1、Google Security Engineering Technical ReportMarch 4,2024Secure by Design:Googles Perspective on Memory SafetyAlex RChristoph KExecutive Summary2022 marked the 50thanniversary of memory safety vulnera-bilities,first reported by Anderson 2.Half a century later,weare still dealing with memory safety bu
2、gs despite substantialinvestments to improve memory unsafe languages.Like others,Googles internal vulnerability data and re-search show that memory safety bugs are widespread and oneof the leading causes of vulnerabilities in memory-unsafe code-bases.Those vulnerabilities endanger end users,our indu
3、stry,and the broader society.At Google,we have decades of experience addressing,atscale,large classes of vulnerabilities that were once similarlyprevalent as memory safety issues.Based on this experience weexpect that high assurance memory safety can only be achievedvia a Secure-by-Design approach c
4、entered around comprehen-sive adoption of languages with rigorous memory safety guaran-tees.As a consequence,we are considering a gradual transitiontowards memory-safe languages.Over the past decades,Google has developed and accumu-lated hundreds of millions of lines of C+code that is in activeuse a
5、nd under active,ongoing development.This very large ex-isting codebase results in significant challenges for a transitionto memory safety:On one hand,we see no realistic path for an evolution ofC+into a language with rigorous memory safety guaran-tees that include temporal safety.At the same time,a
6、large-scale rewrite of existing C+code into a different,memory-safe language appears verydifficult and will likely remain impractical.This means that we will likely be operating a very substantialC+codebase for quite some time.We thus consider it impor-tant to complement a transition to memory safe