The Memory-Safe Language Mandate: Why Governments Are Demanding the End of C and C++ in Systems Programming

The Five-Decade Failure of Manual Memory Management

For five decades, systems programming has been entirely dominated by C and C++—languages that mandate manual memory allocation and deallocation by the developer. [3] While these languages offer unparalleled execution speed and granular hardware control, they rely entirely on the absolute infallibility of the human developer to manage memory correctly. This reliance has proven mathematically, practically, and historically unsustainable.

According to aggregate data from Google’s Project Zero and Microsoft’s Security Response Center (MSRC), approximately 66% to 75% of all documented Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)—and specifically zero-day exploits observed in the wild—are directly attributable to memory safety issues. [1]

These vulnerabilities bifurcate into two primary, highly exploitable categories:

Spatial errors: Out-of-bounds reads and writes, such as buffer overflows, where data is pushed beyond allocated contiguous memory boundaries, allowing attackers to overwrite adjacent execution logic. [3]

Temporal errors: Use-after-free or double-free vulnerabilities, where a program attempts to access or modify memory that has already been deallocated or reallocated, leading to severe memory corruption and arbitrary code execution. [3]

The XZ Utils backdoor operated seamlessly within this memory-unsafe environment. Written in C, the liblzma library provided no intrinsic memory protections to prevent the backdoor from manipulating execution flows, hooking authentication functions, and interacting with system daemons at the lowest level. [4]

Catastrophic Case Studies: Heartbleed and BadAlloc

The historical impact of memory safety vulnerabilities extends far beyond theoretical risk. Two cases illustrate the scale of damage that a single memory-unsafe code path can inflict:

Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160): Caused by a missing bounds check in OpenSSL’s implementation of the TLS heartbeat extension, this buffer over-read vulnerability in C code affected over 800,000 of the most visited websites globally. [1] The bug allowed attackers to read up to 64 kilobytes of server memory per request, exposing TLS private keys, user session cookies, passwords, and sensitive personal data at industrial scale. The financial impact was estimated in the billions, and the remediation required the reissuance of hundreds of thousands of SSL certificates.

BadAlloc (2021): A family of 25 critical vulnerabilities caused by improper input validation in memory allocation routines across multiple Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) used in embedded devices. [1] The vulnerabilities impacted industrial control systems, medical devices, and an estimated 195 million vehicles globally, demonstrating that memory vulnerabilities pose a direct threat not only to data integrity but to national security and human life. [1]

Both Heartbleed and BadAlloc were entirely preventable in a memory-safe language. Rust’s borrow checker would have rejected the invalid memory access at compile time, eliminating the vulnerability before the code could ever execute.

Government Mandates: From Advisory to Directive

Recognizing that perpetually patching memory vulnerabilities is a futile, reactive strategy, global cyber authorities have fundamentally shifted their guidance from advisory to directive. [5]

The United States White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD), alongside the NSA, CISA, the FBI, and international cybersecurity authorities from the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, issued landmark reports urging a complete strategic transition away from C and C++ toward memory-safe languages. [5]

The NSA’s “Cybersecurity Information Sheet: Memory Safe Languages” explicitly identifies C and C++ as the root cause of the majority of exploitable vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure software and recommends Rust, Go, C#, Java, Swift, and Python as preferred alternatives. [1]

The White House ONCD report goes further, calling on software manufacturers to publish “memory safety roadmaps” detailing their plans to eliminate memory-unsafe code from their products. [5] The report explicitly frames the transition as a matter of national security, noting that adversaries routinely exploit memory safety vulnerabilities to compromise critical infrastructure, steal intellectual property, and conduct espionage operations.

This is not an abstract policy recommendation. The U.S. government is the world’s largest software consumer, and its procurement preferences have historically driven industry-wide technology adoption. When the White House signals that memory-unsafe code is a national security liability, the procurement cascading effect influences defense contractors, cloud providers, and technology vendors across the entire supply chain.

Rust: The Technical Case for the Successor to C

For systems programming—operating system kernels, device drivers, and core utilities like liblzma—Rust has emerged as the definitive, industry-standard successor to C and C++. [4]

Rust achieves memory safety through a compile-time ownership model enforced by the “borrow checker.” Every piece of data in a Rust program has a single owner at any given time, and references to that data are either shared (immutable) or exclusive (mutable)—never both simultaneously. [4] This constraint, enforced entirely at compile time with zero runtime overhead, mathematically eliminates use-after-free, double-free, data races, and dangling pointer vulnerabilities by design.

The performance characteristics match C and C++. Rust compiles to native machine code through LLVM, producing binaries with equivalent execution speed and memory footprint. There is no garbage collector, no runtime, and no hidden overhead. [4]

Industry adoption has accelerated dramatically. The Linux kernel accepted Rust as a second implementation language in version 6.1 (December 2022), and subsequent kernel releases have expanded Rust support for driver development. Google has mandated Rust for new Android platform code. Microsoft has integrated Rust into Windows kernel components. The Chromium project has adopted Rust for security-critical browser subsystems. [2]

The Ecosystem Investment: Corporate and Governmental Commitments

Transitioning critical open-source infrastructure to memory-safe languages represents a proactive mechanism to drastically reduce the attack surface, rendering entire categories of exploit engineering functionally obsolete. [1]

Major technology firms have initiated significant financial commitments to accelerate the transition. Google committed a $1,000,000 grant to the Rust Foundation to support the development of a robust, memory-safe ecosystem capable of replacing legacy C infrastructure. [2] The grant specifically targets improvements to the Rust compiler, standard library, and tooling ecosystem that lower the barrier to adoption for systems programmers transitioning from C.

The Atlantic Council’s “Buying Down Risk: Memory Safety” report provides quantitative analysis of the economic benefits of the transition, estimating that proactive investment in memory-safe infrastructure generates a 5:1 to 10:1 return on investment when measured against the costs of ongoing vulnerability remediation, incident response, and regulatory penalties associated with memory-unsafe code. [6]

The challenge, however, remains the transition itself. Billions of lines of C and C++ code exist in production systems worldwide, and a wholesale rewrite is neither practical nor economically feasible. The recommended approach is incremental: new code should be written exclusively in memory-safe languages, while critical security-sensitive legacy components are prioritized for rewriting based on their exploitation history and downstream dependency count.

The XZ Nexus: Why Memory Safety Alone Is Insufficient

While the memory-safe language mandate addresses the structural vulnerability class that enables the majority of CVEs, the XZ backdoor illustrates that memory safety alone is insufficient. The XZ payload was fundamentally a logic and cryptographic hook, not a buffer overflow or use-after-free exploit. [4] A hypothetical Rust implementation of liblzma would have prevented the attacker from exploiting memory-corruption-based code injection paths, but it would not have prevented the deliberate insertion of a logically malicious function by a compromised maintainer.

This underscores that memory safety is a necessary but not sufficient condition for software supply chain security. The comprehensive defense posture requires the combination of memory-safe infrastructure (to eliminate the dominant vulnerability class), robust governance and maintainer verification (to prevent social engineering), continuous behavioral monitoring (to detect anomalous build and runtime behavior), and meaningful human oversight of AI-assisted code review processes.

The memory-safe language mandate and the supply chain governance reforms catalyzed by the XZ incident are complementary strategies. Together, they address both the technical and human dimensions of the software security challenge—eliminating the vulnerability classes that adversaries have exploited for decades while simultaneously fortifying the human and organizational processes that protect the integrity of the code itself.