I was an audience at an event called Lightweight Language Future yesterday in Nakano, Tokyo, Japan. I only attended the first two sessions. The second session was a panel discussion about the programming language 100 years later. While the discussion was technically intriguing, I heard not a word about security at all during the panel. Two of the panelists (names withheld because I don't want this article to be a personal attack to them) were the principal designers of popular lightweight languages, so I asked them in the Q&A session about how they would deal with the security issues which would become more serious in the future. One of the answers surprised me; the person told me that VMware would do.
I understand virtualization in various operating system layers, including VMware and FreeBSD jail, is surely a good hack to control the damage area in the whole system to run a public access system. I think it's not sufficient at all, however, to prevent future security incidents; if a programming language is potentially vulnerable to attacks, the systems built by the language will be also equally vulnerable.
I think programming language designers are not exempted from the responsibility of (at least trying to) making computer systems secure. If I could hear more constructive ways of solving the security problems in the answer from one of the panelists, such as:
- protecting the language from the buffer-overflow bugs;
- preventing the garbage collector from crashing even in a hostile environment where the external attackers try to deliberately manipulate the pointers or variables to hack into the protected memory area;
- implementing a syntax or semantics validation system in the programming language so that the programmers can apply it to validate the external data, such as those from the network-connected users; or
- preventing the race condition, deadlocks, or any sort of resource starvation by the intentional or unintentional programming;
then I would have been much more convinced. But now I should suspect that quite a few programming language designers just don't care about the security consequences of the features they build into the language.
I don't have a definitive answer to solve the issues of unsecure systems built from unsecure programming languages. All I can write now is that a security-aware programming language will surely help making a secure system. Note that security is not just about privacy and secrecy; it's also about the reliability and fault-tolerance.
Note on 4-SEP-2008: one of my friends later reviewed the panel recording and told me that it was not VMware but VM layer that the panelist answered to me. I still think solely relying on the VM layer is insufficient for building a security structure in a programming language, though.