Mitigating Memory Safety Issues in Open Source Software (Google Online Security Blog)
Posted by Dan Lorenc, Infrastructure Security Team Memory-safety vulnerabilities have dominated the security field for years and often lead to issues that can be exploited to take over entire systems. A recent study found that "~70% of the vulnerabilities addressed through a security update each year continue to be memory safety issues.” Another analysis on security issues in the ubiquitous `curl` command line tool showed that 53 out of 95 bugs would have been completely prevented by using a memory-safe language. Software written in unsafe languages often contains hard-to-catch bugs that can result in severe security vulnerabilities, and we take these issues seriously at Google. That’s why we’re expanding our collaboration with the Internet Security Research Group to support the reimplementation of critical open-source software in memory-safe languages. We previously…