Creator commits to adding DBC security hardening
4 Sep 22 7:21 PM · 1d ago · 2 comments · 1 source · development 4 of 4
The FoxDev creator (boredjohnny) responded to the security concern by proposing to hash stored procedure text and embed it in the executable to prevent tampering, treating the runtime as the place where the inherited vulnerability can be fixed.
“I would put in a hash of the stored procedure text into the built executable and refuse to run a container whose procs don't match.”
boredjohnnyboredjohnny FoxDev Studio creatormikestew Security researcher, former FoxPro developerMicrosoft FoxPro publisher (discontinued 2007)
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What people said 24 voices · best of 41 · verbatim
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>, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, Flash. I used to think one day we will have something that is not only faster, easier and scalable replacement of those.A person's perspective on the older dev tools being "superior" to today's newer tools depends on the things they want to build.I had jobs working on Foxbase/FoxPro for DOS and migrated those apps…
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Flashback. When I was an adolescent, the dBase and Fox products were my first paid software development, and they were surprisingly accessible to even kids.I was only supposed to help assemble computer furniture, and maybe install networked Unix and PC software, but the retired Marine my mom worked for thought I had potential. "Hey, Kid", he would…
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Great job with this project, I bet there are VFP apps still running or even DOS FP apps.This takes me back to the first commercial software i ever worked on around 19 years ago, it was an accounting software written in Visual FoxPro. It's a super easy language to get started with programming and the fact that you can drag your widgets on the…
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I know there are still a few niche industry that has an industry standard program written in Visual FoxPro, and I remember as pre COVID 2019 they were still using it. ( Edit: I just called and asked, still using it as of 2026 )Niche but no small business, commodity with over $400M USD annual revenue, the industry together than easily $2B+.If it is…
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Oh nostalgia, dbase, clipper, clarion, foxbase, delphi, I loved VFP so much, not for the language but for the tools, the screen designer, the db browser, the sql queries, all that power and user love was dumped in the trash can for the travesti that was .net at the timeI learned VB.net, C# and even F# to see if they surpassed in any sense my…
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I haven't used FoxPro but I have had plenty of exposure to tech with a similar 'feel' - Excel and Word documents scripted to the gills with VBA, eventually C#, and mutating into new and kinds of horrors.It always starts simple - you wanna build just a simple CRUD where the entry is a form that goes into the table.Then the complexity grows, and…
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I have memories of supporting a Netware network with a custom Foxpro app used by a bunch of telemarketers in the mid 90's.When there was application error the source code would pop up in dialog maybe a some sort of debugger and the end users would just type a bunch of crap in trying to get out of it and hit enter and save the changes and corrupt…
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I have been working on a VB6 recreation starting with the IDE. Eventually I want to build the compiler and runtime, but for now being able to open existing projects, load all the images and do all the syntax highlighting is a good first step.I know TwinBasic exists but its closed source and I want to take things further than VB6 ever did. I always…
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haha, I used this exact example in sales calls to make the case against app modernization. Sometimes, you just need the stuff to keep working, with $20-and-a-roll-of-duct-tape-level budgets.My proposal was proxy layer sitting in between, running on something like k8s and written mostly by an LLM to provide a safe interface to queries against…
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There's been a 64 bit version of FoxPro for years and years [1].No, not the official VFP as released by Microsoft, but a version made by a well known VFP developer.Besides that I do know of some developers actually using this for building their software.No connections here, just know that it exists and is used and well before LLMs became the…
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My goodness, a blast from the past. Such a glorious time to be a programmer... every single business needed a database to do their simple little daily chores, the coding was insanely easy (just a bunch of CRUD process), and the difference it made to the customers was night/day... hence, you could charge thru the roof.I wrote a simple little CRUD…
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Many of the complaints you make apply to SQLite as well?I don't know if dBASE variants support bind variables. That isolation is really required to avoid the "Bobby Tables" effect.https://bobby-tables.com/I'd prefer to see the dBASE language adapted to run on SQLite files, as they are a far more profound standard.
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> Delphi, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, FlashAll these tools are nice for a single developer. But they fail to scale for teams where you want a distributed version system, automated tests and CI/CD pipelines. Also you want to reuse code via package management systems. And a single code base for several target systems (cross compilation , electron)…
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It occurred to me recently that with AI/ML, we can basically keep any and all software going, no matter if its original authors retire it .. its getting to the point where an AI can reliably parse the bytes and apply whatever ABI is defined for the platform, and then .. add features, fix bugs, and so on.Are we witnessing the end of the age of…
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Could the security hole not be closed up?Maybe there's a way to run them more securely with a wrapper.It does make sense to try and move to a sql db of some type, and my immediate thought is if something like Postgres, with a plugin or extension or two couldn't simulate enough of Foxpro.That, or rewriting large parts of the DB engine seem readily…
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My father in law did database programming for small businesses using FoxPro. It was pretty cool, it created the executable and you could host it on any Windows file server IIRC. I think it also may have had some server functionality built in too. Anyways, it was fast if the database was designed correctly and allowed for easy setup at the clients…
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My first ever "paid" consulting job was building a dBASE application."Paid" in quotes because I was about 10 years old at the time and the work was done for my mother in her capacity as a government employee. What she could do, though, was find a surplus shrinkwrapped copy of dBASE III Plus that I was allowed to keep when I was done.
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My first and only internship was at a mom-and-pop company whose flagship product was a niche CRM written with FoxPro. They didn't have any full-time devs. Instead, their two technicians took a few weeks every year off repairing turnstiles to develop a yearly update. It was a terrible company, but those guys really loved FoxPro.
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I miss the VB6 days. Simpler days with worse options than what we have today, but being able to drag a button onto a canvas, double click it, wrote the code behind it, and then build to an executable was lovely. I wish I could do that today with macOS but everything is so complicated these days. AI helping.
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A big software for simulating the economic balance sheets of life insurance companies moved many years ago from using FoxPro under the hood to CSV files and sold it as a huge improvement. I don't think anybody was convinced by that, but vendor lock-in makes companies accept such regressions.
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Just mentioning because you explicitly said builds are unsigned: I'm working on a (open source) signing solution supporting GitHub releases that is easy to use for both signers and downloaders. Let me know if this would interest you (not immediately putting link to avoid spamming).
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OMG what a blast from the past. We were taught FoxPro in school in 2002 for some reason. Not even Visual FoxPro, the old school DOS version. It taught me a lot about scripting and I remember helping out a medical rep who had built a FoxPro app to manage his business while in college.
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> Visual FoxPro is a 32-bit program, and that decides more than it appears to.Has anyone studied what in the models causes this sentence structure? Is it some consequence of the architecture that leads it to blurt out a fact and then only later the significance of that fact?
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Didn't expect an AppImage and a .deb in the downloads. How much of an app survives on Linux, though? Plenty of VFP code drives Excel through CREATEOBJECT, and the .fll bridge is a 32-bit Windows process. What happens to those calls there?
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