It's not just the system architecture that is at fault, but program architecture: how any program can potentially be turned into "anyprogram" by using memory management bugs to overwrite return addresses or function pointers. Anything that uses the C program architecture is vulnerable (OpenBSD's CVE-2007-1365).
And all of this has been known for a long time. When I started studying computer science, two of the recurring themes were the running joke that all the COBOL programs would stop working in the year 2000 (modern programmers, such as those then being educated, would not create such bugs) and that Pascal and Ada were the programming languages of the future, because C was notoriously messy and unsafe.
Posted by Felix at October 5, 2007 10:00 AMAll:
Blanu called it! Notice the Wayback Machine timestamp:
http://web.archive.org/web/20021004143604/http://blanu.net/curious_yellow.html
Regards,
Zooko
Posted by Curious Yellow at October 5, 2007 01:54 PMNitpickingly...
One of the *dicta* of war, courtsey Sun Zi's Art of War is actually more like
"He who knows the other side and knows himself will not be defeated in a hundred battles"
Note the absence of the 'enemy' and a 'win'... Seems a lot more appropriate this way doesn't it?
Courtesy, translation by Chow-Hou Wee, ISBN 0-13-100137-X
Posted by Anonymous Coward at October 13, 2007 07:14 AM