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…

Retrofitting spatial safety to hundreds of millions of lines of C++

Posted by Alex Rebert and Max Shavrick, Security Foundations, and Kinuko Yasuda, Core Developer Attackers regularly exploit spatial mem...

security.googleblog.com

Nov 15, 2024 · 6:57 PM UTC

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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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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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Replying to @ayper
Does OOB access yield an abort or an unwinding exception?
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Oops, I missed this. OOB accesses terminate the program immediately. See libcxx.llvm.org/Hardening.ht…
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