At what level is it necessary to improve the security of software?

Bjarne: First of all: security is a systems issue. No localized or partial remedy will by itself succeed. Remember, even if all of your code was perfect, I could probably still gain access to your stored secrets if I could steal your computer or the storage device holding your backup. Secondly, security is a cost/benefit game: perfect security is probably beyond the reach for most of us, but I can probably protect my system sufficiently that “bad guys” will consider their time better spent trying to break into someone else’s system. Actually, I prefer not to keep important secrets online and leave serious security to the experts.

But what about programming languages and programming techniques? There is a dangerous tendency to assume that every line of code has to be “secure” (whatever that means), even assuming that someone with bad intentions messes with some other part of the system. This is a most dangerous notion that leaves the code littered with unsystematic tests guarding against ill-formulated imagined threats. It also makes code ugly, large, and slow. “Ugly” leaves places for bugs to hide, “large” ensures incomplete testing, and “slow” encourages the use of shortcuts and dirty tricks that are among the most fertile sources of security holes.

I think the only permanent solution to security problems is in a simple security model applied systematically by quality hardware and/or software to selected interfaces. There has to be a place behind a barrier where code can be written simply, elegantly, and efficiently without worrying about random pieces of code abusing random pieces of other code. Only then can we focus on correctness, quality, and serious performance. The idea that anyone can provide an untrusted callback, plug-in, overrider, whatever, is plain silly. We have to distinguish between code that defends against fraud, and code that simply is protected against accidents.

I do not think that you can design a programming language that is completely secure and also useful for real-world systems. Obviously, that depends on the meaning of “secure” and “system.” You could possibly achieve security in a domain-specific language, but my main domain of interest is systems programming (in a very broad meaning of that term), including embedded systems programming. I do think that type safety can and will be improved over what is offered by C++, but that is only part of the problem: type safety does not equal security. People who write C++ using lots of unencapsulated arrays, casts, and unstructured new and delete operations are asking for trouble. They are stuck in an 80s style of programming. To use C++ well, you have to adopt a style that minimizes type safety violations and manage resources (including memory) in a simple and systematic way.

Source of Information : Oreilly - Masterminds of Programming

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