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Re:Nvidia Security Team: “What if we just stopped using C?” by GeekyBear on Monday November 07, 2022 @02:59PM (#33511500)
> Believing that all software security problems would be solved if we got rid of C is a bigger disease than C itself.

According to studies done at Google and Microsoft, about 70% of their serious security issues are a result of memory safety errors.

>Around 70 percent of all the vulnerabilities in Microsoft products addressed through a security update each year are memory safety issues; a Microsoft engineer revealed last week at a security conference.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-70-percent-of-all-se...

and

>Nearly 70% of the high severity security bugs in Chrome's code are memory unsafety problems, Google's engineers have revealed.

https://tech.hindustantimes.com/tech/news/70-of-security-bug...

Re:Nvidia Security Team: “What if we just stopped using C?” by lelanthran on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @03:15AM (#33517022)
As has been pointed out repeatedly whenever this statistic is brought up in discussion, that figure is not indicative of much.

And in discussions like this, it's verging on the dishonest - leading with a large number makes readers think that a large difference to bug count will result.

> Around 70 percent of all the vulnerabilities in Microsoft products addressed through a security update each year are memory safety issues; a Microsoft engineer revealed last week at a security conference.

What's the total bug count?

A codebase with 10000 bugs logged against it might have maybe 10[1] that are CVEs, of which, according to that statistic, only 7 would be fixed by moving to a safer language (either GC or Rust or similar).

That's just not enough motivation for switching when the payoff for preventing "70% of CVEs" is so small it may never even happen.

[1] I've worked on C codebases that were developed over a decade, and 1000:1 of all-bugs:memory-safety-bugs is a very conservative ratio. IME, it's been closer to 10000:1.

Re:Nvidia Security Team: “What if we just stopped using C?” by GeekyBear on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @04:28AM (#33517457)
> that figure is not indicative of much

Microsoft does not appear to agree.

>Mark Russinovich, the chief technology officer of Microsoft Azure, says developers should avoid using C or C++ programming languages in new projects and instead use Rust because of security and reliability concerns.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/programming-languages-its-time...