Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 263 posts.

Security & Privacy
75

The Day I Fell in Love with Fuzzing

In 2007 I wrote a pair of modding tools, binitools , for a space trading and combat simulation game named Freelancer . The game stores its non-art assets in the format of “binary INI” files, or “BINI” files. The motivation for the binary format over traditional INI files was probably performance: it’s faster to load…

85

Infectious Executable Stacks

In software development there are many concepts that at first glance seem useful and sound, but, after considering the consequences of their implementation and use, are actually horrifying. Examples include thread cancellation , variable length arrays , and memory aliasing . GCC’s closure extension to C is another…

86

Modern C++ Won't Save Us

I’m a frequent critic of memory unsafe languages, principally C and C++, and how they induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities. My conclusion, based on reviewing evidence from numerous large software projects using C and C++, is that we need to be migrating our industry to memory safe by default…