Memory safety

This article is about protection of memory in software development. For hardware protection of memory, see Memory protection.

Memory safety is the state of being protected from various software bugs and security vulnerabilities when dealing with memory access, such as buffer overflows and dangling pointers.[1] For example, Java is said to be memory-safe because its runtime error detection checks array bounds and pointer dereferences.[1] In contrast, C and C++ allow arbitrary pointer arithmetic with pointers implemented as direct memory addresses with no provision for bounds checking,[2] and thus are potentially memory-unsafe.[3]

  1. ^ a b Dhurjati, Dinakar; Kowshik, Sumant; Adve, Vikram; Lattner, Chris (1 January 2003). "Memory safety without runtime checks or garbage collection" (PDF). Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Language, compiler, and tool for embedded systems. ACM. pp. 69–80. doi:10.1145/780732.780743. ISBN 1581136471. S2CID 1459540. Retrieved 13 March 2017.
  2. ^ Koenig, Andrew. "How C Makes It Hard To Check Array Bounds". Dr. Dobb's. Retrieved 13 March 2017.
  3. ^ Akritidis, Periklis (June 2011). "Practical memory safety for C" (PDF). Technical Report - University of Cambridge. Computer Laboratory. University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory. ISSN 1476-2986. UCAM-CL-TR-798. Retrieved 13 March 2017.