Re: [PLUG] Microsoft Exchange year 2022 bug in FIP-FS breaks email delivery

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Sun, Jan 02, 2022 at 06:48:23AM -0500, Rich Freeman via plug wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 2, 2022 at 6:10 AM Walt Mankowski via plug
> <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
> >
> > Exchange's spam and malware checking engine was storing dates in a signed 32-bit integer. The date value for 2022-01-01 is 2,201,010,001. Since this is bigger than 2^31 = 2,147,483,648, this prevented mail from being delivered. You can read more at https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-exchange-year-2022-bug-in-fip-fs-breaks-email-delivery/.
> >
> 
> I have no idea how they fixed this in their update, but the first
> thing that jumped out at me is that it appears to be storing a 2-digit
> year, so it would have also failed in Y2K (well, actually, I guess in
> 1922 - it wouldn't have worked at all in the 90s).

The article says this went live in 2013, so maybe Y2K wasn't an issue
for them?

> How is it that programmers are still using 2-digit years?

How did this ever pass code review? In 2013? And if you need to store
the date in 32 bits for some internal backwards compatibility issues,
why not at least use epoch time?

> Hopefully whatever fix they implemented was a clean one, or at least
> leads to a clean one - the MS article was scant on details.  This
> seems like an internal operation, so I guess they don't really have to
> document how it works.

I feel bad for the poor folks who got called in on a holiday to have
to clean up this mess.

Walt

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