Nostalgia, horror, and a very old bug

My next article about graph traversal is pre-empted by this breaking news; I'll pick up that series again soon.

Yesterday morning a coworker forwarded to me an article about a recently patched security hole in Windows, and wondered if I had any thoughts on it. Oh, did I! I read about the exploit with an odd mixture of nostalgia - because I worked on the code in question back in the 1990s - and horror at how long this exploitable bug had been in Windows.

To be clear, I did not write the actual exploitable code; it predates my time at Microsoft. But I was worried while I was reading the article that it might turn out to be my bad! This is the second time that has happened to me, and it is not a pleasant feeling.

Coverity has a research team devoted specifically to security-impacting bugs, and they were kind enough to ask me to write up my thoughts for their blog. You can read about my guess at what the buggy code looked like here.

If you have examples of "missing restore"-style bugs - security-impacting or not - in real-world code in any language, I would love to see them. Please leave examples in the comments here or on the security blog. Thanks!