Can We Achieve Secure and Measurable Software Using Wasm?

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2024-04-03 08:00:10

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The February 2024 report from the White House, Washington, D.C. BACK TO THE BUILDING BLOCKS: A PATH TOWARD SECURE AND MEASURABLE SOFTWARE makes the case that “the challenge of eliminating entire classes of software vulnerabilities is an urgent and complex problem” and “that the technical community is well positioned to reduce computer memory safety vulnerabilities at scale by focusing on the programming language as the primary building block”.

The report mentions that C and C++ are not memory-safe programming languages. In C and C++, the programmer typically manages memory allocation and deallocation manually.

A “memory-safe programming language” is designed to prevent common memory-related errors, including buffer overflows and null pointer dereferences. These memory-safe languages diminish the risk of memory-related vulnerabilities.