Microsoft Open-Sources 'Checked C,' A Safer C Version (softpedia.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday June 16, 2016 @01:25PM from the dot-your-I's-and-cross-your-T's dept.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Softpedia: Microsoft has open-sourced Checked C, an extension to the C programming language that brings new features to address a series of security-related issues. As its name hints, Checked C will add checking to C, and more specifically pointer bounds checking. The company hopes to curb the high-number of security bugs such as buffer overruns, out-of-bounds memory accesses, and incorrect type casts, all which would be easier to catch in Checked C. Despite tangible benefits to security, the problem of porting code to Checked C still exists, just like it did when C# or Rust came out, both C alternatives.

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Solve the problem in hardware, have done with it. by GrahamCox · 2016-06-16 15:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

The CPU just needs to set aside an area of memory exclusively for return addresses, and make that protected. No more security issues, buffer overruns, execution of arbitrary code. The real problem is that return addresses are mingled with other data. This should be solved at the hardware level, and AFAICS, it could be done totally transparently to code, even binaries.