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Michael Howard's Web Log

A Simple Software Security Guy at Microsoft!
A useful primer to Integer overflows/underflows

From a presentation by a security contractor on campus:

1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 0 bottles of beer on the wall.

0 bottles of beer on the wall, 0 bottles of beer, you take 1 down, pass it around, 4294967295 bottles of beer on the wall.

Funny! But it shows analogies between software and the physical world are rarely good!

Posted: Friday, March 10, 2006 11:33 AM by michael_HOWARD
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Comments

Drew Cooper said:

Yes, it's a bad analogy. But it's pretty funny. I'm sure there's some kind of beer/underflow pun here, too, but I'm not gonna touch it.

- Drew
# March 10, 2006 6:15 PM

Jmonkey said:

I bet a beer company would look up to that one...sure would cause a bottleneck. Really would bring up the cache! Ok...korny, but it had to come out of my memory before it crashed.
# March 22, 2006 3:25 PM

Robert Burke's Weblog said:

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# March 31, 2006 12:17 PM

alik levin's said:

Although Michael Howard has some arguments about comparing software stuff with physical world I will

# March 22, 2007 1:20 PM
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