tbh I've considered simply banning math-operator-precedence in projects I work on, and requiring all mixed-operator code to use parenthesis or split to multiple statements. I do that myself, at least.
I've seen so many mistakes from it, and seen people spend so much pointless and avoidable time deciphering and verifying it, it really doesn't seem worth it (in most code) for the extremely minor character savings.
I think I’d generalize that rule to require parentheses in any situation where adding parentheses could change the interpretation. I think that’d leave int addition and multiplication, and I don’t think there’s anything else offhand. Other than those, require parentheses.
a - b - c
is order dependent, even if its deterministic and knowable. When I’m scanning the code to look for a pesky bug, I don’t wanna have to take extra seconds to convince myself that it’s doing what I expect. It steals time and my limited attention from more interesting sections of code.
> I think that’d leave int addition and multiplication, and I don’t think there’s anything else offhand. Other than those, require parentheses.
At this point you just require every compound infix expression to be parenthesised, the terseness isn't worth the inconsistency. Especially as, as others have noted, these operations are only associative when working in some classes (notably not necessarily when dealing with floats).
And then you do automatic parens insertion in the LSP, so you write
If both `args->begin_argv + consume` are supposed to be the same concept and thus the same value, I'd have a variable for it by now. Some people hate it with a passion, but something like this removes the precendence thinking, prevents modification of one and not the other and makes it easier to follow, for me at least:
Yeah - sharing a variable there is a pretty strong signal that they are the same concept and can't be allowed to be different, not just "maybe the same value". That's useful to know.
If there's a ton of it in a dense bit of code, 1) it might be too complex, try making it clearer, and 2) it unfortunately makes for a lot of indirection and that can make it harder to follow, which is generally why I see people dislike it. In non-critical code I can kinda agree with inlining it. Pointer arithmetic is imo never non-trivial tho, paranoia is warranted. Especially in a kernel.
- and + operators have the same precedence. And a similar bug is possible if the operators were the same (both -). So I’m not sure it’s right to blame this on operator precedence or mixed operators. It’s just that, ultimately, the “consume” needs to be subtracted, not added.
Non-mixed always goes strictly left to right, regardless of the operator, which I haven't seen anywhere near as much struggling with.
But yes, I personally parenthesize `a-b-c` explicitly, because it's not worth it for me to read and wonder if parenthesizing order matters later. Costs less than a second to write, saves a second or ten each time I read it - that's an excellent tradeoff imo, and is a trivial pattern to follow.
I agree with explicit parentheses but please be careful about assuming associativity! The risk when handling floating-point arithmetic in particular is that associativity breaks, and suddenly a + (b + c) does NOT equal (a + b) + c. Not only can these lead to unexpected and hard-to-trace failure patterns, but depending on the details, they also can introduce memory overflow/underflow vulnerabilities.
If you're going for bit-for-bit equivalence of float values, then even with a single operation you're relying on compiler flags, architecture, the phase of the moon... I'm hard-pressed to think of any memory safety issues though.
Yea, you're in a fairly special niche of programming if you're somewhere that truly matters, and you can't accept any valid order's output. In most general code, if that kind of precision matters, float is the wrong choice: use a bignum object and be exactly correct regardless of how you organized your code.
Which is a niche that exists, obviously. So it is absolutely true for some cases. But I would hope that any code that requires this is extremely clear about requiring it.
I once had a job interview where they wanted to evaluate my C knowledge. They showed me a printout of some pointer arithmetic and said spot the bug. (It may actually have been the old puzzle where it turns out that /* is always a comment opener and never a division by the referent of a pointer).
I said "well first, this is a mess, I'm putting parentheses here, here, here and here". They said "well you've fixed the bug but can you tell us where it was?"
I gave them a hypothesis but I said my "real answer" was that it's not worth our brain cycles to figure it out, you just shouldn't write code that requires knowing operator precedence. It's just such desperately boring information that I can't hold it in my head.
Interviewing such an insufferable smartarse was probably quite annoying but they did give me the job and I do stand by the underlying principle!
> I gave them a hypothesis but I said my "real answer" was that it's not worth our brain cycles to figure it out, you just shouldn't write code that requires knowing operator precedence. It's just such desperately boring information that I can't hold it in my head.
this is exactly how I think. and it goes for a lot of stuff in general, we have limited bandwidth and wasting it on useless stuff like this has no real purpose.
yet sometimes I see people show off about how they know how to deal with it but I just don't see the point.
Your response was more correct in a professional sense than producing the piece of knowledge you've been asked for. I'd prefer to work with people who value everyone's time and write programs accordingly. If the interviewer was looking for a valuable expert, they were lucky to get you on board.
A much older language that does not have operator precedence is APL.
This is the right choice for a language with a great number of operators.
In C they have tried to minimize the number of parentheses in expressions, but for this they have created far too many levels of precedence between operators, which had the opposite effect to that intended, since people now prefer to insert superfluous parentheses, to avoid having to remember all those levels of precedence.
IIRC several industry and government coding standards don't permit evaluations in arguments to functions, as the compiler can end up doing wonky things, to say nothing of the likely human error. These are the kind of standards we should be adapting into a software building code to avoid security holes like this one.
These standards are that way because older languages (specifically C and C++) have unspecified evaluation orders for arguments, so multiple argument expressions with conflicting side-effects are non-portable.
Here the expressions are pure, OooE has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue.
"our" is a stretch. Not only because you're giving an algorithm personhood, but because you didn't do any of the real work. So you could instead say that it's "nice to randomly encounter what I prompted an instance of [brand of artificially intelligent dowsing rod] to do". There's your chance to claim ownership; you can plainly state that you're the person who pressed the button.
I think cperciva may have been a touch overenthusiastic, but surely this is in fact proving his point? His claim was, as you note before trying to ignore it, about coordination. When one of the recent Linux LPEs broke, the fix wasn't in distro packages yet; there was a vulnerability that users couldn't practically do anything about. This is an LPE that is fixed in the binaries that have already shipped. If I was playing cheerleader, this is exactly the case I'd use to argue that FreeBSD being a single unified system is a win and that its approach to handing security problems is very on top of things.
A not-insignificant chunk of the userbase of the various BSDs is there because they were turned off of Linux after controversial things like Gnome 3, systemd being shoved down users' throats despite being a broken mess, wayland (though nobody was as arrogant about wayland as Poettering was about systemd), etc.
All that to say, the BSD userbase as a sizeable subset that are there for countercultural reasons, rather than technical. These are the people who buy into, say, OpenBSD's vaunted security reputation, or believe that "linux bad because reasons", so you're always going to get people in here bragging, because "not using linux" has become part of their identity.
I run a mix of FreeBSD and Linux on my personal devices. The ground truth is that FreeBSD is yet another unix-like OS written in C, and thus not immune from the types of bugs that stem from that lineage. None of the BSD distros are materially more secure or better than a properly-configured and patched Linux.
The person 'bragging' was not a countercultural user, but rather the FreeBSD engineering lead. They were, however, talking about FreeBSD's response to security vulnerabilities, in contrast to Linux's response.
> thus not immune from the types of bugs that stem from that lineage
They never claimed that FreeBSD didn't have vulnerabilities. I honestly have no idea why grandparent decided to bring up their comment when it exactly validates what the person they were criticising says. GP admits the response to the vulnerability was well-coordinated. The response to security vulnerabilities was the exact, and only, subject of the post they're calling out.
I wouldn't call it countercultural. And Wayland actually runs on freebsd these days.
I use Linux as well but I really like FreeBSD for a number of technical reasons. Like the ports collection, the jails, the first-class citizen ZFS.
And Gnome 3 doesn't really have anything to do with Linux. It is also available for FreeBSD if you want it (I don't, I hate the minimalist opinionated design style so I use KDE, also on Linux).
But I use Linux on servers where I run docker for example. It's not about "not using linux".
> And Gnome 3 doesn't really have anything to do with Linux.
There's a very hard push on getting Gnome 3 aligned to systemd. Gnome is actually my preferred DE on Linux when I choose to use one. But compatibility with Unix systems is becoming harder every day.
Yes even KDE recently introduced a new display manager that is completely tied to systemd. For that reason it's not supported on FreeBSD. But sddm still works of course. But it is a worrying precedent.
From the gnome team this was to be expected because they are beholden to RedHat/IBM and the other big distros who push systemd heavily. But from the KDE team I didn't.
I've stopped my monthly KDE donations for this reason. Just to send a message that this isn't ok.
I also use a mix. I moved to FreeBSD initially after a rough period w/Linux in the late 90's. Today, my FreeBSD machines are all VMs running on Linux hosts!
Yep, most of my linuxes are headless -- but I do have a VM which I pass a graphics card through to for games and ai stuff though -- works really well (as long as you don't reboot the VM, it has a hard time attaching to the gfx card the second time for some reason, not looked into it much)
sysutils/vm-bhyve makes it quite friendly.
I wouldn't use it for work, though, just personal. Work is all enterprisey kubernetes stuff.
Edit: there is a 'proxmox-like' for FreeBSD out [0] -- I did try it on a couple machines and couldn't get the network working, but consoles seemed to work.. Kinda.
Ah I don't really have a second GPU to dedicate to it though. A virtual console like in VMware or QEMU/KVM would be great. Thanks for the heads-up about sylve! I'll check it out.
For me it's all personal too. For work we still use VMWare a lot.
> Upgrade your vulnerable system to a supported FreeBSD stable or
release / security branch (releng) dated after the correction date,
and reboot the system.
Not everyone can just freebsd-update and reboot, so yes, "Oh dear." is a good response to this.
Anyone relying on a 30+ year old monolith kernel written in C to not have some exploitable LPEs lurking should stay in basket weaving and out of sysadmin.
Not necessarily FreeBSD, but for Linux this applies to most universities with a CS program, I think.
The systems should be cut off from sensitive administrative data, but a malicious student would at the very least have access to the other students' data with an LPE.
No, I mean do you run FreeBSD boxes where users who should not ever assume root access actually login to do tasks?
My point is that if you do, you probably shouldn't run, for e.g applications which need production db credential, or hold sensitive data on these boxes, or .. whatever.
Edit: I use FreeBSD extensively, for various things -- but shell access to them is restricted to the sysadmins..
No. And hosting providers I have used usually use VM isolation (QEMU/etc) for the VPS type instances they allocate to users. The VM is vulnerable if it happens to have a kernel compiled such that allows this vuln.
Also statements like this one - TBH -- I don't have any of these kinds of boxes anymore. Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?
Does not convey what your clarification attemps to state.
I mean, where I work we offer machines to external users where they have shell access to be able to do their science, but I don't want them to have root access. Other institutes we work with (like supercomputer networks, etc) give us/users non-root access.
When things like CVE-2026-31431 or the bug that this thread is about affect our systems it causes a big headache. Yeah, we firewall off what we _can_ by having different machines doing critical things versus the ones where science users have code execution, but we don't have the resources to give every user their own machine.
Hard to tell about FreeBSD, it's basically extincted, but think of webhosting servers, wordpress, cPanel/Plesk and alike.
often it's ssh'able with things like rbash and other restrictions and almost always you, well, can run something there (as you can edit php/other files right from web management ui).
The bug appears to have been introduced in some FreeBSD 13 version.
I run FreeBSD servers that do not have this bug. In my "kern_exec.c" there is no "consume" anywhere. There is also no "memmove" at all.
That file was last patched in 2024, but whatever changes had introduced that bug, they were not back-ported to older FreeBSD versions, so those are not affected.
Not sure why the snark but if people are running FreeBSD then they should be...basket weaving instead of using it? Yes, the correct solution is to patch and reboot but not everyone is in a place to jump and do that which is why a temp workaround, if possible, would be welcome
...as opposed to what, exactly? Linux is a 34 y.o. monolithic kernel in C, the BSDs are all forked from the same base (386BSD) of around the same age, XNU is 29 years old (and also heavily based on BSD code while also throwing in mach code) in C and other languages,...
Why can't they? Upgrading and rebooting is kinda the standard response for most security issues. So I would expect something like Ansible's playbooks for this exact scenario. You might also have it setup as a staggered rollout.
The exploit is injecting environment variables, but yes, close enough. You need someone to call execve as root in order to become root, but you don't need a setuid binary.
"When the timing aligns, the trigger's buggy memmove causes K+1 to self-overwrite, replacing sshd-session's real environment with the preseed payload. sshd-session's exec_copyout_strings copies LD_PRELOAD=/tmp/evil.so to the new process's stack, the runtime linker loads evil.so, and its constructor copies /bin/sh to /tmp/rootsh and sets it suid root. My human's unprivileged user runs /tmp/rootsh -p and gets a root shell."
... so at the very end of the exploit chain, is /tmp/rootsh required to be suid root before it is finally run to get the root shell ?
... or is the exploit already achieved and /tmp/rootsh is just an arbitrary indicator ?
I really am starting to think that the level of technical understanding on HN is so low that when readers see an exploit like this, they imagine basically the cult classic movie "Hackers" in their heads where some guy hacks into any machine of their choosing.
Local privilege escalation is largely irrelevant on Windows because basically no one uses it in a multi-user system, and application sandboxing is effectively nonexistent.
I get that multiple human users on a same machine is rare nowadays, and that per-app users were never a thing.
But windows still has a root and a lower privilege user. You typically need to click on "run as admin" to elevate privileges to, for example, alter system binaries.
Sure, but that's mostly academic: compromise of the user account is game over for any real user. Not actually being Administrator isn't much consolation when the regular user account can extract your cookie jar, record all of your keystrokes and mouse movements, record all desktop video (except for DRM-protected content, heh) etc.
I know that Chrome on Windows tries to lower its privileges to mitigate exploits, and although it's not very popular, the MS Store app platform does try to do full isolation of apps. So actually, per-app separation of users kinda does happen, or is attempted on Windows.
I've seen so many mistakes from it, and seen people spend so much pointless and avoidable time deciphering and verifying it, it really doesn't seem worth it (in most code) for the extremely minor character savings.
At this point you just require every compound infix expression to be parenthesised, the terseness isn't worth the inconsistency. Especially as, as others have noted, these operations are only associative when working in some classes (notably not necessarily when dealing with floats).
And then you do automatic parens insertion in the LSP, so you write
and when you save the lsp fixed it up toIf there's a ton of it in a dense bit of code, 1) it might be too complex, try making it clearer, and 2) it unfortunately makes for a lot of indirection and that can make it harder to follow, which is generally why I see people dislike it. In non-critical code I can kinda agree with inlining it. Pointer arithmetic is imo never non-trivial tho, paranoia is warranted. Especially in a kernel.
But yes, I personally parenthesize `a-b-c` explicitly, because it's not worth it for me to read and wonder if parenthesizing order matters later. Costs less than a second to write, saves a second or ten each time I read it - that's an excellent tradeoff imo, and is a trivial pattern to follow.
(Associative operators are fine, obviously)
Which is a niche that exists, obviously. So it is absolutely true for some cases. But I would hope that any code that requires this is extremely clear about requiring it.
I said "well first, this is a mess, I'm putting parentheses here, here, here and here". They said "well you've fixed the bug but can you tell us where it was?"
I gave them a hypothesis but I said my "real answer" was that it's not worth our brain cycles to figure it out, you just shouldn't write code that requires knowing operator precedence. It's just such desperately boring information that I can't hold it in my head.
Interviewing such an insufferable smartarse was probably quite annoying but they did give me the job and I do stand by the underlying principle!
this is exactly how I think. and it goes for a lot of stuff in general, we have limited bandwidth and wasting it on useless stuff like this has no real purpose.
yet sometimes I see people show off about how they know how to deal with it but I just don't see the point.
This is the right choice for a language with a great number of operators.
In C they have tried to minimize the number of parentheses in expressions, but for this they have created far too many levels of precedence between operators, which had the opposite effect to that intended, since people now prefer to insert superfluous parentheses, to avoid having to remember all those levels of precedence.
Yeah that's pretty much exactly what I do by hand. I should really give Pony a try some time... there's a lot of stuff in it that I like.
Here the expressions are pure, OooE has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue.
Check out our blog post for a fun walkthrough: https://blog.calif.io/p/cve-2026-7270-how-i-get-root-on-free...
AI-generated working exploit, write-up and prompts: https://github.com/califio/publications/tree/main/MADBugs/fr...
I am sure you have spend lots of time to make your bot works that great.
All that to say, the BSD userbase as a sizeable subset that are there for countercultural reasons, rather than technical. These are the people who buy into, say, OpenBSD's vaunted security reputation, or believe that "linux bad because reasons", so you're always going to get people in here bragging, because "not using linux" has become part of their identity.
I run a mix of FreeBSD and Linux on my personal devices. The ground truth is that FreeBSD is yet another unix-like OS written in C, and thus not immune from the types of bugs that stem from that lineage. None of the BSD distros are materially more secure or better than a properly-configured and patched Linux.
> thus not immune from the types of bugs that stem from that lineage
They never claimed that FreeBSD didn't have vulnerabilities. I honestly have no idea why grandparent decided to bring up their comment when it exactly validates what the person they were criticising says. GP admits the response to the vulnerability was well-coordinated. The response to security vulnerabilities was the exact, and only, subject of the post they're calling out.
I use Linux as well but I really like FreeBSD for a number of technical reasons. Like the ports collection, the jails, the first-class citizen ZFS.
And Gnome 3 doesn't really have anything to do with Linux. It is also available for FreeBSD if you want it (I don't, I hate the minimalist opinionated design style so I use KDE, also on Linux).
But I use Linux on servers where I run docker for example. It's not about "not using linux".
There's a very hard push on getting Gnome 3 aligned to systemd. Gnome is actually my preferred DE on Linux when I choose to use one. But compatibility with Unix systems is becoming harder every day.
From the gnome team this was to be expected because they are beholden to RedHat/IBM and the other big distros who push systemd heavily. But from the KDE team I didn't.
I've stopped my monthly KDE donations for this reason. Just to send a message that this isn't ok.
I've tried to use it but I dound it pretty difficult for systems that need a GUI. Maybe I should revisit.
sysutils/vm-bhyve makes it quite friendly.
I wouldn't use it for work, though, just personal. Work is all enterprisey kubernetes stuff.
Edit: there is a 'proxmox-like' for FreeBSD out [0] -- I did try it on a couple machines and couldn't get the network working, but consoles seemed to work.. Kinda.
0: https://sylve.io
For me it's all personal too. For work we still use VMWare a lot.
Yeah.
> No workaround is available.
Oh dear.
> Upgrade your vulnerable system to a supported FreeBSD stable or release / security branch (releng) dated after the correction date, and reboot the system.
Not everyone can just freebsd-update and reboot, so yes, "Oh dear." is a good response to this.
You should treat any system where non-admins regularly login as basically insecure/owned and rig your architecture appropriately.
TBH -- I don't have any of these kinds of boxes anymore. Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?
The systems should be cut off from sensitive administrative data, but a malicious student would at the very least have access to the other students' data with an LPE.
> Who is really running anything like this in 2026 and for what purpose?
Am I parsing your question correctly?
My point is that if you do, you probably shouldn't run, for e.g applications which need production db credential, or hold sensitive data on these boxes, or .. whatever.
Edit: I use FreeBSD extensively, for various things -- but shell access to them is restricted to the sysadmins..
Does not convey what your clarification attemps to state.
When things like CVE-2026-31431 or the bug that this thread is about affect our systems it causes a big headache. Yeah, we firewall off what we _can_ by having different machines doing critical things versus the ones where science users have code execution, but we don't have the resources to give every user their own machine.
often it's ssh'able with things like rbash and other restrictions and almost always you, well, can run something there (as you can edit php/other files right from web management ui).
Hordes of this (in Linux world).
The bug appears to have been introduced in some FreeBSD 13 version.
I run FreeBSD servers that do not have this bug. In my "kern_exec.c" there is no "consume" anywhere. There is also no "memmove" at all.
That file was last patched in 2024, but whatever changes had introduced that bug, they were not back-ported to older FreeBSD versions, so those are not affected.
"When the timing aligns, the trigger's buggy memmove causes K+1 to self-overwrite, replacing sshd-session's real environment with the preseed payload. sshd-session's exec_copyout_strings copies LD_PRELOAD=/tmp/evil.so to the new process's stack, the runtime linker loads evil.so, and its constructor copies /bin/sh to /tmp/rootsh and sets it suid root. My human's unprivileged user runs /tmp/rootsh -p and gets a root shell."
... so at the very end of the exploit chain, is /tmp/rootsh required to be suid root before it is finally run to get the root shell ?
... or is the exploit already achieved and /tmp/rootsh is just an arbitrary indicator ?
https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/fr...
The script downloads and sets up FreeBSD on QEMU, then runs the exploit.
The exploit is very smart: https://github.com/califio/publications/blob/main/MADBugs/fr.... It basically backdoors sshd.
Accept that everything is broken and terrible and yet somehow find a way to keep a sense of humor and smile about it.
The recent two. FailCopy and DirtyFrag and FreeBSD with Execve.
2 - Linux 1 - FreeBSD.
Of course, all OS have had past-time exploits. Three now have made the news.
Three. I don't know if this has a name yet... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067734
Naturally they don't do blog posts about what they find.
But windows still has a root and a lower privilege user. You typically need to click on "run as admin" to elevate privileges to, for example, alter system binaries.
It he talked about Android, I would have mentioned Project Zero.
Don't twist the meaning of posts.