious loss in value. An investigation revealed that floor() was being used instead of round(), with the lost fractions of cents accumulating to almost a 50 percent loss of value in 22 months. The programming mistake was finally fixed; the index closed around 500 on a Friday and reopened the following Monday at over 1,000, the lost value restored.

source: ML

> To get more insight into Untitled Goose Game’s meteoric rise, I called up Disseldorp to get the backstory on how the game came to be and why it’s struck such a nerve. Here’s the full story of how a workplace joke about a video game starring a bratty goose became a full-fledged, delightfully silly bestseller.

source: HN

> Alexis Beingessner’s Text Rendering Hates You, published exactly a month ago today, hits very close to my heart.

> Back in 2017, I was building a rich text editor in the browser. Unsatisfied with existing libraries that used ContentEditable, I thought to myself “hey, I’ll just reimplement text selection myself! How difficult could it possibly be?” I was young. Naive. I estimated it would take two weeks. In reality, attempting to solve this problem would consume several years of my life, and even landed me a full time job for a year implementing text editing for a new operating system.

source: L

> We are pleased to announce AddressSanitizer (ASan) support for the MSVC toolset. ASan is a fast memory error detector that can find runtime memory issues such as use-after-free and perform out of bounds checks. Support for sanitizers has been one of our more popular suggestions on Developer Community, and we can now say that we have an experience for ASan on Windows, in addition to our existing support for Linux projects.

> MSVC support for ASan is available in our second Preview release of Visual Studio 2019 version 16.4.

source: white

> This is a happy story about the power of global communication and manufacturing resources in today’s world. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you’ve certainly heard me whine and moan about how impossible it is to find the obscure DB-19 disk connector used on vintage Macintosh and Apple II computers (and some NeXT and Atari computers too). Nobody has made these connectors for decades.

source: HN

> Once you get past the growing pains of the Borrow Checker and realise Rust gives you the power to do things which would be unheard of (or just plain dangerous) in other languages, the temptation to Rewrite it in Rust can be quite strong. However at best, the temptation to RiiR is unproductive (unnecessary duplication of effort), and at worst it can promote the creation of buggy software (why would you be better equipped to write a library for some domain-specific purpose than the original author?).

> A much better alternative is to reuse the original library and just publish a safe interface to it.

source: L

> Game of Trees is a work-in-progress version control system which attempts to be appealing to OpenBSD developers.

https://gameoftrees.org/