[Year 12 SofDev] Apple programming goof

Tue Feb 25 17:26:39 EST 2014

Nice find Mark.

It might be an interesting exercise for students to re-write the code so that it is goto-less. A simple compound conditional won't do the trick (at least not without introducing more variables). I would also be getting rid of the fancy-pants variable assignment that happens inside the conditional expression of each if. As far as I can tell, the function should return 0 if all is well, otherwise it should return the value in err.

Regards
Robert T-A

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Mark 
  To: Year 12 Software Development Teachers' Mailing List 
  Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 11:34 AM
  Subject: [Year 12 SofDev] Apple programming goof

  this might make your kids feel a bit better about bugs in their code...

  'Like everything else on the iPhone, the critical crypto flaw announced in iOS 7 yesterday turns out to be a study in simplicity and elegant design: a single spurious "goto" in one part of Apple's authentication code that accidentally bypasses the rest of it.'

  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/02/gotofail/

  -- 

  --
  Mark Kelly
  mark AT vceit DOT com
  http://vceit.com

  Everything that used to be a sin is now a disease - Bill Maher 

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