Google's take on memory safety

[RazvanN]

I stumbled upon this. Here is the abstract:

"2022 marked the 50th anniversary of memory safety 
vulnerabilities, first reported by Anderson et al. Half a century 
later, we are still dealing with memory safety bugs despite 
substantial investments to improve memory unsafe languages. Like 
others', Google’s data and internal vulnerability research show 
that memory safety bugs are widespread and one of the leading 
causes of vulnerabilities in memory-unsafe codebases. Those 
vulnerabilities endanger end users, our industry, and the broader 
society. At Google, we have decades of experience addressing, at 
scale, large classes of vulnerabilities that were once similarly 
prevalent as memory safety issues. Based on this experience we 
expect that high assurance memory safety can only be achieved via 
a Secure-by-Design approach centered around comprehensive 
adoption of languages with rigorous memory safety guarantees. We 
see no realistic path for an evolution of C++ into a language 
with rigorous memory safety guarantees that include temporal 
safety. As a consequence, we are considering a gradual transition 
of C++ code at Google towards other languages that are memory 
safe. Given the large volume of pre-existing C++, we believe it 
is nonetheless necessary to improve the safety of C++ to the 
extent practicable. We are considering transitioning to a safer 
C++ subset, augmented with hardware security features like MTE."

Here is the full paper: 
https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-research2023-media/pubtools/pdf/70477b1d77462cfffc909ca7d7d46d8f749d5642.pdf

RazvanN