enzGo Proposal: Secret Mode
> The new runtime/secret package lets you run a function in secret mode. After the function finishes, it immediately erases (zeroes out) the registers and stack it used.
I don't understand. Why do you need it in a garbage-collected language?
My impression was that you are not able to access any register in these language. It is handled by the compiler instead.
Go is not a memory safe language. Even in memory safe languages, memory safety vulnerabilities can exist. Such vulnerabilities can be used to hijack your process into running untrusted code. Or as others point out sibling processes could attack yours. This underlying principle is defense in depth - you make add another layer of protection that has to be bypassed to achieve an exploit. All the chains combined raise the expense of hacking a system.
Respectfully, this has become a message board canard. Go is absolutely a memory safe language. The problem is that "memory safe", in its most common usage, is a term of art, meaning "resilient against memory corruption exploits stemming from bounds checking, pointer provenance, uninitialized variables, type confusion and memory lifecycle issues". To say that Go isn't memory safe under that definition is a "big if true" claim, as it implies that many other mainstream languages commonly regarded as memory safe aren't.
Since "safety" is an encompassing term, it's easy to find more rigorous definitions of the term that Go would flunk; for instance, it relies on explicit synchronization for shared memory variables. People aren't wrong for calling out that other languages have stronger correctness stories, especially regarding concurrency. But they are wrong for extending those claims to "Go isn't memory safe".
What is memory safety and why does it matter?
Memory safety is a property of some programming languages that prevents programmers from introducing certain types of bugs related to how memory is used. Since memory safety bugs are often security issues, memory safe languages are more secure than languages that are not memory safe. Memory safe languages include Rust, Go, C#, Java, Swift, Python, and JavaScript. Languages that are not memory safe include C, C++, and assembly. Types of Memory Safety Bugs To begin understanding memory safety bugs, we'll consider the example of an application that maintains to do lists for many users. We'll look at a couple of the most common types of memory safety errors that can occur in programs that are not memory safe.
I’m not aware of any definition of memory safety that allows for segfaults- by definition those are an indication of not being memory safe.
It is true that go is only memory unsafe in a specific scenario, but such things aren’t possible in true memory safe languages like c# or Java. That it only occurs in multithreaded scenarios matters little especially since concurrency is a huge selling point of the language and baked in.
Java can have data races, but those data races cannot be directly exploited into memory safety issues like you can with Go. I’m tired of Go fans treating memory safety as some continuum just because there are many specific classes of how memory safety can be violated and Go protecting against most is somehow the same as protecting against all (which is what being a memory safe language means whether you like it or not).
I’m not aware of any other major language claiming memory safety that is susceptible to segfaults.
Rust is susceptible to segfaults when overflowing the stack. Is Rust not memory safe then?
Of course, Go allows more than that, with data races it's possible to reach use after free or other kinds of memory unsafety, but just segfaults don't mark a language memory unsafe.
Go is most emphatically NOT memory-safe. It's trivially easy to corrupt memory in Go when using gorotuines. You don't even have to try hard.
This stems from the fact that Go uses fat pointers for interfaces, so they can't be atomically assigned. Built-in maps and slices are also not corruption-safe.
In contrast, Java does provide this guarantee. You can mutate structures across threads, and you will NOT get data corruption. It can result in null pointer exceptions, infinite loops, but not in corruption.
This is just wrong. Not that you can't blow up from a data race; you certainly can. Simply that any of these properties admit to exploitable vulnerabilities, which is the point of the term as it is used today. When you expand the definition the way you are here, you impair the utility of the term.
Serious systems built in memory-unsafe languages yield continual streams of exploitable vulnerabilities; that remains true even when those systems are maintained by the best-resourced security teams in the world. Functionally no Go projects have this property. The empirics are hard to get around.
There were CVEs caused by concurrent map access. Definitely denials of service, and I'm pretty sure it can be used for exploitation.
> Serious systems built in memory-unsafe languages yield continual streams of exploitable vulnerabilities
I'm not saying that Go is as unsafe as C. But it definitely is NOT completely safe. I've seen memory corruptions from improper data sync in my own code.
I would try to cause the map reallocation at the same moment I'm writing to it. Leading to corrupted memory allocator structures.
Go ahead and demonstrate it. Obviously, I'm saying this because nobody has managed to do this in a real Go program. You can contrive vulnerabilities in any language.
It's not like this is a small track record. There is a lot of Go code, a fair bit of it important, and memory corruption exploits in non-FFI Go code is... not a thing. Like at all.
Go is rarely used in contexts where an attacker can groom the heap before doing the attack. The closest one is probably a breakout from an exposed container on a host with a Docker runtime.
I triggered SSM agent crashes while developing my https://github.com/Cyberax/gimlet by doing concurrent requests.
I'm certain that they could have been used to do code execution, but it just makes no real sense given the context.
Another canard, unfortunately. "Segfault" is simply Go's reporting convention for things like nil pointer hits. "Segfaults" are not, in fact, part of the definition for memory safety or a threshold condition for it. All due respect to Ralf's Ramblings, but I'm going to rest my case with the Prossimo page on memorysafety.org that I just posted. This isn't a real debate.
> Segfault" is simply Go's reporting convention for things like nil pointer hits.
Blatantly false. From Ralf’s post:
> panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference
[signal SIGSEGV: segmentation violation code=0x1 addr=0x2a pc=0x468863]
The panic address is 42, a value being mutated, not a nil pointer. You could easily imagine this address pointing to a legal but unintended memory address resulting in a read or write of unintended memory.
No, you can't, and the reason you know you can't is that it's never happened. That looks like a struct offset dereference from a nil pointer, for what it's worth.
You’d be wrong. I recommend you reread the blog post and grok what’s happening in the example.
> When that happens, we will run the Ptr version of get, which will dereference the Int’s val field as a pointer – and hence the program accesses address 42, and crashes.
If you don’t see an exploit gadget there based on a violation of memory safety I don’t know how to have a productive conversation.