BSidesWLG 2017 - attacus - When Bugs Bite: why neglecting your edge cases can kill
Channel: BSides Wellington
Date: 2018-02-01

Two people died because of a Unicode support error. Another died because of a camera’s inability to distinguish colours from one another, and yet another died because of bad GPS data. Many thousands more deaths could have been prevented by a single variable, if the developers had thought to include it.

As developers and security testers, our skills and ideas are increasingly crucial for keeping the world running. We don’t have time to test for, find, and fix all of the bugs. It's common to think of information leakage and unauthorised manipulation as the worst outcome of a software flaw, but the most innocuous of bugs can sometimes lead to an actual loss of life.

No software ever holds up to contact with reality, but in this talk, you'll see some of the more extreme consequences of tech debt and seemingly small bugs, and learn how your team can more easily identify assumptions, document weirdness, and eliminate edge case behaviour when building and breaking software. That boring task hiding in your backlog might just save a life.