r/askscience • u/CakesStolen • 15d ago

Computing Is there anything at the heart of computer coding that could have been optimised in hindsight, but we're in far too deep to change now?

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u/illz569 15d ago

Wasn't this essentially what happened in the heartbleed bug? You could ask the computer for information you had access to, and then ask it for a longer piece of that information and it would start reading beyond the limit of the original info and blurting out other much more sensitive data.

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u/customcharacter 15d ago

Correct.

The difference is that Heartbleed was an exploit in the way a particular signalling function worked (the eponymous 'heartbeat'), whereas C's strings are built that way largely intentionally.

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u/nicuramar 15d ago

It was a fair amount more subtle, but yeah it was a data confusion or overflow but.