Month: November 2022

Microsoft and Google have each stated that software memory safety issues are behind around 70 percent of their vulnerabilities. Poor memory management can lead to technical issues as well, such as incorrect program results, degradation of the program’s performance over time, and program crashes. NSA recommends that organizations use memory safe languages when possible and bolster protection through code-hardening defenses such as compiler options, tool options, and operating system configurations. The full report is available here (PDF).

[A] growing movement to write software in a language called Rust is gaining momentum because the code is goof-proof in an important way. By design, developers can’t accidentally create the most common types of exploitable security vulnerabilities when they’re coding in Rust, a distinction that could make a huge difference in the daily patch parade and ultimately the world’s baseline cybersecurity….

[B]ecause Rust produces more secure code [than C] and, crucially, doesn’t worsen performance to do it, the language has been steadily gaining adherents and now is at a turning point. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have all been utilizing Rust since 2019, and the three companies formed the nonprofit Rust Foundation with Mozilla and Huawei in 2020 to sustain and grow the language. And after a couple of years of intensive work, the Linux kernel took its first steps last month to implement Rust support. “It’s going viral as a language,” says Dave Kleidermacher, vice president of engineering for Android security and privacy. “We’ve been investing in Rust on Android and across Google, and so many engineers are like, ‘How do I start doing this? This is great’….”

By writing new software in Rust instead, even amateur programmers can be confident that they haven’t introduced any memory-safety bugs into their code…. These types of vulnerabilities aren’t just esoteric software bugs. Research and auditing have repeatedly found that they make up the majority of all software vulnerabilities. So while you can still make mistakes and create security flaws while programming in Rust, the opportunity to eliminate memory-safety vulnerabilities is significant….

“Yes, it’s a lot of work, it will be a lot of work, but the tech industry has how many trillions of dollars, plus how many talented programmers? We have the resources,” says Josh Aas, executive director of the Internet Security Research Group, which runs the memory-safety initiative Prossimo as well as the free certificate authority Let’s Encrypt. “Problems that are merely a lot of work are great.”

Here’s how Dan Lorenc, CEO of the software supply-chain security company Chainguard, explains it to Wired. “Over the decades that people have been writing code in memory-unsafe languages, we’ve tried to improve and build better tooling and teach people how to not make these mistakes, but there are just limits to how much telling people to try harder can actually work.

“So you need a new technology that just makes that entire class of vulnerabilities impossible, and that’s what Rust is finally bringing to the table.”

In a new interview, he says the site’s been accessed about 50 billion times over the past 14 years — and then shares his thoughts on the notion that programmers could be replaced by no-code, low-code, or AI-driven pair programming:

A: Over the years, there have many, many tools, trying to democratize software development. That’s a very positive thing. I actually love the fact that programming is becoming easier to do with these onramps. I was speaking at Salesforce recently, and they’ve got people in sales organizations writing workflows, and that’s low code. You’ve got all these folks who are not software engineers that are creating their own automations and applications.

However, there is this trade-off. If you’re making software easier to build, you’re sacrificing things like customizability and a deeper understanding of how this code actually works. Back in the day, you might remember Microsoft FrontPage [an early HTML web page editor] as an example of that. You were limited to certain basic things, but you could get web work done. So similarly, these tools will work for general use cases. But, if they do that, without learning the fundamental principles of code, they will inevitably have some sort of a limit. For example, having to fix something that broke, I think they’re going to be really dumbfounded.

Still, I think it’s important, and I’m a believer. It’s a great way to get people engaged, excited, and started. But you got to know what you’re building. Access to sites like Stack Overflow help, but with more people learning as they’re building, it’s essential to make learning resources accessible at every stage of their journey….

Q: Is Stack Overflow considering any kind of certification? Particularly, as you just mentioned, since it’s so easy now for people to step in and start programming. But then there’s that big step from “Yes, I got it to work,” but now “I have to maintain it for users using it in ways I never dreamed of.”

A: “It’s very much part of our vision for our company. We see Stack Overflow going from collective knowledge to collective learning. Having all the information is fine and dandy, but are you learning? Now, that we’re part of Prosus’s edtech division, we’re very much looking forward to offering educational opportunities. Just as today, we can get knowledge to developers at the right place and time, we think we can deliver learning at just the right place and time. We believe we can make a huge impact with education and by potentially getting into the certification game.

Q: Some of the open-source nonprofits are moving into education as well. The Linux Foundation, in particular, has been moving here with the LF Training and Certification programs. Are you exploring that?

A: This is very much part of our vision….

Stack Overflow’s CEO adds that the site’s hot topics now include blockchain, machine learning, but especially technical cloud questions, “rising probably about 50% year over year over the past 10 years…. Related to this is an increase in interest in containerization and cloud-native services.”