Security News > 2024 > February > White House urges devs to switch to memory-safe programming languages
The White House Office of the National Cyber Director urged tech companies today to switch to memory-safe programming languages, such as Rust, to improve software security by reducing the number of memory safety vulnerabilities.
Such vulnerabilities are coding errors or weaknesses within software that can lead to memory management issues when memory can be accessed, written, allocated, or deallocated.
"The highest leverage method to reduce memory safety vulnerabilities is to secure one of the building blocks of cyberspace: the programming language. Using memory safe programming languages can eliminate most memory safety errors."
The National Security Agency also published guidance in November 2022 on how software developers can prevent software memory safety issues.
A similar report from CISA and international partners in December 2023 followed, asking for a transition to memory-safe programming languages to reduce software products' attack surface by eliminating memory-related vulnerabilities.
As Microsoft discovered years ago, as many as 70 percent of security vulnerabilities identified in software developed using memory-unsafe languages stem from memory safety concerns.