The article is extremely shallow beyond saying "Formal verification a la SPARK" should have been used, while not offering how this could actually work in the real world - I don't think the author has any experience working on any similar piece of software either.
While such techniques are available, would they be really applicable in a very dynamic environment such as with millions of PCs running various windows versions, needing continuous / real-time updates.
And yes, we of course know that QA and testing magically removes all possible failure modes/bugs.
The thread is still wrong, since it was a OOB memory read, not a missing null pointer check as claimed. 0x9c is likely the value that just happened to be in the OOB read.
There are actually some patterns to deal with this, such as Saga - I'm actually working on a project (not open-source yet) related to this specific problem. You can reach me at [email protected] if you want to learn more.
While such techniques are available, would they be really applicable in a very dynamic environment such as with millions of PCs running various windows versions, needing continuous / real-time updates.
And yes, we of course know that QA and testing magically removes all possible failure modes/bugs.