I work at Apple where I lead the development of libc++, the Standard Library under the LLVM project and used by the Clang compiler.
C++ has gotten a lot of attention lately for being a memory-unsafe language. However, less well-known is the existence of mitigation techniques for certain spatial and temporal memory safety issues. While imperfect, these techniques can help greatly improve the security of existing C++ applications often without requiring any code changes. This talk will go over two concrete mitigation techniques we implemented as extensions in the Clang and libc++ toolchain: Standard Library hardening and typed memory allocation. Standard Library hardening allows catching common cases of undefined behavior such as out-of-bounds memory accesses and turning them into guaranteed traps. Typed memory allocation […]