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.
Adapted from Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be ↩
the "da DUM" iambic foot is split among two sentences, bad ↩
not pentameter: only has 8 syllables ↩
tcp attack involves guessing the sequnce number ↩
tcp reset attack (doesn't have to be MITM) ↩
"pale cast of thought" is properly used in the original text, but doesn't quite fit here, because it doesn't "slow" anything down. ↩
EvanBot: mascot for Berkeley CS161 (Computer Security) during Sp2020 ↩