The U.S. government recommends abandoning C or C++ programming tools. In a new report, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) urged developers to use «memory-safe programming languages». The advice is a step toward «protecting the building blocks of cyberspace».
Memory security — is protection against bugs and vulnerabilities related to memory access. Buffer overflows and freezes are examples of this. Java is considered a memory-safe language because of its runtime error detection checking. However, C and C++ allow arbitrary arithmetic with pointers to direct memory addresses without bounds checking.
In 2019, Microsoft security engineers reported that about 70% of vulnerabilities were caused by memory security issues. In 2020, Google reported the same figure, but for bugs found in the Chromium browser, transmits Tom’s Hardware.
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The report also calls for better measurement of software security. ONCD believes that better metrics enable technology vendors to better plan, anticipate, and mitigate vulnerabilities before they become a problem.