Recently, the latest Perl.com newsletter alerted me to this article about Microsoft's .NET and security concerns. Interestingly, it was pointed out that .NET could have even greater security problems than other Microsoft products. Virtually all of the security concerns, however, used free and open-source products to illustrate the potential danger, as if the danger stemmed from them and not from .NET's architecture. One telling quote:
The ability for the platform to understand programmes in different languages makes the threat from worms and trojans much greater, as many of these are written in other languages such as Perl and currently have no anti-virus products.
How, exactly, does one write a worm or trojan in Perl? Frankly, you can't do it now.¹ I haven't paid much attention to the .NET blather as things from Redmond tend not to get me very excited. Is there something here that I am missing?
The above quote was from Eric Chien, the chief researcher for Symantec. The article was almost entirely quotes from him. Here's another interesting tidbit:
Chien delivered his misgiving s in a research paper last Friday, in which he admitted his worries that attempts to port .NET to other operating systems - such as the Mono project to make it available on Linux - will ignore Microsoft's various security settings, leaving the platform open to attack.
Is Chien bucking for a job at MS, or is Symantec so far in bed with BillG and friends that he has no choice but to say that, or is there some serious concern here? I don't use Linux much, but from what I've seen about the open-source community, they've done an admirable job of adhering to standards (much better than MS, in fact²). Something just strikes me as being wholly disengenous in the above quote where there's a suggestion that the open-source community might have trouble following the standards that MS lays down.
Cheers,
Ovid
1. Well, okay, you can do it, but it wouldn't be very effective. I have some Perl virus code that someone wrote once, but all it does is illustrate the ridiculousness of the concept.
2. To be perfectly fair to Microsoft, I don't have much of a problem with standards violations per se. With respect to Web browsers, JavaScript (nee Livescript) wasn't a standard when it came out. Many new tags have arisen because one of the browser manufacturers wanted to add new features to differentiate between them and the competition. In this respect, Microsoft needs to violate the standards. Any browser that's one hundred percent standards compliant is already out-of-date.
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