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The story of the $500,000,000 error.
In 1996, an unmanned Ariane 5 model rocket was launched by the European Space Agency.
Onboard was software written to analyze the horizontal velocity of the spacecraft. A conversion between a 64-bit floating point value and a 16-bit signed integer within this software ultimately caused an overflow error just forty seconds after launch, leading to a catastrophic failure of the spacecraft.
That day, $7 billion of development met it's match: a data type conversion.12 -
* On a field trip *
🎵 99 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL, 99 BOTTLES OF BEER. TAKE ONE DOWN, PASS IT AROUND, 98 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL 🎵
Oh please don't.
...
🎵 1 BOTTLE OF BEER ON THE WALL, 1 BOTTLE OF BEER. TAKE ONE DOWN, PASS IT AROUND, 0 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL 🎵
Finally, they've been singing for like an hour. Good thing it's ove--
🎵 0 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL, 0 BOTTLES OF BEER. TAKE ONE DOWN, PASS IT AROUND, 4294967295 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL 🎵
>_>5 -
When you hate someone so bad that it actually turns into love...natures emotional integer overflow...3
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A lot of phrases we use in software would make awesome alternative-rock band names.
- Integer Overflow
- Curly Braces
- Recursion
- Callback Hell
- Daemon Processes
- Nested Loop
- Regular Expressions
Source: Twitter2 -
So we ordered a piece of software from external software house becouse I was low on time and we needed it asap.
So. Long story short, their software was bugged as hell, they deny all the bugs and they have their BDD that they done and anything we say about it like "feature XYZ is broken on firefox" they will deny it "becouse it wasn't on BDD" or "let's get on call" (in which +- 6-7 people participate from their side and we of course have to pay them for this...)
So they fixed like 20% of bugs (mostly trivials/minors) Application is fairly small scope. You have integration with like 3 endpoints on arbitary API, user registration/login, few things to do in database (mainly math running from cron).
They done it in ASP so I don't know the language and enviroment so can't just fix it myself.
2 days ago (monday) they annoyed me to point where I just started to break things. For starters I found that every numeric input is vunrable to integer overflow (which is blocker). I figured most of fields are purefect opportunity to XSS (but I didn't bother to do JS... anything but not JS...). I figured I can embed into my name/surname/phone (none validated) anything in HTML...
So for now we have around 25 bugs, around 15 of them are blockers.
They figured it's somehow our fault that it's bugged and decided to do demo with us to show off how perfectly it works. I'm happy to break their demos. I figured I will register bunch users that have name - image with fixed/absolute position top:0;left:0 width/height 100% - this will effectively brick admin panel
Also I figured I can do some addotional sounds in background becouse why not. And I just dont know what to put in. It links to my server for now so I can freely change content of bricked admin panel.
I have curl's ready to execute in case they reset database.
I can put in GIFs or heck, even videos, dosen't really matter. Framework escapes some things for them so at least that. But audio/image/video works.
Now I have 2 questions:
- what image + audio combo will work the best (of course we need to keep it civil). Im thinking finding some meme with bugs or maybe nuclear logo image with some siren sound
- am I evil person?
Edit:
I havent stated this clearly:
"There is no BDD that describes that if user inserts malicious input server should deny it" - that's almost literally what we get from them....11 -
2038 because of integer overflow we can finally start time travel and maybe a few satellites will fall down.4
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Empty your memory,
with a free(),
like a pointer.
If you cast a pointer to an integer,
it becomes the integer.
If you cast a pointer to a struct,
it becomes the struct.
The pointer can crash and can overflow.
Be a pointer my friend.
1 -
The tons of undefined behaviour in C that ought to have been implementation defined instead, and increasingly sadistic compiler writers on the other side.
Like signed integer overflow that should just do what the underlying machine does, i.e. in practice, wrap around two's complement.
But the wierdest UB is when a C source code line has a non-matching ' or ". WTF, this should have been a compile time error!2 -
One thing when working with a ton of data:
If there is a slight, infinitesimal probability that something will be wrong, then it will 100% be wrong.
Never make assumptions that data is consistent, when dealing with tens of gigabytes of it, unless you get it sanitized from somewhere.
I've already seen it all:
* Duplicates where I've been assured "these are unique"
* In text fields that contain exclusively numeric values, there will always be some non-numeric values as well
* There will be negative numbers in "number sequences starting with 1"
* There will be dates in the future, and in the far far future, like 20115 in the future.
* Even if you have 200k customers, there will be a customer ID that will cause an integer overflow.
Don't trust anything. Always check and question everything.5 -
Did the loan amount offered to me just cause an integer overflow !!!
I dont know if i should be happy or sad
6 -
A bit longer rant, somehow triggered by the end of this rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/7145365/...
The discussion revolved around strpos returning false or a positive integer.
Instead of an Option or a Exception.
I said I'm a sucker for exception, but I'm also a sucker for typing.
Which is something most languages lack - except the lower level ones like C / C++.
I always loved languages which have unsigned and signed types.
There, I said it... :) I know that signed / unsigned is controversial, Google immediately leads to blog entries screaming bloody murder because unsigned can overflow – or underflow, if someone tries to use a -1on an unsigned integer.
Note that my love is only meant for numeric types, unsigned / signed char is ... a whole can of insanity on its own.
https://phoronix.com/news/...
If you wanna know more.
Back to the strpos problem, now with my secret love exposed:
strpos works on a single string, where a string is a sequence of chars starting with 0.
0 is a positive integer.
In case the needle (char that should be looked up in the string) cannot be found in the haystack (the string), PHP returns "false".
This leads to the necessity of explicitly checking the type as "0" (beginning of string, a string position)... So strpos !== false.
PHP interprets 0 as false, any other integer value is true.
In the discussion, the suggestion came up to return -1 if a value could not be found – which some languages do, for example Scala.
Now I said I have a love for unsigned & signed integers vs. just signed integers...
Can you guess why the -1 bothers me very much?
Because it's a value that's illogical.
A search in a sequence that is indexed by 0 can only have 0 or more elements, not less than zero elements.
-1 refers to a position in the sequence that *cannot* exist.
Which is - of course - the reason -1 was chosen as a return value for false, but it still annoys me.
An unsigned integer with an exception would be my love as a return value, mostly because an unsigned integer represents the return value *best*. After all, the sequence can only return a value of 0 ... X.
*sigh*
Yes, I know I'm weird.
I'm also missing unsigned in Postgres, which was more or less not implemented because it's not in the SQL standard...
*sob*30 -
Something you really should not do:
*adds a new feature*
*build & run*
*See no difference*
Me: "Hmm.. Maybe 1 is not the best test integer, let me pick something higher..."
*build & run*
*INTEGER OVERFLOW EXCEPTION*
Feel free to share your "let me choose anothee test integer"-stories, which gone terribly wrong.1 -
I really thought i would never run into integer overflow issues, but damn, not being able to set a date as 100 years into the future for comparison is pretty shite. Fuck this bug.2
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in vb.net i can declare a void function:
Declare Function some_func& Lib "some_lib.dll" ()
then try to assign its return value to a variable:
some_return = some_func()
and get no errors during compilation, not even a warning
but in runtime it produces integer arithmetic overflow exception
in what way it is not even a warning?4
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