Mozilla Has Been Rewriting Its Crash Reporter In Rust

[mdedetrich]

It is reporting crashes of Firefox, not itself.
Furthermore, there are multiple ways to crash an application. You are most likely taking about segmentation faults. But what about unhandled exceptions? Firefox is partially a C++ code base. What about errors the rust code base boubles up and cannot be handled reasonably? In the end the application will crash and those crashes need to get reported.

Saying partially here is a bit diplomatic, Firefox is still primarily C++ although they are slowly moving parts to Rust.

[andyprough]

I had my first crash in years today, and it took down the whole plasmashell. I guess it is more accurate to say firefox caused amdgpu to crash. The joy of switching to plasma6 on wayland.

Yes, I should have pointed out that I am no longer serving as a pre-alpha tester for Gnome's various Wayland efforts, so life is definitely more crash-less.

[Weasel]

Not really. A CVE implies it's something wrong with the language/compiler itself, rather than what seems to be an intended feature based on the fact that *every other language that exists* had the exact same flaw. Many of which straight up said they're not going to bother with patching it, because it's not a real CVE. And again, weird that the CVE was filed *only* against Rust and not any other languages.

Rust's memory safety is nice, but it does so via syntax and control flow. Languages shouldn't automatically parse data and change it behind the scenes without you knowing. Languages shouldn't get in the way of people who know what they're doing to cushion people who don't know what they're doing.

Next, there's going to be a CVE for C and ASM because you can arbitrarily read memory D:

C/C++ and ASM don't claim to be secure for retarded cases like this that's why no CVE.

I swear Rust fanboys cope so hard.

[bug77]

It's not a path commonly followed. Few people should be submitting commands to CMD.exe instead of launching the program they want directly, and nobody should be feeding untrusted input into the shell.

The rust people are freaked out because they made a promise that they would (could) make this safe through clever filtering and escaping, and they take their promises VERY seriously. Rust goes as far as to have stronger stability guarantees than some of the stuff it relies on, like LLVM.

The rust developers are choosing to treat this just as seriously as if thousands of developers had relied on this promise in millions of applications, when in reality both numbers are probably in the single digits. In the grand scheme of things it was important to keep their promise for developers' sanity, but nobody in their right mind should have been leaning on this specific promise.

It's not something a regular developer would do. But it's the first thing a malicious attacker would craft and get you to install on your machine...
I agree it should be on cmd.exe to let people know what's safe for consumption and what's not, but when you integrate crap like that, sometimes you're left picking up the slack.

[mattia.b89]

I notice I haven't seen a crash in quite awhile. Kind of nice.

Unfortunately, I suffer annoying bug: every time I D'n'D a file into github field, FF crashes and the prophetic reporter appears!

[Developer12]

I trust since Rust developers are experts in their own software and therefore their own assessment that it is a critical security patch. You can choose to rely on your guesses that contradicts Rust developers.

You fundamentally don't understand what either I or the developers are saying. At this point I doubt you've even read their blog post on the CVE.

From the perspective of "we made a security guarantee (about untrusted input and arbitrary execution) which it turns out isn't true" yes this is should be "severe" if you want to rate the vulnerability itself. This completely ignores whether anyone has ever written a single line of code that uses this functionality. This is the approach the rust devs have taken. Completely absent from the rust devs' analysis is whether anyone has relied on their guarantee in the real world.

The severity of this vulnerability is critical if you are invoking batch files on Windows with untrusted arguments.

All Rust versions before 1.77.2 on Windows are affected, if your code or one of your dependencies executes batch files with untrusted arguments.

That's it. That's the whole analysis of real-world impact.

Has anyone actually done this? Almost certainly not, for the reasons stated before.

[Developer12]

It's not something a regular developer would do. But it's the first thing a malicious attacker would craft and get you to install on your machine...
I agree it should be on cmd.exe to let people know what's safe for consumption and what's not, but when you integrate crap like that, sometimes you're left picking up the slack.

If you already have a malicious attacker installing code on your machine, I shouldn't need to tell you this CVE isn't necessary for them to do whatever the hell they please.

[bug77]

If you already have a malicious attacker installing code on your machine, I shouldn't need to tell you this CVE isn't necessary for them to do whatever the hell they please.

They wouldn't install it themselves, they would have you install it on your own. "free cleaner", "speed up your system" ring a bell? Though they don't need to rely on Rust if they can get you to do that.

[Developer12]

They wouldn't install it themselves, they would have you install it on your own. "free cleaner", "speed up your system" ring a bell? Though they don't need to rely on Rust if they can get you to do that.

If a malicious attacker can convince you to install anything they've written, I shouldn't need to tell you this CVE isn't necessary for them to do whatever the hell they please.

[swastika]

You fundamentally don't understand what either I or the developers are saying ... Has anyone actually done this? Almost certainly not, for the reasons stated before.

They fundamentally have called it is a critical security patch and I understand that just fine and quoted that to you but you seem to downplaying that heavily and you said you are guessing that nobody is doing this. If you have any evidence beyond just a guess, feel free to cite that. I am not going to be relying on your guess.