Blog

From Facebook to Silent Circle, through the “metrics” Frama-C plug-in
Pascal Cuoq on 16 February 2013

From Facebook to Silent Circle Some computers at Facebook were recently compromised because of a zero-day in Java. Nothing unexpected. Last december instead of writing a full blog post I lazily linked to Robert Graham predicting this sort of thing for the year 2013. Speaking of Facebook do you know...

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ENSL seminar
Pascal Cuoq on 1 February 2013

Seminar As anticipated, I was at my alma mater's student seminar last tuesday. School and seminar were very much like I remembered them. The latter was improved by orange juice and biscuits to chat around after the talk, that I do not think were part of the protocol when I...

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Customers, customers, customers
Pascal Cuoq on 24 January 2013

The recent posts on extremely minor undefined behaviors in zlib neatly tie in with a discussion on John Regehr's blog about the future-proofitude of C and C++. Another insightful post in this regard is this one by Derek Jones. Derek claims that the situation is different for proprietary compilers with...

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2000s
Pascal Cuoq on 22 January 2013

Blogger of multiple qualities Harry McCracken was recently still looking for “an iPad PDF reader which can handle giant files which are 100s of pages long without choking”. Sorry I meant “STILL looking”. PDF is a nineteen-nineties technology to display text and pictures. Key quote: “Each PDF file encapsulates a...

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Bad zlib, bad! No compare pointer!
Pascal Cuoq on 16 January 2013

In a previous post we remarked that the decompression function of zlib for some inputs computes an invalid pointer. But at least it neither dereferences it nor compares it to another pointer. Or does it? Recipe for an invalid pointer comparison Instrument Take an ordinary zlib library version 1.2.7 and...

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