White House to Developers: Using C or C++ Invites Cybersecurity Risks

Posted under: CyberSecurity
Date: 2024-03-04
White House to Developers: Using C or C++ Invites Cybersecurity Risks

The White House urges the tech industry to adopt memory-safe programming languages to enhance cybersecurity, citing historical cyberattacks caused by memory safety vulnerabilities. Languages like Rust, Go, and Python are recommended for new projects due to their security benefits. Despite challenges in overhauling existing code, a hybrid approach is suggested, prioritizing critical functions for rewriting. Standardized metrics for software cybersecurity are proposed to inform policies and promote secure development practices. Industry leaders, such as Palantir's CTO, Shyam Sankar, support the White House's engineering-focused cybersecurity policy. However, Stanford University's computer science professor, Dan Boneh, acknowledges the difficulty in translating existing software to memory-safe languages. Overall, the report emphasizes the significance of programming languages in national cybersecurity and advocates for proactive measures to mitigate vulnerabilities.

Read more at: www.pcmag.com