Feds: Critical Software Must Drop C/C++ by 2026 or Face Risk

It’s one backed by a lot of data. One example is from the Android project.

The percent of vulnerabilities caused by memory safety issues continues to correlate closely with the development language that’s used for new code. Memory safety issues, which accounted for 76% of Android vulnerabilities in 2019, and are currently 24% in 2024, well below the 70% industry norm, and continuing to drop.

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html

There’s an argument that critical infrastructure software vendors are already meeting standards for basic, non-memory related items. Yes, there are other categories, but memory safety is one that’s harder to verify. Moving to memory safe languages is an ensure a category of correctness. This excludes usage of unsafe escape hatches.