ELIMINATING MEMORY SAFETY VULNERABILITIES AT THE SOURCE

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Google advocates for Safe Coding, a secure-by-design approach that prioritizes using memory-safe languages, to eliminate memory safety vulnerabilities at scale. By transitioning to memory-safe languages for new code, Google observed a significant decline in memory safety vulnerabilities in Android, dropping from 76% to 24% over six years. This counterintuitive result is explained by the exponential decay of vulnerabilities over time, meaning older code becomes inherently safer.