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White House: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe

PRESS RELEASE: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe | ONCD | The White House

https://www.whitehouse.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024/02/26/press-release-technical-report/

Leaders in Industry Support White House Call to Address Root Cause of Many of the Worst Cyber Attacks Read the full report here WASHINGTON – Today, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) released a report calling on the technical community to proactively reduce the attack surface in cyberspace. ONCD makes the…

PRESS RELEASE: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe | ONCD | The White House

On the one side I really like c and c++ because they’re fun and have great performance; they don’t feel like your fighting the language and let me feel sort of creative in the way I do things(compared with something like Rust or Swift).

On the other hand, when weighing one’s feelings against the common good, I guess it’s not really a contest. Plus I suspect a lot of my annoyance with languages like rust stems from not being as familiar with the paradigm. What do you all think?

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psudo

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Wasn't Go designed to be a memory safe systems programming language? I haven't really used it enough to see if it holds true, though.

YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU

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mox

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Segfaults aren't particularly dangerous. They mean the problem was caught. The program usually just exits.

Failing to segfault, thereby allowing a bad memory access, is where the real trouble happens.

BatmanAoD

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No, if you try to index something out-of-bounds it will panic, which is not a memory-safety gap.

arendjr

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Go is almost memory safe, but it does suffer from an issue with its thick pointers (type + address) that can cause race conditions to misrepresent the type of a data structure. This can lead to true segmentation faults and out of bound memory accesses, though it will probably be quite difficult (but not impossible) to exploit them.