The White House(US Presidential office) has recommended developers to consider using memory safe programming languages1.
They seem to be very concerned about memory safety vulnerabilities, and this report focuses on the choice of programming language as the crucial element of solving them. Many of the major cybersecurity vulnerabilities over the past several decades were facilitated by memory safety vulnerabilities, including the Morris Worm of 1988, the Slammer Worm denial-of-service attack in 2003, the Heartbleed vulnerability in 2014, and the BLASTPASS exploit chain of 2023.vii For over 35 years, this same class of vulnerability has vexed the digital ecosystem.
Rust was mentioned specially as a memory safe language which would fix these issues, which often originate from code written in C and C++. I work on building a system, built entire with C++, which is crucial for the financial industry. I wonder if we really need to stop using C++ and actively migrate all of our code to Rust.
These are some examples of how memory safety vulnerabilities work.
These are the basic tenets of C and C++ which cause memory un-safety.