"a skilled backdoor-writer can defeat skilled auditors"?

[coderman]

On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 10:54 PM, Stephan Neuhaus
<stephan.neuhaus at tik.ee.ethz.ch> wrote:
> ...
> And that I think is going too far.  There might be perfectly valid
> reasons to do what the developer did, and saying post-hoc that you fail
> the audit because you don't like some design choices opens the door to
> personal biases. (Good luck, for example, trying to write nontrivial C
> without at least some form of pointer arithmetic.)

there is a significant difference between engineering for safety,
conservatively.  and sloppy error prone techniques indicating haste
and carelessness.

pointer arithmetic in C may be unavoidable, yet using them
consistently with thoughtfulness and robustness is always a great
idea.

defensive designs and conservative implementations are not "personal
biases" in any form!


[ what is defensive and conservative? well, i know it when i see it! *grin* ]



> If you fail the audit, it's your duty as a professional auditor to
> provide evidence that there is something actually wrong with the
> software.

"why do I need to add braces around my if clause? that's your opinion
about style, who cares??"

'you don't have to, but a trivial edit error could bleed you for years
if you don't!'


if (what) {
  goto fail;
  goto fail;
  /* fail safer! */
}