Blogs on Alex Gaynor

If I ask you if some code is correct, there are broadly two things I could be asking: (1) does this code have the desired behavior for the set of inputs that users will provide, and (2) does it have the desired behavior for all possible inputs.

(I work for Anthropic.)

Anytime you see some someone describing how they used a new vulnerability research technique to find a bug, you’ll see an internet commenter state with confidence that static analysis could have found this bug.

(I’m not a lawyer, and I did precious little research in drafting this.

I’ve recently created and open sourced a new serialization format, named Relish1, and a Rust library implementing it.

When a project receives a vulnerability report, what’s the first question they should ask?

(Editor’s Note: My day job is at Anthropic.)

Benchmarks are how we measure performance, obviously.

Standard libraries are among the most debated topics in programming language design.

I’ve previously written about common reasons that developing open source software is not funded.

Postel’s Law famously states that “implementations should follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.”

Canonical recently announced that they’re on the path to switching the coreutils that Ubuntu ships from being the venerable upstream GNU coreutils to a newer Rust implementation.

Toby: I read it, I think, 16 years ago.

Once upon a time, a group of scientists built a machine learning model to predict whether a radiological scan contained a tumor.

In the United States, federal antitrust law is composed of several complementary statutes, one of the centerpieces of which is Section 2 of the Sherman Act.1 Section 2 prohibits monopolization (and attempted monopolization).

For years, people have criticized the “SSO Tax”, SaaS companies' practices of limiting single-sign-on to only their more expensive plans, effectively imposing a tax on organizations that care about security.

Often in life, we want something from someone else.

I’ve had the good fortune to get paid to write open source as part of my job several times.

There are a variety of professions whose job it is to help businesses manage risks, for example, information security, accounting, and legal.

I’ve maintained a popular cryptography library for years and in that time I’ve realized that many of the differences between cryptographic libraries flow from their creators' philosophies.

I’m indebted to a colleague who many years ago succinctly told me: Backups don’t matter, only restores matter.

Sandboxing and memory safety are generally considered two orthogonal, and therefore complementary, approaches to improving security.

I am an unrepentant advocate for migrating away from memory-unsafe languages (C and C++) to memory safe languages in security-relevant contexts.

I’m a staunch advocate for need to migrate away from memory unsafe programming languages, in order to address the endemic security issues they produce.

One of my least favorite kinds of bug is when two different systems are interacting and the result has bad behavior but it’s difficult to say which (if either!)

Software packages have version numbers.

Complexity in software, whether it’s a programming languages, an API, or a user interface, is generally regarded as a vice.

CSVs are a relatively popular data format, it seems particularly common as a format for providing exports of medium-sized datasets.

There are not a lot of very strong empirical results in the field of programming languages.

Every Passover, Jews around the world sing Dayenu, which translates roughly as “it would have been enough”.

software engineering is programming integrated over time This quote, from Titus Winters, expresses an important notion: that software engineering as a discipline must be considered not just with programming at a point in time, but with programming over an…

In January of this year, I put together a wish list for security in 2019.

When you read “safety critical software” your mind probably went to something like medical device software (perhaps the Therac-25), or maybe avionics software, or perhaps industrial control systems that run nuclear power plants.

I’ve been a ferocious critic of C, C++, and other memory unsafe languages, and a booster of memory safe languages such as Swift, Go, and particularly Rust.

What is memory unsafety?

As software engineers, we overwhelmingly focus on the skill of writing code.

I’m a frequent critic of memory unsafe languages, principally C and C++, and how they induce an exceptional number of security vulnerabilities.

It’s no secret that I’m a big believer in the adoption of security keys.

Earlier this week the Google Security Team disclosed a pair of vulnerabilities, known to be exploited in the wild, one in Windows and the other in Chrome.

ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick are two popular libraries for manipulating images.

About 3 years ago I wrote about five projects I thought were very important for advancing the state of computer security.

When we write code, we optimize for many different things.

Attackers just need one vulnerability, defenders need to be perfect This may be the single most repeated truism in information security.

From 2015 to 2017 I worked for the United States Digital Service, a team within the US Government, created after the launch failure of healthcare.gov, dedicated to improving the government’s ability to use technology.

This past week Google’s Project Zero disclosed an unfixed security issue in Microsoft’s Edge browser.

My day job is working on sandboxing for Firefox.

Heartbleed, POODLE, Shellshock.

This week Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave two speeches on encryption; one at the U.S.

If you’re a software engineer or work in tech, there’s a decent chance that your first thought after hearing about the Equifax breach was “oh my god, how incompetent do you have to be to get owned like that?”

There’s a lot of different types of work that tend to get put into the bucket “security engineering”.