Interesting article! One thing that made me literally LOL was the fact that several exploits were enabled via a Google "style recommendation" that caused on-heap length fields to be signed and thus subject to sign-extension attacks.

The conversation-leading-up-to-that played out a bit like this in my head:

Google Engineer #1: Hey, shouldn't that length field be unsigned? Not like a negative value ever makes sense there?

GE#2: Style guide says no

GE#1: Yeah, but that could easily be exploited, right?

GE#2: Maybe, but at least I won't get dinged on code review: my metrics are already really lagging this quarter

GE#1: Good point! In fact, I'll pre-prepare an emergency patch for that whole thing, as my team lead indicated I've been a bit slow on the turnaround lately...

What does FTE stand for?:

> From what I can tell, there have been about 4 FTE from Google over this period