Foreword

There is a humorous, computing-related aphorism that goes like this: "There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't." Besides being amusing to people who understand number representation, this saying can be used to group people into four (or 100) categories:

• Those who will never quite get the meaning of the statement, even if it is explained to them

• Those who need some explanation, but will eventually get the meaning

• Those who have the background to grasp the meaning when they read it

• Those who have the knowledge and understanding to not only see the statement as obvious, but be able to come up with it independently on their own

There are parallels for these four categories in many different areas of endeavor. You can apply it to art, to cooking, to architecture...or to writing software. I have been teaching aspects of software engineering and security for over 20 years, and I have seen it up close. When it comes to writing reliable software, there are four kinds of programmers:

• Those who are constantly writing buggy code, no matter what

• Those who can write reasonable code, given coaching and examples

• Those who write good code most of the time, but who don't fully realize their limitations

• Those who really understand the language, the machine architecture, software engineering, and the application area, and who can write textbook code on a regular basis

The gap between the third category and the fourth may not seem like much to some readers, but there are far fewer people in that last category than you might think. It's also the case that there are lots of people in the third category who would claim they are in the fourth, but really aren't...similar to the 70% of all licensed drivers who say they are in the top 50% of safe drivers. Being an objective judge of one's own abilities is not always possible.

What compounds the problem for us all is that programmers are especially unlikely to realize (or are unwilling to admit) their limits. There are levels and degrees of complexity when working with computers and software that few people completely understand. However, programmers generally hold a world view that they can write correct code all the time, and only occasionally do mistakes occur, when in reality mistakes are commonplace in nearly everyone's code. As with the four categories, or the drivers, or any other domain where skill and training are required, the experts with real ability are fewer in number than those who believe they are expert. The result is software that may be subtly or catastrophically incorrect.

A program with serious flaws may compile properly, and work with obvious inputs. This helps reinforce the view that the code is correct. If something later exposes a flaw, many programmers will say that a "bug" somehow "got into the code." Or maybe "it's a computer problem." Neither is candid. Instead, whoever designed and built the system made mistakes. As a profession, we are unwilling to take responsibility when we code things incorrectly. Is it any wonder that a recent NIST study estimated that industry in the United States alone is spending $60 billion a year patching and customizing badly-written software? Is it a surprise that there are thousands of security patches per year for common software platforms? We've seen estimates that go as high as $1.5 trillion in damages per year worldwide for security problems alone, and simple crashes and errors may be more than 10 times as much. These are not rare flaws causing problems. There is a real crisis in producing quality software.

The reality is that if we truly face up to the situation, we might reassess some conventional beliefs. For instance, it is not true that a system is more secure because we can patch the source code when a flaw is discovered. A system is secure or it is not there is no "more secure." You can't say a car is safer because you can replace the fenders yourself after the brakes give out and it goes over a cliff, either. A system is secure if there are no flaws that lead to a violation of policy. Being able to install the latest patch to the latest bad code doesn't make a system safer. If anything, after we've done it a few times, it should perhaps reduce our confidence in the quality of the software.

An honest view of programming might also cause us to pay more attention to design to capturing requirements and developing specifications. Too often we end up with code that is put together without understanding the needs and the pitfalls of the environment where it will be used. The result is software that misbehaves when someone runs it in a different environment, or with unexpected input. There's a saying that has been attributed to Brian Kernighan, but which appears to have first been written down by W. D. Young, W.E. Boebert, and R.Y. Kain in 1985: "A program that has not been specified cannot be incorrect; it can only be surprising." Most of the security patches issued today are issued to eliminate surprises because there are no specifications for the underlying code. As a profession, we write too much surprising code.

I could go on, but I hope my points are clear: there are some real problems in the way software is being produced, and those problems lead to some serious and expensive problems. However, problem-free software and absolute security are almost always beyond our reach in any significant software project, so the next best thing is to identify and reduce the risks. Proven approaches to reduce these risks include using established methods of software engineering, exercising care in design and development, reusing proven software, and thinking about how to handle potential errors. This is the process of assurance of building trust in our systems. Assurance needs to be built in rather than asserted after the software is finished.

That's why this book is so valuable. It can help people write correct, robust software the first time and avoid many of the surprises. The material in this book can help you provide a network connection with end-to-end security, as well as help you eliminate the need to patch the code because you didn't add enough entropy to key generation, or you failed to change the UID/GID values in the correct order. Using this code you can get the environment set correctly, the signals checked, and the file descriptors the way you need them. And along the way, you can read a clear, cogent description about what needs to be set and why in each case. Add in some good design and careful testing, and a lot of the surprises go away.

Are all the snippets of code in this book correct? Well, correct for what? There are many other things that go into writing reliable code, and they depend on the context. The code in this book will only get you partway to your goal of good code. As with any cookbook, you may need to adjust the portions or add a little extra seasoning to match your overall menu. But before you do that, be sure you understand the implications! The authors of this book have tried to anticipate most of the circumstances where you would use their code, and their instructions can help you avoid the most obvious problems (and many subtle ones). However, you also need to build the rest of the code properly, and run it on a well-administered system. (For that, you might want to check out some of the other O'Reilly books, such as Secure Coding by Mark Graff and Kenneth van Wyk, and Practical Unix and Internet Security by Simson Garfinkel, Gene Spafford, and Alan Schwartz.)

So, let's return to those four categories of programmers. This book isn't likely to help the group of people who are perpetually unclear on the concepts, but it is unlikely to hurt them. It will do a lot to help the people who need guidance and examples, because it contains the text as well as the code. The people who write good software most of the time could learn a lot by reading this book, and using the examples as starting points. And the experts are the ones who will readily adopt this code (with, perhaps, some small adaptions); expert coders know that reuse of trusted components is a key method of avoiding mistakes. Whichever category of programmer you think you are in, you will probably benefit from reading this book and using the code.

Maybe if enough people catch on to what it means to write reliable code, and they start using references such as this book, we can all start saying "There are 10 kinds of computer programmers: those who write code that breaks, and those who read O'Reilly books."

Gene Spafford, June 2003