Re: How to answer "Perl is not secure" objections?

[Joost]

'Perl has bindings into OS calls that bypass OS security'.

The only way I can read that is as "our OS is insecure".

Either there are legitimate bindings in the OS to bypass normal security for good reasons, and those hooks have the usual protection (i.e. you need to be root / of a specific group to call them), or there are hooks in the OS that just break security and it doesn't matter what language you're using - you could probably break them using a shell script.

[grinder]

'Perl has bindings into OS calls that bypass OS security'.

The only way I can read that is as "our OS is insecure".

Quite. For instance, I wrote BSD::Sysctl, a module to allow you to manipulate FreeBSD sysctl kernel variables. If you're an ordinary user, you can only read the values. If you try to set a value... nothing happens (apart from an error condition returned by the kernel system call).

You have to have superuser privileges in order to change a variable. So if you're already root, everything becomes insecure!.

I'm sure if someone figured out how to set sysctl variables as an ordinary user in Perl, that the technique used would be completely language-independent (that is, the result of an exposed flaw in the OS).