On Tue, 23 Sep 2003 15:58:29 PDT, "Luck, Tony" said:
> Alan Cox wrote:
> > On Maw, 2003-09-23 at 19:21, Luck, Tony wrote:
> > > a) the programmer is playing fast and loose with types and/or casts.
> > > b) the end-user is going to be disappointed with the performance.
> > 
> > c) the programmer is being clever and knows the unaligned access is
> > cheaper on average than the cost of making sure it cant happen
> 
> Which is great until the "cleverly written" program is fed a data set
> that pushes into the unaligned case far more frequently than the
> programmer anticipated.

Didn't we recently fix a DoS attack on the TCP stack that was basically this
sort of thing with hashes?  And crafting an attack against this would be a lot
simpler than the hash-function attack.....