Re: [Qemu-devel] KVM call for 2017-03-14

Peter Maydell
2017-03-14T10:40:21Z

On 14 March 2017 at 09:13, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com> wrote:
> The minimum requirements for the new language:

> 3. Is it safer than C even when writing code to operate on guest RAM
> (i.e. it's no good if you must use unsafe primitives to do the
> systems programming tasks that QEMU requires)?

My impression is that many of our security vulnerabilities are
overflows in local arrays in the device emulation (for instance
good old VENOM), so I think that even if a candidate safer
language only provided bounds-checking on arrays it knew about
and not on raw guest RAM it would still be a significant
improvement. (Accesses to guest RAM are often via APIs that
we could add bounds-checks to "by hand" anyway.) So I wouldn't
consider this as a "minimum requirement", only a "nice to have".

thanks
-- PMM