Unsafe Impedance: Safe Languages and Safe by Design Software

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Barney, Lee, Neto, Adolfo
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Barney, Lee
Neto, Adolfo
author_facet Barney, Lee
Neto, Adolfo
contents In December 2023, security agencies from five countries in North America, Europe, and the south Pacific produced a document encouraging senior executives in all software producing organizations to take responsibility for and oversight of the security of the software their organizations produce. In February 2024, the White House released a cybersecurity outline, highlighting the December document. In this work we review the safe languages listed in these documents, and compare the safety of those languages with Erlang and Elixir, two BEAM languages. These security agencies' declaration of some languages as safe is necessary but insufficient to make wise decisions regarding what language to use when creating code. We propose an additional way of looking at languages and the ease with which unsafe code can be written and used. We call this new perspective \em{unsafe impedance}. We then go on to use unsafe impedance to examine nine languages that are considered to be safe. Finally, we suggest that business processes include what we refer to as an Unsafe Acceptance Process. This Unsafe Acceptance Process can be used as part of the memory safe roadmaps suggested by these agencies. Unsafe Acceptance Processes can aid organizations in their production of safe by design software.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_13046
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsafe Impedance: Safe Languages and Safe by Design Software
Barney, Lee
Neto, Adolfo
Programming Languages
In December 2023, security agencies from five countries in North America, Europe, and the south Pacific produced a document encouraging senior executives in all software producing organizations to take responsibility for and oversight of the security of the software their organizations produce. In February 2024, the White House released a cybersecurity outline, highlighting the December document. In this work we review the safe languages listed in these documents, and compare the safety of those languages with Erlang and Elixir, two BEAM languages. These security agencies' declaration of some languages as safe is necessary but insufficient to make wise decisions regarding what language to use when creating code. We propose an additional way of looking at languages and the ease with which unsafe code can be written and used. We call this new perspective \em{unsafe impedance}. We then go on to use unsafe impedance to examine nine languages that are considered to be safe. Finally, we suggest that business processes include what we refer to as an Unsafe Acceptance Process. This Unsafe Acceptance Process can be used as part of the memory safe roadmaps suggested by these agencies. Unsafe Acceptance Processes can aid organizations in their production of safe by design software.
title Unsafe Impedance: Safe Languages and Safe by Design Software
topic Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.13046