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Microsoft: 70 Percent of All Security Bugs Are Memory Safety Issues (zdnet.com)
Around 70 percent of all the vulnerabilities in Microsoft products addressed through a security update each year are memory safety issues; a Microsoft engineer revealed last week at a security conference. From a report: Memory safety is a term used by software and security engineers to describe applications that access the operating system's memory in a way that doesn't cause errors. Memory safety bugs happen when software, accidentally or intentionally, accesses system memory in a way that exceeds its allocated size and memory addresses. Users who often read vulnerability reports come across terms over and over again. Terms like buffer overflow, race condition, page fault, null pointer, stack exhaustion, heap exhaustion/corruption, use after free, or double free -- all describe memory safety vulnerabilities. Speaking at the BlueHat security conference in Israel last week, Microsoft security engineer Matt Miller said that over the last 12 years, around 70 percent of all Microsoft patches were fixes for memory safety bugs.
They can't remember how to code safely. :-)
The problem is, even if you know full well how to "code safely" all it takes is one slip, or some interaction with another part of the system you didn't fully understand, and you are done.
That is why for most things, sadly languages that allow such slip-ups simply have to go. We cannot live like this forever in a world of chaos where any system of any size is just moments away from disaster or infiltration. As an industry we have to somehow ratchet ourselves forward, even if only a little bit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Large systems require a lot of developers, and even the best developer can have a bad day and make a mistake that potentially exposes their application to various memory exploits. Sometimes you have to pay the tax of having better developers, more tools, etc. to make the applications safer.
But, in general, as processors get faster, memory amounts in modern computers gets higher, we should move away from such languages except for projects that require them.
C/C++ gives you CONTROL. If you don't have enough knowledge to use it properly, use something else. It's as if you can't drive a car, you are probably going to hit a tree. But if you can drive, you have whole areas open up to you for exploration and increases in productivity.
12:50 - press return.
Ugh, another completely predictable response from a C ideologue. Ideology turns a person into a mindless fanatic. Ideology makes a person dumb.
The practical reality is that memory safety is a problem. Ideological utopias do not exist. Languages like Rust are trying to mitigate the problem of memory safety in the real world. Forget your ideology and try to find a way forward to some pragmatism.
... didn't he once say that Microsoft addressed the memory security issues in Windows? Maybe 15 years ago?
Microsoft developed and provided all the tools you'd need to avoid the problem, and then apparently never bothered to use them themselves.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"