With most types of software, if you're stuck with C/C++, you want to keep the development to a high standard where there aren't any bugs like this. But anti-virus software is unusual in that it needs to handle malicious input of an unusually wide variety of file formats, which makes completely eliminating file-format vulnerabilities basically unfeasible without some sort of broadly-applicable fix.<p>That fix could be a memory-safe language, or it could be sandboxing. But the assumption should be that for any antivirus product which does its file-parsing in C or C++, and which doesn't sandbox is scanning engine, there's going to be at least one critical vulnerability in the scanner. Bitdefender is still unsandboxed, so fixing this particular vulnerability is only of limited use; there are almost certainly other, similar vulnerabilities in it, so users running it are vulnerable to anyone with the resources to find one.<p>AV companies have mostly gotten away with this sort of thing in the past, because individual AV scanners tend to have low enough market share that they aren't as desirable targets as web browsers. But Windows Defender recently broke that trend by being present on every Windows system, and having a critical vulnerability, so now there are a lot more researchers looking at unsandboxed AV scanning engines and finding problems.
> Moreover, the engine runs unsandboxed and as NT Authority\SYSTEM.<p>Is there an antivirus that _doesn't_ parse untrusted input in a process with full system privileges? What a joke.
"Assuming that the size is not explicitly casted, the compiler should throw a warning of the following kind:"<p>In D, implicit truncation of an integer value is an error, not a warning.<p>I've predicted before that lack of memory safety will be the demise of C in internet-facing programs. Dealing with the bugs is just too expensive.
Might we agree to recommend to Microsoft users that they should use Microsoft AV. About 6 months ago we had a similar discussion [0] which arrived at that conclusion.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13489100" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13489100</a>
> I want to thank Bitdefender and especially Marius for their response as well as for fixing the bug.<p>I don't see an update for the mac version.