The chapter emphasizes the critical need to address memory safety vulnerabilities in C and C++, focusing on areas like type, bounds, initialization, and lifetime safety. The speakers highlight the broader context of software vulnerabilities beyond memory safety, mentioning concerns about currency safety, overflow, and cybersecurity threats from criminal organizations and nation states.
The U.S. government recently released a report calling on the technical community to proactively reduce the attack surface area of software infrastructure. The report emphasized memory safety vulnerabilities, which affect how memory can be accessed, written, allocated, or deallocated.
The report cites this class of vulnerability as a common theme in the some of the most infamous cyber events, such as the Morris worm of 1988, the Heartbleed vulnerability in 2014, and the Blastpass exploit of 2023.
Herb Sutter works at Microsoft and chairs the ISO C++ standards committee. He joins the show to talk about C++ safety.
Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and marketer that specializes in software delivery, developer experience, cloud native and open source. He has developed his career at companies like GitLab, Weaveworks, Harness and other platform and devtool providers. His interests range from software supply chain security to open source innovation. You can reach out to him on Twitter at @jordimonpmm.
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