The White House is urging the tech industry to prioritize using programming languages that are less susceptible to cyberattacks in a new report. The report emphasizes the importance of programming languages as the “primary building block” of the nation’s cybersecurity, stating that the way programmers write code is crucial to national security.
According to the report, moving towards memory-safe languages can help prevent cyberattacks that have plagued cybersecurity infrastructure for decades. Notable cyberattacks like the Morris worm of 1988 and the Heartbleed vulnerability in 2014 were caused by memory safety vulnerabilities. The report highlights memory safe languages such as Rust, Go, C#, Java, Swift, Python, and JavaScript as more secure alternatives to non-memory safe languages like C and C++.
Tech industry experts seem to support the White House’s initiative, with Shyam Sankar, CTO at Palantir, praising the engineering-first approach to cybersecurity policy. However, overhauling existing code to switch to memory-safe languages may not be feasible at this time, according to Dan Boneh, a professor of computer science at Stanford University.
The White House recommends a “hybrid approach” for existing codebases, suggesting that software developers prioritize rewriting critical functions or libraries first. The report also calls for standardized metrics to assess the cybersecurity level of software, which could help inform policies and promote secure software development in the future.