Defensive programming

[Jack Diederich]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 10:53:10AM +0100, Robin Becker wrote:
> This recently slashdotted paper
> 
> http://www.cs.rice.edu/~scrosby/hash/CrosbyWallach_UsenixSec2003/index.html
> 
> suggests that many common algorithms (including perl hashing) are open to low input
> DoS attack.
> 
> I know that the Timbot and other python 'bots are pretty smart, but are there python
> algorithms that suffer the same vulnerabilities?
> 

The author brought this up on python-dev and the 'bots did indeed
disect the arguments.  The verdict was that it is interesting but not a
problem (or at least a solvable problem) in practice.  Specific problems are 
best solved at specific layers, and DoS attacks that eat CPU are best solved
at the operating system level.