Secure Or Not Secure [1]

Secure, or not secure, that is the question:
Whether ’tis safer on the stack[2] to store
The secret passwords of our precious users,
Or to solidify our memory
And with canaries[3] harden it. Tis safe?
No more; or by a DEP[4] to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural bugs
That C is heir to: ‘tis [5] a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To code, to run;
To run, perchance to crash—ay, there’s the rub:
For in that run of code what bugs may come,
When we have hardened up this legacy,
Must give us pause—there’s the chance that[6]
Some other bugs bring down our tested app.
For who would bear the collisions of hashes[7],
The brute-forced passwords and seq numbers[8], fie,
RESET’d connections by th'man in the middle[9],
The bypass’d firewalls, and the so little
Amount of money that D-DOS[10] can cost,
When we ourself might our quietus make
Without concerns for a well-secure’d system?
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But for the dread of some improbable
Attacks, from whose 0-days[11] no one has suffer’d?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the speed of our development
Is slowed down with the pale cast of thought[12],
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. —Soft you now,
Fair EvanBot[13]!— In thy inspections be
All my bugs fixed.


  1. Adapted from Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be

  2. A stack

  3. Stack canaries

  4. DEP

  5. the "da DUM" iambic foot is split among two sentences, bad

  6. not pentameter: only has 8 syllables

  7. hash collision

  8. tcp attack involves guessing the sequnce number

  9. tcp reset attack (doesn't have to be MITM)

  10. DDOS

  11. zero day

  12. "pale cast of thought" is properly used in the original text, but doesn't quite fit here, because it doesn't "slow" anything down.

  13. EvanBot: mascot for Berkeley CS161 (Computer Security) during Sp2020