Security @ Google. Previously co-founder of @ForAllSecure. Opinions here are my own. @ayper@infosec.exchange

Pittsburgh
Joined August 2008
We're joining forces with industry & academia to call for memory safety standardization: security.googleblog.com/2025…. It's a recognition that memory unsafety is no longer a niche technical problem but a societal one, impacting everything from national security to personal privacy.
🛡️Want to help make the open source world safer and earn up to $45k 💰? We've revamped our Patch Rewards Program, extending its scope and increasing rewards for security patches – with a particular focus on memory safety, including bonus multipliers! bughunters.google.com/blog/5…
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Alex Rebert retweeted
Bounds-checking in C++: so people ask if the .3% overhead is real. It's not just a benchmark result, we got this through our Google-Wide profiling, that gives us the live insights from DCs. This surprised us too as it was much cheaper than we thought research.google/pubs/google-…
Excited to share our latest post on memory safety! We're tackling spatial safety in our massive C++ codebase by hardening libc++ *by default*. It adds bounds checks to things like std::vector, preventing a fair bit of out-of-bounds vulnerabilities: security.googleblog.com/2024…
The best part? It's incredibly cost-effective, with an average performance overhead of just 0.30%.  So there's really no reason not to do it if you're running C++ code :)
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This improves spatial memory safety across Google's services, including performance-critical components of Search, Gmail, Drive, YouTube, and Maps.  We've already seen it disrupt a red team exercise, reduce segfaults by 30%, and improve code correctness.
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Excited to share our latest post on memory safety! We're tackling spatial safety in our massive C++ codebase by hardening libc++ *by default*. It adds bounds checks to things like std::vector, preventing a fair bit of out-of-bounds vulnerabilities: security.googleblog.com/2024…
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Alex Rebert retweeted
The dedication and hard work has payed off: "for hundreds of complex web applications that are built on Google’s hardened and safe-by-design frameworks, we've averaged less than one XSS report per year in total" (see page 9 of the whitepaper).
Secure by design takes dedication and years of hard work to get the balance right between velocity and safety. Read a bit about @Google’s commitment and journey in our new white paper. Humbled to work with the professionals that make this happen everyday. blog.google/technology/safet…
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Percentage of codebase that's memory-safe 📈, memory-safety vulns 📉, EVEN IF YOU KEEP ADDING LINES OF C 🤯
NEW EPISODE! You may not be rewriting the world in Rust, but if you walk like the Android team, you'll drive down your memory-unsafety vulnerabilities more than 2X below the industry average over time! 🎉 securitycryptographywhatever… piped.video/WL4CgVI6p9g
Excited to share Google's memory safety strategy! We're working to build safer software by migrating to memory-safe languages like Rust as well as hardening our existing C++: security.googleblog.com/2024…. We'll be sharing more details in upcoming posts.
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Google CVR is doing incredible vulnerability research.
Learn how Google CVR could have potentially exfiltrated Gemini 1.0 Pro before launch last year. We describe the vulnz, the fix, and tips for bughunters. Also, shout-out to @epereiralopez for teaming up to adapt this work to another cloud provider. bughunters.google.com/blog/5…
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Alex Rebert retweeted
Released a blog about our @theori_io AIxCC experience! medium.com/@sa-blog/winning-… @tjbecker_ and I were hoping to have more info about other challenges, but they aren't released, so some of the information is a bit limited. Still, hope folks can enjoy reading it!
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The drop in Android's memory safety vulnerabilities is astonishing. It's counterintuitive, but prioritizing memory-safe languages in new code quickly reduces memory-safety risks. Once we turn off the tap of new vulnerabilities, they start decreasing exponentially.
I’m super excited about this blogpost. The approach is so counterintuitive, and yet the results are so much better than anything else that we’ve tried for memory safety. We finally understand why. security.googleblog.com/2024…
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Alex Rebert retweeted
"just as our efforts to eliminate XSS attacks through tooling showed, removing large classes of exploits both directly benefits consumers of software and allows us to move our focus to addressing further classes of security vulnerabilities." security.googleblog.com/2024…
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Alex Rebert retweeted
Today I spoke on the importance of Secure by Design on behalf of @Google alongside @CISAgov @FDD @VenableLLP & more. We also launched a paper on @Google's approach to Secure by Design & published on how it can be applied to address memory safety vulns: blog.google/technology/safet…
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Alex Rebert retweeted
this is a big one… if you have opinions on this, make sure that they are heard 👀 Fact Sheet: Office of the National Cyber Director Requests Public Comment on Open-Source Software Security and Memory Safe Programming Languages | ONCD | The White House m.cje.io/3s2Xz6t
Alex Rebert retweeted
I’m excited to announce the AI Cyber Challenge, a major, two-year @DARPA competition challenging the best and the brightest in cybersecurity and AI to secure the systems on which all American rely. aicyberchallenge.com
Announced at the #BlackHat keynote: @Google, @OpenAI, @Anthropic, and @Microsoft will collaborate with @DARPA for its AI Cyber Challenge – a 2-year competition aimed at driving innovation at the nexus of AI and cybersecurity. Read more here: whitehouse.gov/briefing-room…
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