Compiler Can Undo Your Security Checks
Big thanks to @ThreatLocker for sponsoring my trip to Black Hat USA 2026 and also for sponsoring this video. To start your free trial with ThreatLocker please use the following link: https://www.threatlocker.com/davidbombal You can write secure C code, follow accepted best practices and still end up with a vulnerable binary. The reason is simple: the CPU does not run your source code.
- ▪Big thanks to @ThreatLocker for sponsoring my trip to Black Hat USA 2026 and also for sponsoring this video.
- ▪To start your free trial with ThreatLocker please use the following link: https://www.threatlocker.com/davidbombal You can write secure C code, follow accepted best practices and still end up with a vulnerable binary.
- ▪The reason is simple: the CPU does not run your source code.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Davidbombal |
| Canonical URL | https://davidbombal.com/your-compiler-can-undo-your-security-checks/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:07:58 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-12T16:45:11.138Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-12T16:45:26.618Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | dJ0aEKtuKkNc · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Big thanks to @ThreatLocker for sponsoring my trip to Black Hat USA 2026 and also for sponsoring this video. To start your free trial with ThreatLocker please use the following link: https://www.threatlocker.com/davidbombal You can write secure C code, follow accepted best practices and still end up with a vulnerable binary. The reason is simple: the CPU does not run your source code. It runs whatever the compiler produces.David sits down with security researcher Chris Domas at Black Hat to examine how legal compiler optimizations can remove security protections, delete memory-clearing operations and introduce time-of-check to time-of-use vulnerabilities into code that appeared secure.Chris explains the C abstract machine, why compilers are allowed to transform code so dramatically and…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Davidbombal.
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