Memory unsafe languages are still widely used in a lot of critical software such as operating system kernels and browsers, and thus, memory corruption attacks remain a significant threat. To mitigate the threat, various defense approaches have been proposed such as the Address Space Layout ...
“Most critical open-source projects analyzed, even those written in memory-safe languages, potentially contain memory safety vulnerabilities. This can be caused by direct use of memory-unsafe languages or external dependency on projects that use memory-unsafe languages,” the report stated. “Addition...
In the previous post we looked at the underlying causes of memory unsafety which was using unsafe programming languages. In particular, C and C++ have been widely used for performance but at the same time carry risks of errors that cause unsafe memory accesses. Let’s now look at software ...
"Some languages require anything memory unsafe to be explicitly annotated as such to make the programmer and any reviewers of the program aware that it is unsafe. Memory safe languages can also use libraries written in non-memory safe languages and thus can contain unsafe memo...
Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, found that that more than half of the analyzed critical open-source projects contain code written in memory-unsafe languages. That’s software that includes programming languages requiring manual...
Memory safety vulnerabilities, caused by mistakes in memory management, are common in unsafe programming languages like C and C++.This type of vulnerability is responsible for a majority of security breaches, with estimates from Microsoft and Google showing that up to 70% and 90% of vulnerabilities...
If you have a very large (millions of lines of code) codebase, written in a memory-unsafe programming language (such as C or C++), you can expect at least 65% of your security vulnerabilities to be caused by memory unsafety. He based this claim on data on operating systems including ...
In the past, unsafe code was viewed as required for low-level programming. The sun.misc.Unsafe class was introduced in 2002 as a way for Java classes in the JDK to perform low-level operations. Its memory access methods, as the name of the class suggests, are unsafe and can lead to ...
As explained earlier (refer to Section 2.1), unsafe languages do not have explicit memory checks. The defense methods in this sub-category aim to add memory checks intelligently to ensure a minimal performance overhead. Serebryany et al. [96] proposed a tool called AddressSanitizer to reduce ...
Eventually, this leads to a drop in memory safety vulnerabilities as new memory unsafe development slows down after a certain period of time, and new memory safe development takes over, Google's Jeff Vander Stoep and Alex Rebertsaidin a post shared with The Hacker News. Perhaps even more inte...