Secure by Design: Google's Perspective on Memory Safety

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.

• Security, Privacy and Abuse Prevention

• Software Systems